Lost Elegance (June 1957 | Volume: 8, Issue: 4)

Lost Elegance

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Authors: Francis Russell

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June 1957 | Volume 8, Issue 4

The Mansion is what the children of the district call it, knowing nothing of its history. It stands narrowly on its once rural hill, as it has these 200 years, in a peripheral Boston slum where the tide of middle-class respectability ebbed two generations ago. Roxbury, between Uphams Corner and the Dudley Street terminal, is not the place where one would expect to find a royal governor’s residence. There is a mean anonymity to these encroaching streets. However many people may live out their lives here, a visitor is apt to feel that the outer world will never hear of them. The houses press in on each other, solid mansard-roofed houses of the Seventies and Eighties that were once decent, if never fashionable, rackrent three-deckers built for the swarming immigrants.

Shirley Street dips down sharply beyond the mansion. Where the sea once flooded across the salt marshes is now a filled area taken up by an abandoned brewery and the enveloping three-deckers and the Shirley Café on the corner, Framed in the perspective of a few hardwoods beyond chimneys and television masts, the upswept line of Washington’s old fortifications cuts the horizon at Dorchester Heights, although the intervening bay is hidden.

Gray is Roxbury’s prevailing color, broken by the pastel dinginess of brick and the singular blueness of the sky that seems to draw something of its quality from the invisible sea. In the autumn before the frost a few fenced gardens in front of the scrimshaw-gabled lodging houses are oddly bright with yellow and orange marigolds and borders of salvia. But mostly the tramped lots are untended. Here is one of the thickest population areas of the city, yet it gives the impression of lifelessness as one walks through it.

Shirley Place, perched on makeshift foundations, looks a stranded hulk, a survival from a past that has no meaning here. Yet in its marred elegance it still maintains the form of an age of sensibility and proportion. Compared to the English country houses of the day, to Belton House and to Roger Pratt’s Coleshill, which it resembles most, it is small. In the old country it would have been overshadowed. Among the New England colonies it was unique. Beside it Boston’s Old State House and Faneuil Hall are naïve, and Bulfinch’s later classical State House amateurish. Only the interior of King’s Chapel can compare in architectural sophistication. The latter was designed by Peter Harrison, that émigré master of the Palladian style, and the cornerstone was laid by his friend Governor Shirley. Although the evidence is deductive rather than documentary, Harrison may also have been the architect of Shirley Place.

That house was the embodiment of royalty. When Governor Shirley planned it he had other thoughts in mind than mercantile display. There is none of the bourgeois opulence gloating in its own comfort which is found in the Federalist houses of Beacon Hill, but viceregal splendor, formal and aloof, the seal of the royal presence across the