The History of 152 Commonwealth Avenue

The buildings at 150 and 152 Commonwealth Avenue combine two adjacent historic structures, one built in 1870 (152 Commonwealth Avenue/287 Dartmouth Street) and the other in 1880 (150 Commonwealth Avenue).

152 Commonwealth Avenue/287 Dartmouth Street was designed in 1870 by architect Henry Richards of the firm of Ware and Van Brunt. Richards was married to Laura Elizabeth Howe, daughter of Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe. His career as a Boston architect was short, but Richards continued to execute various important projects in Maine, including the C.H. Dorr House (c. 1910) in Bar Harbor and the public library in Gardiner. His last major design was the William Amory Gardner house in Beverly MA, now part of Endicott College (1915-17). Ware & Van Brunt was an architectural firm formed in 1864 by Henry Van Brunt and William Robert Ware. Ware is credited with founding the first architecture school at an American university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1868.

Important Boston-area work by Ware & Van Brunt includes:

• Ether Monument in the Boston Public Garden

• First Church in Boston (Marlborough Street)

• Memorial Hall at Harvard University, described as one of the greatest examples of Ruskinian Gothic architecture outside of England

• Walter Hunnewell house in Wellesley

• Various other collegiate buildings at Harvard College, Episcopal Divinity School, Wellesley College

In 1910, the Chilton Club received permission to significantly remodel and expand 152 Commonwealth Avenue/287 Dartmouth Street, including removing the original third floor, with its mansard roof, and adding three additional floors, two of brick and the third of roof. It also received permission to construct an addition at the rear, 38 feet by 18 feet 9 inches, five stories high above the basement, four of brick and one of roof. The Club retained the firm of Richardson, Barott, and Richardson, and the work was overseen by F. L. W. Richardson, son of the noted architect Henry Hobson Richardson. The addition was completed in February 1911. On May 28, 1926, the Club acquired 150 Commonwealth. 

The well-known architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns was hired to design 150 Commonwealth for Mrs. Richard Baker in or around 1879. The firm had been formed about 10 years earlier by Robert Swain Peabody and John Goddard Stearns and continued until their deaths, in 1917. They have been described as “the most important arbiters of building taste after H. H. Richardson” by scholar Karl Putnam in the 1940’s. Their pre-eminence in the late nineteenth century was exemplified by the fact that they were chosen over rival architects to represent Boston at the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

The firm’s particularly noteworthy designs in the 1880’s and early 1890’s occurred at a time when Julius Schweinfurth, the most influential of all Peabody and Stearns’ array of talented designers, was chief draftsman. Their commercial work in Boston and environs includes insurance company buildings, churches, banks, railroad stations and the Custom House Tower on State Street at India Street.

Of the 74 residential buildings designed by Peabody and Stearns in the Back Bay (all but four still standing), 23 were on Commonwealth Avenue. The Chilton Club’s 150 Commonwealth Avenue building is the only one designed by the firm in the block between Clarendon and Dartmouth.

In 1925 and 1926, the house at 150 Commonwealth Avenue was bought and then sold to the Chilton Club by Pauline Revere Thayer. The Club received approval to commence remodeling the building to consolidate it with its property at 152 Commonwealth Avenue/287 Dartmouth Street in 1926, hiring architect William Bigelow of Bigelow and Wadsworth to design the work.  The Club’s official mailing address is 152 Commonwealth Avenue.

The Back Bay Architectural District

The property at 152 Commonwealth Avenue is within the bounds of the Back Bay Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.  It is also within the boundaries of the Back Bay Architectural District, and subject to the Back Bay Architectural Commission.