Horticultural Hall
Demolishing fine buildings is
something Bostonians, like most
Americans, are very good at. Few
buildings have been more delightful
than the one in the old photo.
This was Horticultural Hall,
built in 1865 as the headquarters
of the Massachusetts Horticultural
Society. The building was a
marvelous pile of columns, pilasters,
brackets, arches, cornices,
pediments, dentils, statues of goddesses,
and apparently everything
else the architect could stuff into
one building. Our Victorian forebears
didn’t worry much about
overindulgence, in either their
banquets or their architecture.
The architect was the engagingly
named Gridley J. Fox Bryant.
He worked in a manner
that’s sometimes labeled by architectural
historians as the Boston
Granite Style. This was a 19thcentury
style of massive buildings
that seem to embody the power of
the rising mercantile class. You can check out Bryant’s love of
bold granite architecture in such
works as the Mercantile Wharf,
the Charles Street Jail, and especially
the flamboyant Old City
Hall, which Bryant designed in
collaboration with Arthur Gilman.
At Horticultural Hall, as at
Old City Hall, Bryant shaped his
granite into delicate motifs that he
drew from the fashionable Paris
architecture then being built under
Napoleon III. But like the
practical businessman he was,
Bryant inserted a modest ground
floor of shops beneath the two
taller floors that contained the
horticultural society’s rooms. The
shops produced income for the
society, and they enlivened the
sidewalk for pedestrians.
In both photos, we’re looking
along Tremont Street from the
corner of Bosworth Street (formerly
Montgomery Place). The
new photo is dominated by the
swelling facade of Sargent Hall of Suffolk Law School, which
opened in 1999 and was designed
by the firm Tsoi/Kobus. Sargent
is built of stone, too, in this case
limestone, but the material is used
in a contemporary manner as a
thin skin over a structural steel
frame, rather than being piled up
in solid blocks. Sargent resembles
Horticultural Hall in the way traditional
architectural motifs -- at
Sargent, those of an Italian Renaissance
palazzo -- are deployed
in a frankly theatrical way to assert
the building’s importance as a
civic institution and to suggest its
connection to a cultural past.
Tsoi/Kobus also did the new
boutique hotel Nine Zero at the
left of the photo. Between those
two, the site of Horticultural Hall
is now occupied by a modest office
building with a pub at the
sidewalk. The horticultural society
decamped in 1901 to a new,
equally lavish building in the
Fenway.
