March 26th - April 1st

Approved March 29, 1955 (Opened 1956)

March 30,1857 - Town votes money for a library

March 26,1881 - Women’s suffrage defeated at Town Meeting
March 26, 1931 - Longyear estate on Fisher Hill left for museum March 29,1955 - Town approves Centre Street parking lot

March 30,1857 Town votes money for a public library

Town meeting voted to appropriate funds for the establishment and maintenance of a town library on the first floor of the 1844 Town Hall. The appropriation -- $934 to establish the library $233 for the first year of operation -- came six years after Massachusetts passed legislation enabling cities and towns to appropriate funds for public libraries.

Brookline's 1844 Town Hall stood on Prospect Street between where the current Town Hall and the older Pierce School building are today. It was used as the town police station when a new Town Hall was built in 1873 and was torn down when the 1904 Pierce building was constructed. Prospect Street was eliminated when the current Town Hall was built in the 1960s.

Brookline's public library was not the first in the state, but it was the first established under the 1851 legalization. The town had discussed the need for a school library as early as 1843 and appropriated $45 for the purpose a year later, though it is unclear if one was ever established.

The public library continued to operate in the 1844 Town Hall, taking over additional space over the years, until 1869 when a new library was constructed on the site of the current Brookline Village Library.

For much more on the history of the Public Library of Brookline, see Public Library of Brookline: A History: Celebrating 150 Years of Library Service, written by library staff in 2007.

March 26,1881
Women’s suffrage defeated at Town Meeting

One year after women were first allowed to vote in school committee elections in Brookline, Town Meeting rejected a proposal to allow women to hold town office and "to vote in town affairs on the same terms as male citizens." The vote was 96 against and 37 in favor of the proposal.

The motion had been made by William Ingersoll Bowditch. Bowditch and his wife Sarah were leading figures in the abolition movement in Brookline; their house on Toxteth Street (still standing) was a station on the Underground Railroad. After the Civil War and the end of slavery, they turned their attention increasingly to suffrage. 

William Ingersoll Bowditch and Sarah Rhea Higginson Bowditch

In his 1875 book Taxation of Women in Massachusetts William echoed the old Revolutionary cry of "No taxation without representation."

"We men in America practice a form of tyranny over our own women," he wrote, "which we cannot help admitting to be unjust, without repudiating our own principles...."

William Bowditch died in 1909 at the age of 90. Sarah Bowditch, who was the first woman to vote in the 1880 Brookline School Board election, died in October 1919, two months before her 100th birthday and 10 months before women gained the right to vote with ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

March 26, 1931 Longyear estate on Fisher Hill left for museum The will of Mary B. Longyear, who died on March 14th, decreed that her large Fisher Hill home be turned into a museum to display her paintings and historical collections and materials relating to the teachings of Christian Science.

Longyear and her husband, lumber magnate John Longyear, were followers of Christian Science who had the house moved from Marquette, Michigan, on the shore of Lake Superior, to be near Mary Baker Eddy, founder the church. It was dismantled, moved by railroad, and reassembled between 1903 and 1906. 

The Longyear mansion after its move from Michigan and reconstruction on Fisher Hill.

The mansion continued to be used as the museum until the 1995 when the property was sold to a developer for a condo complex incorporating the house. The museum moved to nearby space and opened a new facility in Chestnut Hill in 2001.

March 29,1955 Town approves Centre Street parking lot Concerns about the lack of parking in Coolidge Corner and its impact on local businesses led Town Meeting to approve funds for acquiring several Centre Street properties by eminent domain to create a parking lot.

Town Meeting had rejected such a proposal the previous June despite efforts from a group concerned about a growing number of vacant storefronts in the town's major shopping district.

A group called Save Coolidge Corner took out this half-page advertisement in the Brookline Citizen on June 17, 1954 urging a Yes vote on a plan to turn several Centre Street properties into a parking lot. Although unsuccessful that year, the plan was approved by Town Meeting in 1955. (Click image for larger view)

The acquisitions led to the demolition of six Centre Street houses, four of which were used as boarding houses with multiple residents. The Centre Street parking lot opened in June 1956 with a full page announcement (shown above) from the Coolidge Corner Merchants Association in the Citizen.

