October 29th - November 4th

November 4, 1930

November 4, 1930 - Movie referendum passes
November 3, 1948 - Death of Isabel Anderson
November 2, 1954 - First Democrat from Brookline in legislature
November 1, 1966 - JFK house returned to family

November 4, 1930
Movie referendum passes
After two decades of opposition, Brookline voters narrowly said Yes to allowing a license for a motion picture theater to be granted in town. A town-wide referendum that drew 80% of registered voters passed 8,219 to 6,884. 

The Brookline Chronicle came out strongly in favor of the motion picture referendum before the vote

Brookline had stood against allowing movies in town while many neighboring communities allowed them. An earlier referendum, in 1923, to allow a theater license had been rejected by a three-to-one margin.

Within a few weeks of the successful 1930 referendum, the town received as many as 14 proposals for a movie theater. Licenses were granted for two locations: on Beacon Street, just east of Harvard Street; and at Washington Street and Pearl Street in Brookline Village. Both of those fell through, and Brookline finally got its first movie theater, the Coolidge Corner Theatre, in December 1933.

(See this two-part blog post for more on the long fight against movies in town.)

November 3, 1948
Death of Isabel Anderson
Isabel Anderson, owner of the South Brookline hilltop estate known as "Weld," died at the age of 72. The 77-acre estate was left to the Town of Brookline and became a public park, named for her husband, diplomat and collector Larz Anderson. 

Isabel & Larz Anderson

Isabel, born Isabel Weld Perkins, was an author, socialite, and philanthropist. She and her husband purchased the estate from other members of the Weld family in 1899 and used it as their summer residence.

Their house, damaged in a fire and in poor condition, was torn down in 1959, but the carriage house that held the Anderson's automobile collection was included in the gift to the town. It is now the Larz Anderson Auto Museum.

November 2, 1954
First Democrat from Brookline in legislature
33-year-old attorney Sumner Kaplan became the first Democrat ever elected to serve Brookline in the state legislature. Kaplan finished third among six candidates competing for three seats. 

Boston Globe, November 3, 1954

Michael Dukakis, who worked on the campaign as a young man, later attributed Kaplan's success to an approach to campaigning that was new to Brookline. 

"This guy shows up at 7 in the morning at every one of the T stops in town. This was so different than anything this town had ever experienced, and it was a lesson for the rest of us." Dukakis told the Boston Globe after Kaplan's death, at the age of 91, in 2011. "He was the mentor for us younger fry who were part of his crew, and in the course of moving Brookline out of the Republican column, he was a great role model."

Kaplan served in the legislature until 1962. He also worked as a lawyer and judge and served several terms as a Town Meeting member and Brookline selectman. 

November 1, 1966
JFK house returned to family
A private group led by attorney Merrill I. Hassenfeld arranged to purchase the Brookline birthplace of John F. Kennedy from a later owner and turn it over to the Kennedy family with the idea of having it preserved as a memorial to the late president.

The group was motivated, reported the Brookline Chronicle Citizen, by rumors that the home, where the Kennedy family lived from 1914 to 1920, was going to be purchased by a private group that planned to commercialize the birthplace. 

Kennedy's mother, Rose, led the three-year effort to restore the house to the way it looked when the family lived there. It was turned over to the National Park Service in 1969 and remains open to the public as the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site.

The living room of the John F. Kennedy birthplace as it appears today (National Park Service / Robert Perron)

October 22nd - October 28th

October 24, 1899

October 25, 1848 - Water from Brookline Reservoir comes to Boston
October 27, 1880 - Teddy Roosevelt married in Brookline
October 24, 1899 - Whitney Hall opens
October 23, 1932 - Kenmore to St. Mary's subway tunnel

October 25, 1848
Water from Brookline Reservoir comes to Boston

Water brought from Lake Cochituate to the reservoir on Boylston Street in Brookline was sent to Boston for the first time, bringing fresh water to the city as the culmination of a two-year project. A crowd estimated at 100,000 people gathered on Boston Common to witness the coming of the water, displayed spectacularly in a 96-foot high column of water rising from the Frog Pond.

The flow of water from Brookline to Boston was controlled via the gatehouse, still standing today, at the Boylston Street reservoir. In 1902, the reservoir, no longer used for Boston's water supply, was purchased by the town of Brookline and turned into Brookline Reservoir Park.

