Bryant’s talent for self-promotion meant that the Charles Street Jail was the first constructed American design to appear in a foreign architectural magazine – Britain’s The Builder.

book review

Granite Style

Building Victorian Boston: The Architecture of Gridley J.F. Bryant
by Roger Reed
University of Massachusetts Press, Boston, MA; 2007
225 pp.; clothbound; 72 illustrations; $39.95
ISBN: 978-1-558-49555-5

Reviewed by Lynne Lavelle

On November 9, 1872, the most costly property fire in American history was sparked in the basement of a warehouse on Summer Street in Boston, MA. In 12 hours, it consumed 65 acres of the city’s downtown, destroying almost 800 buildings at a cost of $73.5 million. While the death toll was remarkably low – recorded at just 30 people – there was no shortage of tragedy in its aftermath. Thousands of Bostonians were left without jobs or homes, and the city had lost many remarkable buildings.

Among the local architects who watched a large portion of their lives’ work disappear, quite literally, overnight, was Gridley James Fox Bryant. Born in Boston in 1816, Bryant was one of the most prolific architects in the city, if not New England, in the 19th century. As a proponent of the “Granite Style,” and creator of progressive public buildings such as the Boston City Hospital and Charles Street Jail, Bryant embraced the many technological and social changes of the age, forming strategic partnerships with other architects and reformers as he did so. In Building Victorian Boston: The Architecture of Gridley J.F. Bryant, architectural historian Roger Reed examines Bryant’s work, its influence on health, education and penal policies, and the business sense that made him “one of the first truly modern architects.”

Reviewing Bryant’s career is no easy task. As Reed explains, he left no office records or collections of letters, and though some drawings do survive, they are scattered in different locations. However, a scarcity of primary materials and a certain degree of guesswork do not detract from the portrayal of Bryant as an architect of his time. Building Victorian Boston ably frames Bryant’s career almost entirely within the history of his city and his materials, and the observations of the press.

As the son of the inventor, mason, builder and engineer Gridley James Fox Bryant Sr., the younger Bryant had much to live up to. The elder Bryant designed and built the Granite Railroad in 1826 – considered the first commercial railroad in the U.S. – and oversaw much of the brick building in Boston from the end of the War of 1812 to the 1850s. Bryant gained a good grounding in the building trades by observing his father at work, but artistic inspiration was harder to come by. The early-19th century was not a particularly innovative time for architecture in Boston, a lull Reed attributes in part to the city’s declining trade and commerce as new markets opened up in New York and the Midwest. Mocking the city’s reputation as the “Athens of America,” one critic commented in 1836 that “the days of Pericles have not yet come, if we judge from the architecture of the city, which is singularly bad.”

It was in this climate, in 1837, that Bryant opened his own practice at age 20. The young architect had been working under Loammi Baldwin and Alexander Parris at the Charleston Navy Yard, but decided to set out on his own after Parris failed to win a large government contract, probably for the United States Custom House. Bryant prospered from the beginning, despite growing competition and the city’s worsening economic situation. Solomon Willard, Thomas Sumner, Asher Benjamin and Cornelius Coolidge were nearing the ends of their careers, but a number of new architects were gaining prominence: Isaiah Rogers, William Washburn, Richard Bond, Richard Upjohn, Edward Shaw, Charles G. Hall, William Sparrell, Amni B. Young and Charles Roath, to name a few.

Bryant won his first commission in September of that year, while many of his peers were feeling the strain. In a letter to a client who had fallen behind in his payments, Richard Upjohn wrote: “We have nothing to do here, nor is there any means that I know of to meet rents and all the other expenses attending the keeping of a family etc. etc. etc. these nothing to do times.” Meanwhile, the plans for a cottage for a Mr. Abbott Lawrence had just earned Bryant a rumored $5,000, a substantial amount at the time.

Rapid population growth ensured that Boston’s residential market remained relatively active throughout the depression of 1837-1843. Still, many architects were forced to find work in other fields, such as civil engineering. That Bryant worked on a number of projects during this period owes much to his father’s reputation and contacts. However, he made his own name during Boston’s transformation from the 18th-century city of Charles Bulfinch to a modern Victorian-era metropolis, an evolution that began immediately after the depression.

While Boston’s “Granite City” era was relatively short, it was a pivotal time – the last phase of Greek Revival architecture in Boston and the eve of social changes that would change the landscape. A large number of structures with granite fronts were built in the city between 1844 and 1846, chief among them Bryant’s Old South Block on Milk Street. Bryant narrowly missed an appointment to act as agent for the granite used in the New Orleans Custom House, despite the testimonials Reed discovered in the National Archives; Congressman Robert C. Winthrop had stated: “Mr. Bryant is highly esteemed here as a judicious architect, & as a trustworthy & honest man.”

As attitudes toward public education, and the treatment of prisoners and the insane, changed dramatically, the backing of prominent Bostonians afforded great opportunity for Bryant. Though his opinion of the various reform movements at the time was not known, Bryant worked on many of the resulting buildings, which were often very specialized.

From 1840 to 1848, 11 new grammar schools and three primary schools were built in Boston, of which Bryant designed at least three. In association with the penal reformer Louis Dwight, Bryant won commissions for prisons throughout the Northeast, most notably Boston’s Charles Street Jail, completed in 1851. Renowned for its elaborate masonry exterior – a departure from the austere prison designs of the time – Charles Street Jail symbolized Boston’s commitment to reform. And in 1864, Bryant’s Boston City Hospital completed the city’s transformation, providing a hospital for the poor within a grand Italianate building that complemented local architecture.

Before his death in 1899, Bryant was commissioned to rebuild 100 of the 152 buildings he lost in the fire of 1872. However, his life’s work was undone further by redevelopment, particularly in Boston’s central business district. “What is fame in architecture in these latter days?” Bryant wrote toward the end of his life. “Is it to witness the demolition of radical remodeling of an architect’s work, with less than a century of its real usefulness about it?” One can only speculate on what he would say about the Charles Street Jail’s reinvention as The Liberty Hotel. TB