(NOTE: I'm tracing what happened to the people displaced by the taking by eminent domain of the six Centre Street residences. More to come. - KL)
 

March 19th - March 25th

March 22, 1858

March 22, 1858 - Vote to lay plank sidewalks on Beacon Street
March 19, 1898 - Lecture on Black university held at Beaconsfield
March 20, 1916 - First Town Meeting under representative format
March 23, 2019 - First recreational marijuana shop in metro Boston opens

March 22, 1858 - Vote to lay plank sidewalks on Beacon Street
The mid-19th century unpaved streets of Brookline were generally adequate for the horse-drawn carriages, carts, and wagons then in use. But dirt and mud were an annoyance, at best, for anyone walking along those streets. 

In March 1858, Town Meeting authorized up to $600 to place wooden, or plank, sidewalks along the marshy stretch of Beacon Street west of the Boston line. (Beacon, laid out in 1850-51, was then an unpaved country lane, less than a third of its current width.) More plank sidewalks were added piecemeal in subsequent years as the town grew. Finally, in 1869, Town Meeting authorized the spending of $8,000 for the laying out of

such walks as they shall deem best suited to the different streets, always remembering that a good sidewalk should protect from mud at all seasons of the year.

Beacon Street got special attention, as seen in the 1880s photo above, looking east from Englewood Avenue. Those wooden Beacon Street sidewalks were replaced when the street was widened and paved in the late 1880s, but wooden sidewalks continued to be used in Brookline for many years. The last ones, kept for largely nostalgic reasons, were removed in the 1950s.  (See The Long History of Wooden Sidewalks in Brookline for more details and photos.)

A plank sidewalk on Rawson Road in 1915. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service. Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site)

March 19, 1898 - Lecture on Black university held at Beaconsfield
Atlanta University, founded in 1865 as the first of the Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) in the South, was the subject of a talk at the Beaconsfield Casino just outside Washington Square. Speakers included W.E.B. Du Bois, William Lloyd Garrison Jr., and the president of the university, Horace Bumstead.

Left to right: W.E.B. Du Bois; William Lloyd Garrison Jr., and Horace Bumstead

Du Bois, a professor at the university (now Clark Atlanta University), spoke [as reported in the Boston Globe] of efforts of the Black population to improve their lives amid "the chaos of public opinion and passions directed against" members of the race. Garrison, son of the famous abolitionist, said that the fight of Southern Blacks for equality was far more important than the war against Spain being fought at the time.

"The struggle in the Southern states among colored men," said Garrison [as reported in the Boston Herald], "against great and unexpected odds, is far greater, their condition being the legacy of slavery, and conditions of 200 years." It was not something, he said, that could be overcome in 35 years.

NOTE: The Beaconsfield Casino, where the Regency Park apartment building is today, was not a casino in the modern sense. It was a social hub for the Beaconsfield Terraces complex of apartments, which still stand. Garrison was a resident of the complex. 

March 20, 1916 - First Town Meeting under representative format
Brookline became the first town in Massachusetts to hold a Town Meeting with elected representatives voting on warrant articles instead of the old system where all eligible voters had a say in whether articles were passed.

The change had been approved by voters -- men only at that time -- the previous November. The Brookline Chronicle praised the new format as "more like a consultative body bent on working out problems through a free interchange of views than a mass meeting liable to be frightened by its very size into an attitude of hesitancy and reserve."

The town's other paper, the Brookline Townsman, found some humor in the new format, even having a cartoonist illustrate the meeting in its front page. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Brookline Townsman cartoon, March 25th, 1916. See full coverage in the Townsman and the Chronicle via the digitized newspapers from the Public Library of Brookline.

Read much more about the change in government in this 2009 blog post.


March 23, 2019 - First recreational marijuana shop in metro Boston
The NETA dispensary in Brookline Village became the 13th dispensary in Massachusetts -- and the first in metro Boston -- to sell recreational marijuana. Recreational sales had been legalized following a successful 2016 state ballot initiative.

The NETA store at the corner of Washington and Boylston Streets is located in a former bank building constructed in 1922 for the Brookline Savings Bank (now Brookline Bank). NETA, which had opened the state's first marijuana dispensary in Northampton, had initially taken over the bank space (in 2016) as a dispensary for medical marijuana.

The former bank building, with its dramatic dome, was designed by the Swiss-born architect Franz Joseph Untersee, a longtime resident of Brookline. Untersee also designed the bank's previous building at 366 Washington Street, now the Christian Community church. Other still-standing Untersee-designed buildings in Brookline include the Unified Arts Building at Brookline High School, the school of the St. Mary of the Assumption church, the St. Lawrence church and rectory on Boylston Street, a mixed commercial/residential building at the corner of Cypress and Boylston Streets, and several houses.

