February 26th - March 4th

March 2, 1969

March 4, 1635 - Cart bridge ordered over Muddy River

March 2, 1920 - Town votes to stop being a dry town
March 2, 1969 - Groundbreaking for Hearthstone Plaza
February 26, 2021 - Renaming of Devotion School for Florida Ruffin Ridley

March 4, 1634
Cart bridge ordered over Muddy River
Many different transportation developments have played a part in Brookline's growth: the opening of the Worcester Turnpike (now Route 9) in 1810; the coming of the railroad to Brookline Village in 1848; the widening of Beacon Street, with streetcar tracks, in the late 1880s.

But the transportation development that first opened up the land that would become Brookline to European settlement was the placing of a wooden cart bridge over the Muddy River in in 1634. Here's what was recorded in the Boston records on March 4th of that year:

That Mr. Richard Dummer and John Johnson shall build a sufficient cartbridge over Muddy River before the next General Court, and that Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Newtown, and Watertown shall equally contribute to it.

Part of a Brookline Historical Society map made in 1923 showing Brookline in 1667. The location of the cart bridge over the Muddy River is circled in red.

Modern aerial view showing approximate location of the cart bridge. Lower Washington Street becomes Huntington Avenue when it crosses the Boston border just west of the bridge carrying the Riverway north. (Image via Atlascope, Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library) 

March 2, 1920
Town votes to stop being a dry town

Brookline voters joined those in dozens of Massachusetts communities in voting to allow liquor sales in town. In Brookline's case, it represented a reversal of a long-standing policy in place since 1886 when  Town Meeting voted 452-268 to ban the granting of licenses for the sale of intoxicating beverages.

Articles in the Boston Globe and Springfield Republican after Brookline voted to allow liquor licenses in town.

The vote, in Brookline and elsewhere, was merely a symbolic one; Prohibition had gone into effect nationally two months earlier. 

Boston Globe headline, March 2, 1920. Brookline would join the protest against Prohibition later that day

The Brookline Chronicle, which had editorialized against going "wet," criticized, "the 'die-hards' who have been shouting 'constitutional rights' and 'personal liberty' in support of a Yes vote. "How weak his protest against the fancied loss of 'personal liberty' must seem to him now." wrote the paper, "beside the real personal liberty from misery which thousands of families are enjoying since the head of the household has been unable to squander a week's pay for drink in one night!"

March 2, 1969
Groundbreaking for Hearthstone Plaza
Major change came to Brookline's oldest commercial area with the ceremonial start to a $5 million office and retail complex to be known as Hearthstone Plaza in Brookline Village. The complex, as completed, is shown in the 1973 photo at the top of this post. (Photo credit: Brookline preservation department)

When finished, the 75,000-square-foot multilevel complex included the headquarters of the Hearthstone Insurance Company, as well as a restaurant, a movie theater, and other retail space. A pedestrian bridge connected the complex to the new Brook House development across Route 9. (The bridge was closed in 2006 and later torn down.)

The new development, the latest urban renewal project in Brookline Village, replaced the older commercial buildings seen below in this photo from 1938. 

Lower Washington Street in 1938

The new movie theater was deep inside the complex but had its marquee in approximately the same place the marquee of the older movie theater it replaced. Movie tastes had also changed: the Brookline Theater in 1938 was showing Tropic Holiday, with Dorothy Lamour and Martha Raye, and Laurel and Hardy's Swiss Miss; the Plaza, in 1973, was showing The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge.

February 26, 2021
Renaming of Devotion School for Florida Ruffin Ridley

A new Brookline school opened in Coolidge Corner in 1892. It was named in honor of Edward Devotion, a colonial era resident who left money to the town upon his death in 1744. He had inherited the old house, built by an earlier Edward Devotion, that stood (and still stands) adjacent to the new school.

This second Edward Devotion was also a slaveholder. An inventory of his property upon his death included land, livestock, household goods, and “one Negrow” valued at 30 pounds. In 2018, with a new Devotion School under construction, local residents Deborah Brown and Anne Greenwald introduced a warrant article to change the name of the school. 

The article was approved overwhelmingly by Town Meeting in May 2018, and a process, led by students, for choosing a new name was established. In 2019, Town Meeting voted that the school be renamed the Florida Ruffin Ridley School in honor of the African American educator, author, civil rights activist, and suffragist.  The renaming ceremony, delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, took place in 2021.

