Commonwealth Avenue (Boston)
Commonwealth Avenue (often abbreviated "Comm Ave" by locals) is a street in the city of Boston, Massachusetts beginning at the western edge of the Public Garden, and continuing west through the Back Bay, Kenmore Square, and the suburbs of Brighton and Chestnut Hill. It continues as part of Route 30 through Newton until it crosses the Charles River at the Weston border.
Description
Designed in the Parisian tradition and sometimes called "Boston's Grand Boulevard", the first section of Commonwealth Ave. is a parkway divided at center by a large median. This greenway, called Commonwealth Avenue Mall, is adorned with statuary, forms the narrowest "link" in the Emerald Necklace, and connects the Public Garden to the Fens.
Where Commonwealth Ave reaches Kenmore Square, the MBTA Green Line "B" Branch rises above ground and dominates the center of the roadway through the campus of Boston University and the neighborhoods of Allston and Brighton to the city of Newton near Boston College. The section in Newton is made up of two roadways separated by a grassy median lined with trees. The south side of the roadway contains the main, two-lane east-west roadway, with a one-way, westbound "carriage road" providing local access on the north side of the median.
History
The Commonwealth Avenue Mall was designed by Arthur Delevan Gilman.[1] Frederick Law Olmsted designed the Newton portion of Commonwealth Ave and included the parkway as part of the Emerald Necklace park sytem. The first statue on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall was erected in 1865 at Arlington Street.[2]
The Newton end of the roadway was constructed in 1895 with a line of the Middlesex and Boston Street Railway in the median. Train service was cut back to its present terminus at the Boston border in 1930 and buses last ran on Commonwealth Avenue in 1976. An amusement park and ballroom known as Norumbega Park was built at the end of the line on the Charles River in 1897 to increase streetcar patronage.[3]
Several boathouses were built along the "Lakes District" of the Charles, stretching several miles from a dam in Waltham. As many as 5,000 canoes would crowd the waters on weekend days in the summer. As the auto became more prevalent in the 1950s, the park closed and the ballroom vanished in 1964, although the tracks and foundations of some of the rides can still be found north of the road.[4]
"Charles River Canoe and Kayak" began offering canoe rentals in the old police boathouse in the early 1970s, reincarnating a tradition of boating on the river. A Marriott hotel now occupies most of the site of the ballroom.
Statuary
Starting at the Public Garden, the following statues can be seen on the mall:
- Alexander Hamilton, co-author of the Federalist Papers.
- John Glover, Revolutionary War soldier.
- Patrick Andrew Collins, former mayor of Boston.
- The Vendome Memorial, which honors nine firefighters killed in a fire at the adjacent Hotel Vendome in 1972.
- William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist and journalist.
- Samuel Eliot Morison, naval historian and writer.
- The Boston Women's Memorial, with statues of Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone, and Phillis Wheatley.
- Domingo Sarmiento, former president of Argentina.
- Leif Ericson, first European discoverer of Newfoundland.
External links
- Boston Univerity's Commonwealth Avenue Improvement Project
- Commonwealth Avenue Case Study
- Commonwealth Avenue in 1903 Showing 217 Commonwealth Avenue (Algonquin Club of Boston) and surroundings.