Interior of NETA's Brookline building (Photo courtesty of NETA)

March 12th - March 18th

March 18, 1919

March 13,1895 - Establishment of Brookline Education Society
March 18,1919 - Town Meeting votes against annexation
March 15,1921 - First four women take seats in Town Meeting
March 18,1941 - BK votes to use voting machines (a Massachusetts first)

March 13, 1895
Establishment of Brookline Education Society
The Brookline Education Society, an organization created "to bring the school and the home into closer sympathy," was formed in a meeting at the High Street home of Annie E. Crane. "Nothing could be more promising to the cause of education," reporting the organization in its first annual report, "than frequent mutual conferences between teachers and parents."

By November, the Society had more than 400 members and had established a lecture series on education that brought in speakers from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and other educational and civic institutions.

This article about Education Society's inaugural lecture series appeared in the Boston Globe on November 15, 1895

In 1915, the organization changed its name to the Brookline Civic Society, reflecting a focus on broader civic concerns than just education. The Civic Society disbanded in 1926.

March 18, 1919
Town Meeting votes against annexation
Boston had grown dramatically between the Civil War and World War I, annexing the neighboring towns of Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, Brighton, West Roxbury, and Hyde Park. (See the map above.) But Brookline resisted.

In 1873, Brighton (northwest of Brookline) and West Roxbury (southwest) voted to join the big city, as did Charlestown, following earlier votes by Roxbury (1868) and Dorchester (1870). The new annexations took effect in 1874. (Brookline lost its Charles River waterfront, given to Boston to connect it with the newly incorporated Brighton district.) But Brookline overwhelmingly rejected annexation, by a vote of 707 to 299. 

Pro-annexation forces in Brookline and in Boston continued to advocate for the town's incorporation into the bigger city. The last gasp came in 1919, seven years after Hyde Park became part of Boston. A bill introduced in the legislature by Boston Mayor Andrew Peters would annex Brookline and nine other communities. Town Meeting voted 198-1 to oppose the plan. Other targeted communities also objected and the bill was withdrawn a week later.

Map showing the annexations proposed under the Peters Bill. Boston Globe, January 10, 1919

March 15,1921
First four women take seats in Town Meeting
Brookline's Town Meeting met with women members for the first time following the first town election after women gained the right to vote. The women were Margaret Robinson, Sybil Holmes, Helen Whitington, and May Johnston.

Robinson was asked if a woman with five children could find time for politics and government.

"I certainly do," she replied [as reported in the Boston Globe]. "I know men with families as large as mine who find the time and don't neglect the families. Why can't women do it?" 

 

Margaret Robinson and her five children, as shown in the Boston Globe, March 14, 1921

Robinson, a resident of The Point neighborhood, continued to serve as a Town Meeting Member until her death in 1935. She also served for six years on the town's School Committee. Four years after her death, the new playground in the neighborhood, built on the site of the former car barn lot for the Boston Elevated Railway Company in the neighborhood, was named after her. 

March 18,1941
Brookline votes to use voting machines (a Massachusetts first)
Town Meeting approved the allocation of funds to purchase a first batch of voting machines for use in elections in the town. Brookline thus became the first municipality in Massachusetts to approve a move from paper to machine balloting.

This example of a 1940s voting machine was used to instruct Brookline voters how to use the new form of balloting. (Photo courtesy of Town Clerk's office)

Voting machines manufactured by the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation had been tested the year before, first in a Brookline High School election and later in one precinct in a town election. The decision by Town Meeting assured that the machines would be gradually rolled out townwide. 

This March 5, 1940 Boston Globe photo shows Louise Jacques of Thayer Place using a voting machine at the Pierce Primary School in an early trial of voting machines. Townwide use of the machines was approved a year later and gradually introduced in all precincts.

Demonstrations showing how to use the new machines were held in various places, beginning with Precinct 9 in South Brookline, as the new voting system was put in place.