February 19th - February 25th

February 22, 1873

February 22, 1873 - New Town Hall dedicated
February 24, 1912 - Teddy Roosevelt in Brookline amid election speculation
February 24, 1912 - Tennis star Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman
February 21, 1958 - Skating Rink opens at Larz Anderson Park

February 22, 1873
New Town Hall dedicated
Brookline's third Town Hall, shown above in a contemporary sketch (courtesy of the Public Library of Brookline) was officially dedicated in a ceremony attended by local and state officials, including Massachusetts governor William Washburn and two former governors.

The three-story Gothic building stood adjacent to the site of the current Town Hall. It replaced the 1845 Town Hall, which was converted into a new police headquarters. Former U.S. Senator and Speaker of the House Robert Winthrop, who described himself as "an eleventh-hour Brookline man" -- he had moved to town a few years earlier-- gave the main speech, a lengthy address in the style of the day.

"I may not venture to depict, or attempt to anticipate, [said Winthrop] all the various scenes which this Hall may exhibit, in the long vista of time and change and chance through which we look forward to-day, as through the ever-changing, still-combining colors of a kaleidoscope."

Robert C. Winthrop photo by Matthew Brady. (Library of Congresss)

Winthrop expected the building to last well more than a century. "We can hardly imagine that any increase in population, or any multiplication of offices or affairs, or any caprice of taste of fancy, will ever call for a more spacious or commodious edifice of the kind," he said. 

Less than 50 years later, however, there were already discussions about replacing it with a new, larger building. (See This Week in Brookline History, January 15th-January 21st for more.)

February 24, 1912
Teddy Roosevelt in Brookline amid election speculation
Former president Theodore Roosevelt, visiting Boston and staying at the Brookline home of Edward Brandagee, announced that he would accept the presidential nomination of the Republican Party if offered to him instead of to the current president, William Howard Taft.

Washington Post headline, February 26, 1912

The announcement was evidence of the growing rift between Roosevelt and Taft, who had been Roosevelt's vice president. It was made in response to a request from a group of Republican governors who wished to see the former president challenge Taft.

In the end, Republicans nominated Taft for re-election, leading Roosevelt to run as a third-party candidate under the banner of the Progressive Party, popularly known as the "Bull Moose" party. In November, Roosevelt won 27.4% of the popular vote and 88 of the votes in the electoral college, while Taft, with 23.2% of the popular vote, won just 8 electoral votes. Democrat Woodrow Wilson won less than half of the popular vote but was elected with an overwhelming victory in the Electoral College.

February 24, 1912
Tennis star Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman

According to her biography on the website of the International Tennis Hall of Fame, "few in women’s tennis history had a more distinguished and productive career than Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman." Born in California, where she began her tennis career, Hotchkiss' 1912 marriage to attorney George Wightman brought her to Brookline, where they lived until the mid-1930s.

Helen Hotchkiss Wightman as she was shown in Spalding's Tennis Annual in 1911, left, and in the Brookline Chronicle Citizen in 1968.

 

Her tennis career, which began before her marriage, brought her more than 40 tennis titles in singles and doubles and two Olympic gold medals (both in 1924). Her desire to increase attention to women's tennis led to the Wightman Cup competition, named for a silver cup she donated in honor of her husband. The competition between players from the U.S. and Great Britain was held annually until 1989.

Hotchkiss, her husband, and their five children lived in a house at the corner of Charles Street and Beacon Street in Coolidge Corner, which no longer stands.. (Her in-laws' house on Hawes Street, still standing, has since been used by Hebrew College, Wheelock College, and Boston University.) She continued to play -- and teach -- tennis well into her 80s.

 

February 21, 1958
Skating Rink opens at Larz Anderson Park
Brookline's public ice skating rink -- reported by the Boston American to be the first municipally-constructed rink in New England -- opened in Larz Anderson Park. The celebration featured figure skaters from the Skating Club of Boston, an exhibition by the Brookline High School ice hockey team, and demonstrations by amateur skaters.

The rink was constructed on what had been the Italian Garden of the Larz and Isabel Anderson estate, adjacent to the main house. (The estate had been given to the town after Isabel Anderson's death in 1948.)