These sketches illustrate the exterior of the Brookline Reservoir gatehouse and the interior with a cast iron stairway and pipes that carried water from the reservoir to Boston.

October 27, 1880
Teddy Roosevelt married in Brookline
Recent Harvard graduate Theodore Roosevelt and Chestnut Hill resident Alice Lee were married, on Roosevelt's 22nd birthday, at the First Parish church in Brookline. The couple moved to New York where the future president began his political career.

The certificate for the marriage of Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Lee was issued in Newton -- Lee's hometown -- but notes that the wedding took place in Brookline.

Alice Roosevelt died in 1884 at the age of 22, two days after giving birth to the couple's daughter, Alice. The loss devastated TR, who was said to rarely speak about his first wife thereafter. (He remarried, to a childhood friend, in 1886.)

Brookline was host to another Roosevelt wedding in  1930, when James Roosevelt, son of then New York governor Franklin Roosevelt, was married at St. Paul's Church to Brookline resident Betsey Cushing, daughter of renowned surgeon Harvey Cushing.

October 24, 1899
Whitney Hall opens
The S.S. Pierce Building, constructed between 1898 and 1899, originally included a large function hall on the second floor used for concerts, lectures, weddings, plays, and other events. The hall, which measured 66 feet by 38 feet, was named for Henry Whitney, the developer most responsible for transforming Beacon Street from a narrow country lane to a grand boulevard.

Adjacent to the main hall were a banquet room, a small supper room, a reception room, parlors and women's dressing rooms, and a well-equipped kitchen. The third floor had men's dressing, smoking, and coat rooms.

Whitney Hall continued to be used for events until the 1950s, when the upper floors were divided into office spaces.  

Advertisements and notices for events and activities in Whitney Hall (Click image for larger view)

October 23, 1932

Kenmore to St. Mary's subway tunnel
A new subway tunnel carrying trains under Kenmore Square to emerge at the St. Mary's Street stop on Beacon Street in Brookline was officially opened. 

Boston Globe, October 24, 1932

The tunnel, completed at a cost of $5 million nine months ahead of schedule, was designed to eliminate traffic congestion in the square, where trains and automobiles competed for space. A work force of 1,600 had taken part in the construction of the tunnel and the new Kenmore Station.

Kenmore Square had been known as Governor's Square until 1931, when it was changed by an order passed by the Boston City Council and signed by Governor James Curley. The station was already known as Kenmore after Kenmore Street, a small street intersection Commonwealth Avenue, where it was located.

October 15th - October 21st

October 20, 1931

October 18, 1869 - Opening of first library building
October 17, 1904 - Murder of Officer McMurray
October 20, 1931 - Harvard Church burns
October 15, 1949 - Larz Anderson Auto Museum opens

October 18, 1869
Opening of first library building
Brookline's first free-standing public library was opened on the site of the current library on Washington Street in Brookline Village. The new library replaced the one established 12 years earlier on the first floor of the 1844 Town Hall.

The 1869 Public Library of Brookline. The building behind it on the right was the town's high school from the 1850s to the 1890s.

The site was chosen over several others. It was also decided not to have the library included in a new town hall. (Brookline would construct a new town hall four years later.)

The 1869 building, with an 1888 addition, continued to serve as the library until the first part of the current library building opened in 1910. The older building was moved to the corner -- where the house is in the picture above and where the Civil War statue is today -- and continued to be used until the new library was completed.

These photos from the Public Library of Brookline show the 1869 library raised on railroad ties to facilitate its move to the corner of Washington and School Street. It was torn down when the new library was ready for use. 

October 17, 1904
Murder of Officer McMurray
Brookline police officer Joseph McMurray, responding to a report of a fight and a gunshot in a house on Boylston Street in Brookline Village, was fatally shot as he broke down the door of the apartment. The gunman, who was arrested by other officers, had shot and killed his wife.

McMurray, a Brookline police officer since 1893 who lived on Davis Avenue with his wife and six children, was the first Brookline police officer to be killed in the line of duty. (There would be one more in 1930.). He had won special recognition for rescuing a young boy who had fallen through the ice on Leverett Pond in 1894. In 1900, he had rescued another man from drowning: the same man, Henry Bowles, who killed him four years later.

Residents of the town raised $10,000 to support McMurray's widow, Mary, and her children. Boles, who had been fired from his job with the town's water department for drunkenness,  was sentenced to life in prison.