Advertisement in the Brookline Citizen ahead of the March 1942 town election

March 5th - March 11th

March 9, 1914

March 7, 1842 - School Committee report on future of town schools
March 9, 1914 - 700-800 attend suffrage meeting at Town Hall
March 8, 1960 - Louise Castle first woman elected to Board of Selectmen
March 9, 1972 - Black BHS students call for change

March 7, 1842
School Committee report on future of town schools
Brookline's commitment to its public schools was evident early on. An 1847 report from the Massachusetts Board of Education -- compiled by its Secretary, Horace Mann -- showed the town spending more money per pupil on education than any other city or town in the Commonwealth in the 1845-46 school year.

Brookline, with 352 pupils between the ages of 4 and 16, spent $8.52 per pupil on education in the 1845-46 school year, more than any other city or town in Massachusetts

That commitment had no doubt been strengthened by a report from the town's school committee three years earlier. The report, submitted to Town Meeting on March 7, 1842, noted that 

none of us put too high an estimate upon a good education, or feel too much the importance of having our children furnished with such means for intellectual culture as the exigences of the age demand. The public schools in this town ought not to be inferior to those of any other town in the Commonwealth, and we ought not to be satisfied without the evidence that we are every year elevating their character and improving their condition.

 
Among the obstacles to quality education cited by the committee were the irregularity of attendance and turnover among teachers. In closing, the committee noted that they

would respectfully suggest to all our citisens the importance of giving still more attention to the great cause of education connected as it is with all that is dear in the weal of our common country.

March 9, 1914
700-800 attend suffrage meeting at Town Hall
Supporters and opponents of suffrage packed Brookline's Town Hall to hear a speech by U.K.-based activist Stanton Coit on "Women and the State." Coit was introduced by Gertrude B. Newell, vice president of Brookline's Equal Suffrage Association.

Coit was scathing in his criticism of upper class women and men who opposed an expansion of voting rights. "The people of Brookline and Back Bay," he said (as reported in the Boston Herald), "do not believe, so far as I can see or have been able to ascertain, in the vote for the poor people or for anything else that is not descended from their families."

Brookline's pro-suffrage activists did, in fact, include many upper class women (and men), though there were clear divides among the elite in the town. The local papers regularly carried both "Equal Suffrage Notes" and "Anti Suffrage Notes", usually on the same page. (The examples below appeared side-by-side on page 5 of the Brookline Townsman after the meeting.)

Brookline Townsman, March 14, 1914

Coit welcomed the opportunity to engage with anti-suffragists, commenting that indifference, rather than opposition, was the biggest obstacle to the suffragists' success. The "antis" declined, however, to participate in the question and answer period that followed the talk. Sarah White, their leader, told the Townsman that his [Coit's] "whole argument was so foolish that it was hardly worthwhile to ask him questions."

March 8, 1960
Louise Castle first woman elected to Board of Selectmen
Louise Castle upset the incumbent chair of the Board of Selectmen to become the first woman elected to the board in the 255-year history of the town. She was only the fourth woman to run for a position on the board.

Louise Castle monitoring election returns at her home in 1960. (Boston Globe photo by LeRoy Ryan)

Castle, who was 50-years old when elected, had been active in town affairs for more than a decade. She had been president of the League of Women Voters and had served on the Council for Planning and Renewal, the Committee on the Structure and Organization of Town Government, and the Community Relations Committee of the Community Council. 

Castle's successful campaign was managed by two men who went on to their own success in politics and government: future governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, a Democrat; and future lieutenant governor and U.S. cabinet officer Elliot Richardson, a Republican.

Castle served on the board for nine years. She died in 2002 at the age of 92. In 2007, women formed a majority on the Board of Selectmen for the first time. The board's name was finally changed to Select Board in 2017.

March 9, 1972
Black BHS students and parents call for change
Racial tensions at Brookline High School came to a head at a meeting at Town Hall where Black students and parents presented a list of 11 changes they said were necessary for Black students to be seen as full members of the school community. 

Page 1 article in the Brookline Chronicle Citizen, March 16, 1972

More than 200 students and parents, along with school and town officials, participated in the meeting, precipitated by threats against Black students near the school the previous day. Ophie A. Franklin, father of a Black student, told the officials that the incident was "only a symptom of the larger and continually escalating problems of harassment and oppression" that had been occurring since the METCO program brought increasing numbers of Black students to the school.

Among the changes called for were: appointment of a Black administrator and other staff at the school; formation of a committee of Black students, parents, and staff;  introduction of staff development programs on Black history; curriculum revisions to recognize minority cultures; and other changes to "create a positive atmosphere and environment suited to to the specific needs of the Black students and staff and for the benefit of the entire Brookline community." 

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.)