The photo on the left shows the Italian Garden of the Anderson estate. The photo on the right shows pipes laid as part of the conversion of the garden into an ice skating rink. (Click for larger view)
Garden photo from Ralph D. Cornell Papers, UCLA. Pipes photo from Brookline Chronicle, February 20, 1958, via Public Library of Brookline)

Prior to the construction of the rink, the town had provided space for skating by spraying water onto the grass on sections of local parks, a process that continued for a few years after the opening of the Anderson rink. (See Ice Skating at Brookline Parks & Playgrounds for more on the early history of ice skating in town.)

February 12th - February 18th

 

February 17, 1903

February 17, 1903 - Manual Training high school building
February 15, 1933 - Best Small Home in America
February 15, 1937 - Brookline woman and her aunt make gift of Tanglewood
February 14, 1969 - Two Sagamore editors resign in censorship dispute

February 17, 1903
Manual Training high school building
An 1894 Massachusetts law required cities and towns with populations above 20,000 to incorporate manual training into their high school curricula. Brookline remained exempt; its population as late as the 1900 Census was just under the threshold. But the town was growing rapidly; by 1910 it would have nearly 28,000 people.

The new manual training building on Tappan Street (shown above) opened for use with the 1902-03 school year. In February 1903, the public was invited to tour the new facility. The curriculum, reported the School Committee,

"does not mean that trades are to be taught in the high school any more than professions are taught, but that such instruction be given as will afford a solid foundation for either when in after life a special vocation is chosen."

The manual training building of Brookline High School, outlined in blue on this section of a 1907 atlas, is now the oldest building in the high school complex. 

Boys learned industrial skills like carpentry, foundry, boiler, and engine work, while the girls learned "domestic arts" like sewing and cooking, but the School Committee recognized early on that "we have gone further in the development of satisfactory manual courses for boys...than we have done thus far for girls."

February 15, 1933
Best Small Home in America
Architect Royal Barry Wills designed more than 20 homes in the Blake Park development on the lower half of Aspinwall Hill in the 1920s and 1930s. One of these, now 37 Weybridge Lane, was awarded the Gold Medal for the best small house in the country in the annual Better Homes in America competition for 1932.

37 Weybridge Lane in 1932. A sign hanging at the far right says "Gold Medal Home.'

Wills received his award at the White House on February 15th from President Herbert Hoover, honorary chairman of Better Homes in America. Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, had been a major supporter of the Better Homes organization in its early years.

This house was the home of Maurice and Mary Dunlavy. Maurice Dunlavy was the builder of all of the Wills-designed homes in Blake Park. Read more about the house on my Blake Park website.

February 15, 1937
Brookline woman and her aunt make gift of Tanglewood
The Boston Symphony Orchestra announced it had accepted the gift of the 210-acre Tanglewood estate in Lenox and Stockbridge from Rosamund Brooks of Brookline and her aunt, Mary Aspinwall Tappan of Boston. The estate, which had been in the Tappan family for more than 80 years, was to become the permanent home of the orchestra's summer concerts.

Part of a February 1937 Berkshire Eagle article, left, and a flyer from the fourth annual Berkshire Symphonic Festival, the first held at Tanglewood, right. 

William Aspinwall Tappan, a merchant and banker and the father and grandfather of the two women, developed Tanglewood in the 1850s. (His father was the abolitionist Lewis Tappan whose 1820s house on Aspinwall Hill was torn down in 1939.) Mary Tappan was born in Lenox on an adjacent estate while Tanglewood was being developed. She died in 1941. Her niece, then remarried as Rosamund Hepburn, died in 1948.

February 14, 1969
Two Sagamore editors resign in censorship dispute
Two editors of the Brookline High School newspaper the Sagamore resigned after the administration put in place a new rule requiring all articles, except sports reporting, to be approved by school officials "for verification of factual information" before being published. The ruling came after publication of an editorial said to contain numerous factual errors.

1968-69 masthead of the Sagamore

Editorial editor Stephen Kinzer and sports editor Larry Horowitz, later joined by photography editor Mike Franklin, resigned in protest. Kinzer, whose editorial prompted the rule change, told a meeting of the School Committee that "in an issue like this there's no middle ground. Students can either write what the administration wants or they can write what the students want.'

Other Sagamore editors wrote in the paper that their remaining on the staff "does not in any way indicate that we condone indiscriminate censorship." They did, however, put in place a new structure in which editorials would reflect the consensus views of a new editorial board, instead of a single editorial editor. The administration's ruling on oversight was overturned a month later.

The controversy did not hurt Kinzer's career. After graduating from Boston University in 1973, went on to be an aide to Michael Dukakis in his first term as governor, a reporter for the Boston Globe, a longtime foreign correspondent and bureau chief at the New York Times, and the author of several books. 