October 20, 193
Harvard Church burns
The Harvard Church, Brookline's 1873 Congregational edifice at the corner of Harvard and Marion Streets, was destroyed in a Tuesday evening fire. Firefighters are shown battling the blaze in the photo at the top of this post.

The tower of the church was the only part that could be saved. The tower had been rebuilt just a few years earlier due to defects discovered in the original structure.

These images show the Harvard Church as it originally looked and after it was rebuilt following the 1931 fire. The differences in the tower, the only part of the church that was preserved, reflect its rebuilding just a few years before the fire.

The church was rebuilt on the original foundation. It is now known as United Parish, the result of a 1970 coming together of three congregations: the Harvard Church (United Church of Christ, UCC), St Mark’s Methodist Church, and the Baptist Church in Brookline.

October 15, 1949
Larz Anderson Auto Museum opens
Brookline marked the official opening of the Antique Auto Museum (now the Larz Anderson Auto Museum) in the former carriage house of Larz and Isabel Anderson on Newton Street. 

On display, reported the Brookline Chronicle, were "twelve ancient autos and forty horse drawn vehicles" formerly owned by the Andersons, plus six "old-time cars" belonging to members of the Veteran Motor Car Club of America.

The opening of the Antique Auto Museum was announced in the Boston Globe, which also  included pictures of youngsters enjoying some of the old cars.

The ceremonies included a ribbon cutting and a speech on the early days of motoring, plus a parade of old cars driven by collectors and a series of road tests, races, and competitive events.

October 8th - October 14th

October 14, 1845

October 14, 1845 - Second Town Hall dedicated
October 8, 1915 - Civil War statue dedicated
October 8, 1926 - Notable paintings left to town
October 13, 1965 - New Town Hall dedicated

October 14, 1845
Second Town Hall dedicated
Brookline's second Town Hall -- the first in today's municipal center of town -- was dedicated on Holden Street. The Rev. John Pierce, minister at Brookline's oldest church (First Parish), gave the dedication speech.

Pierce, who first came to Brookline as minister in 1797, described the building as "this new, commodious, and beautiful Town Hall." At the same time, he foresaw its future replacement as the town grew and changed.

"The progressive improvements of modern times render it not improbable that, when this beauteous fabric shall grow old, and decay, it may give place to an edifice, which shall as far exceed this, as the present is superior to the rude structures of former times."

The building (shown at the top of this post) was, indeed, replaced by a new, much larger Town Hall, in 1873. The old building was then used as the police station. It was torn down in 1904 when an addition to the Pierce Grammar School (now the Historic Building) was built.

The location of the second Town Hall is indicated by the blue star on these maps from 1874 and 1907 and the current aerial view. In 1874 it was serving as the police station. By 1907 it had been torn down and replaced by the addition to the 1855 Pierce Grammar School building. (Click image for a larger view)

October 8, 1915
Civil War statue dedicated
Brookline's second Civil War memorial -- you can read more about the first one here -- was dedicated on the lawn next to the Brookline Village library in ceremonies that featured Massachusetts Governor David Walsh and other local and state officials.

The memorial, a statue by noted sculptor Edward Clark Potter on top of a granite base, featured a Union bugler mounted on his horse.

Potter is known particularly for his equestrian statues, including figures of George Washington in Paris (with a replica in Chicago), Ulysses S. Grant in Philadelphia, and Union General Joseph Hooker in front of the State House in Boston. He also sculpted the lions, dubbed Patience and Fortitude, at the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.

October 8, 1926
Notable paintings left to town
Desmond FitzGerald, whose house stood at the corner of Washington and Cypress Streets, was a hydraulic engineer who designed the waterworks at the Chestnut Hill reservoir. (A video of an actor portraying him can be seen at the Waterworks Museum.) 

He was also a noted art collector who built a gallery, adjacent to his home, to house his collection. (The gallery building has been the Church of Christ since 1942.) Upon his death in 1926, several paintings were left to the town.

Interior of Desmond FitzGerald's art gallery, now the Church of Christ. The skylight, bringing natural light to the display of art, was later replaced by a new roof.

Several of the paintings FitzGerald left to the town are on display in different rooms on the first floor of the library, while others -- watercolors more sensitive to sunlight -- are in storage. Read more about FitzGerald, his art collection, and his gallery in this handout prepared for a Historical Society program held in the space several years ago.

