The Architectural Legacy of the Harborside Inn Building

The historic Harborside Inn building, at 185 State Street, was designed in 1858 by Gridley James Fox Bryant (1816-1899).

Downtown Boston from 1850's to 1870's was a Bryant-built city. His warehouses, wharf buildings, and store blocks - often erected row on row and street after street - were all of granite, in the established tradition of Boston's superior commercial architecture, and all were distinguished by the powerful, functional simplicity of their handsomely proportioned masonry facades. These strong granite blocks were as omnipresent and characteristic of their age as the curtain-wall skyscraper is today.

State Street, Commercial Street, Milk Street, Summer Street, Pearl Street, Devonshire Street, Winthrop Square, Franklin Street, as well as the city wharves, had imposing Bryant edifices. A huge fire in 1872 destroyed 152 Bryant buildings, but he was commissioned to rebuild 111 of them. His buildings bore a stamp of such solid authority - - Henry Russell states in his Guide to Boston Architecture, Brant's ranges of granite warehouses "are hardly equaled anywhere in the world" - that the rediscovery of his buildings and the re-evaluation of his reputation establishes him in the front rank of America's commercial architects.

Bryant's continuation of the Boston style of massive masonry construction is no accident; granite was part of his heritage and training. He was the son of Gridley Bryant, owner of Granite Railway Company and the Quincy granite quarries opened by Solomon Willard for the building of the Bunker Hill monument, and he received his professional education in the office of Alexander Paris, architect of Quincy Market and many of the city's early granite commercial buildings. The years of 1856 to 1860, however, established him as the city's leading commercial designer.

Even more important than the role of the individual architect in determining the nature of this admiral commercial construction were the material and method of construction. Talbot Hamlin has attributed "the peculiar simple effectiveness of the Boston commercial work to the use - increasingly direct-of granite." Before 1800, granite had been employed for comparatively few buildings, in small pieces obtained from local boulders. When Chelmsford quarries were started, they offered the first generous supply of the material that was eventually to revolutionize Boston architecture. It was only with the opening of Quincy quarries however, by Soloman Willard, in 1826, and his development of mechanical hoists and sponsorship of a pioneer railroad, that granite became available on a large scale and in sizable slabs - due to Willard's dedicated persistence in seeking a material of suitable monumentality for the Bunker Hill obelisk, and in arranging for purchase and transportation of the stone.

As the taste for monumentality spread - due primarily to the popularity of the massive Greek Revival style but partly to the engineering innovations that made it possible to cut and move bigger and bigger blocks of stone - it became the accepted custom to build with as few and as large pieces as possible, instead of laying up courses of small-stone ashlar construction. The result was a new kind of design based on the functional use of monolithic structural elements: piers, beams, and lintels precut at the quarry in single pieces and assembled at the site. This dramatic, unconventional method of constructing "skeleton" facades had its greatest acceptance from the mid 1820's - 40's, and produced a characteristically handsome architecture. In the late 1850's and 60's there was a return to ashlar construction, particularly in the work of Bryant, but the lesson of unadorned mass had been well learned, and even these buildings are notable for an equally effective insistence on rich surface quality and decorative restraint. Today, in the 21st century, it is still evident that this granite commercial construction is architecture of simplicity, suitability and strength.