(Kinzer is shown here as he appeared in a group portrait of the Student Council in the 1968 Brookline High School yearbook, the Murivian.)

February 5th -- February 11th

February 11, 1944

February 5, 1916 - New tuberculosis hospital opens
February 11, 1944 - First in vitro fertilization at Women's Hospital
February 10, 1971 - Court upholds Brookline rent control law
February 8, 1973 - Start of Brookline Early Education Program (BEEP)

February 5, 1916
New tuberculosis hospital opens

Brookline Tuberculosis Hospital as shown in The American Architect, March 14, 1917

The triangle of land at the corner of Newton and Grove Streets, adjacent to the Country Club, was far removed from the centers of population of the town. As such, it became the location for a variety of facilities that remained largely out of sight to most residents.

These included an almshouse, opened in 1883 under the management of the Overseers of the Poor, where indigent individuals and families were provided housing. A high service pumping station for the town's water supply was added in 1885. A series of hospitals for treating contagious diseases also occupied the space.

In 1916, a new building specifically for tuberculosis patients (the pink building at the top of 1919 map below) was added to the complex. This location continued to be used as a hospital site until the 1950s when a new Brookline Hospital was built (where Goddard House is today) and the land was sold to a developer for new housing.

The map shows this location in 1919. The aerial photo shows it today with two new streets with housing: Fairgreen Place, built in the mid-1960s, is the larger, dark-hued development; Benjamin Place, developed in the mid-1980s, is at bottom. The Putterham School, which opened in 1768 (lower right on the map) was an active school for nearly 150 years; it was moved to Larz Anderson Park in 1966. (Click on image for a larger view)

February 11, 1944
First in vitro fertilization at Women's Hospital

Dr. John Rock and his assistant Miriam Menkin had been working on in vitro fertilization at the Free Hospital for Women on Pond Street for six years when they had their first success. (See the image at the top.)  As Menkin later wrote:

“I felt like -- who was the first man to look at the Pacific -- Balboa?  You see, I really was nobody. If you don’t get a doctorate in this kind of field, You always work under other people. You’re in a different category. You may want to do independent work, but you’re not allowed to. But there it was …the first fertilized egg...what no one had ever done before.”

The Free Hospital for Women, now condominiums on Pond Street

Rock and Menkin's achievement, published by them in the journal Science, led to widespread publicity -- and controversy.

Menkin, had degrees from Cornell and Columbia and had completed requirements for a Ph.D. from Harvard on an audited basis. But because she took jobs to support her husband in medical school, she never had the money to enroll officially and get the degree. When he got a job in North Carolina, she had to give up her work with Rock. She returned years later and worked with him on the development of the first birth control pill. 

February 10, 1971
Court upholds Brookline rent control law
Three-and-a-half months after it went into effect, Brookline's rent control bylaw survived a challenge by landlords in the state's Supreme Court. The ruling also cleared the way for Cambridge and Somerville, which had adopted their own bylaws in the wake of a new state law allowing local rent control rules.

Image via Brookline Newspaper Archive, Public Library of Brookline

Brookline's bylaw had been passed by Town Meeting in September. Michael Dukakis, then a state legislator and candidate for lieutenant governor, spoke at Town Meeting, stating that a "rent control bill with real enforcement powers is needed to protect both honest landlords and tenants who have been victimized by unscrupulous landlords."

Rent control ended in Brookline in 1996, phased out in the wake of a close vote on a November 1994 Massachusetts referendum that abolished rent control statewide.  

February 8, 1973
Start of Brookline Early Education Program (BEEP)
The announcement of the official launch of the Brookline Early Education Project, or BEEP, called it "the first major school-based program to provide comprehensive education and health services to children during infancy and the early years of life."

The pilot program, funded by grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, included "diagnostic services, educational programs for participants and their infants and evaluative studies to assess the effectiveness of the various components of the program along with estimates of their costs."

2006 analysis of the BEEP program by one of the original funders, 25 years after the end of the eight-year pilot project.

The program began with more than 150 racially and economically diverse participants from Brookline and parts of Boston. A study of the participants, 25 years after the end of the pilot program found that results "add to the growing body of findings that indicate that long-term benefits occur as the result of well-designed, intensive, comprehensive early education." This pioneering program continues to be a part of the Brookline Schools 50 years after it began.