October 13, 1965
New Town Hall dedicated

Brookline's fourth Town Hall, the third in Brookline Village, was officially dedicated. Boston Mayor John Collins, arriving late, gave the dedication speech.

October 13, 1965 (Public Library of Brookline photo)

"The carefully planned details of the dedication were delayed a total of 30 minutes," reported a clearly annoyed Brookline Chronicle Citizen, "while town officials and guests awaited the arrival of the guest speaker." Collins, noted the paper, jokingly called Brookline "a lovely enclave to which we would like to lay claim."

Town officials had moved into the building the previous fall, but the dedication was postponed until landscaping was completed.

October 1st - October 7th

October 1, 1990

October 7, 1873 - Brookline rejects annexation
October 5, 1875 - Walnut Hills Cemetery dedicated
October 7, 1911 - Holtzer Cabot fire
October 1, 1990 - Town begins curbside recycling

October 7, 1873
Brookline rejects annexation
Brookline voters overwhelmingly rejected annexation of the town to Boston. The vote -- men only could vote at the time -- was 706 against versus 299 in favor. Brookline would thus remain independent, unlike the towns of Brighton, West Roxbury, and Charlestown, all of which voted the same day to become part of the city.

Boston Globe headline, October 8, 1873

The anti-annexation newspaper the Brookline Independent crowed about the result, under the headline "Hurrah for Old Brookline":

 

"For years, if the annexationists keep their recorded promises, this question will not be agitated again, but the town will be allowed to resume its uninterrupted march of improvement without being distracted with questions affecting only private interests only damaging those of the public."

Pro-annexation forces would continue to advocate for the town's incorporation into Boston. The last gasp occurred in 1919 when an annexation bill in the state legislature was withdrawn after Brookline Town Meeting voted against it by a margin of 198-1.

October 5, 1875
Walnut Hills Cemetery dedicated 
The Walnut Hills Cemetery, Brookline's second town-owned burying ground, was dedicated in the southern part of town. It joined the 158-year old Old Burying Ground on Walnut Street. (Holyhood Cemetery, a privately-owned Catholic cemetery, was founded in 1857.)

"The grounds," reported the Brookline Chronicle, "are well diversified with hill and dells, making a pleasing and beautiful landscape. They contain about thirty acres, of which some eight acres are in grass, the remainder covered with a thrifty growth of oak, walnut, chestnut, pine, birch, beech, maple, sassafras, cedar and a good variety of shrubs, which nestle in quiet nooks and dells, and seem to invite to retirement and repose."

The cemetery was expanded in 1928 with the purchase of an additional 15 acres adjacent to the original grounds. 

1991 photo taken at Walnut Hill Cemetery (Public Library of Brookline)

October 7, 1911
Holtzer Cabot fire
The factory of the Holtzer Cabot Electric Company on Station Street suffered extensive damage in a fire that the entire Brookline fire department was brought on to fight. The crews did manage to keep the fire from spreading to the adjacent Brookline Storage company building and nearby. stores and apartment houses on Washington Street.

The Holtzer Cabot Electric Company building is in the center of this photo, across Station Street from the Brookline Village railroad station. The Holtzer Cabot building and the Brookline Storage building to its left are still standing today.

The oldest part of the building, a wooden structure contained within the brick building, was destroyed. It was the old St. Mary's of the Assumption Catholic church, taken over by Holtzer Cabot when the current church was built and later encased within the larger brick building. 

Holzer Cabot, which had already expanded to facilities outside Brookline, rebuilt and continued operating in town, but moved away from Station Street and Brookline for good in 1915.

October 1, 1990
Town begins curbside recycling 
Brookline inaugurated what was described as one of the most comprehensive curbside recycling programs in the nation. The new program, reported the Brookline Citizen, would require 14,500 households to recycle glass, metal, plastic, leaves, and other material.

Households were provided with blue plastic recycling bins, like the one shown in this Boston Herald photo. It was reported at the end of the first week that town residents had recycled 51.61 tons of newspaper and 18.41 tons of other materials. (The numbers might have been inflated by residents holding on to recyclable materials in anticipation of the new program.)

Boston Herald, October 12, 1990

In October 1991, the town reported that residents had recycled 3,250 tons of material that would otherwise have been thrown away. That amounted to almost 20% of the overall tonnage that would normally have gone into the trash.