[walk down Thomas Street to the corner with Brewer]
8 Brewer Street/25 Thomas Street
This house is a very early Jamaica Plain dwelling, some sources date it to 1716. It was known as the “old Stephen Brewer house”. At one point it was situated on Centre Street and served as a tavern along the stagecoach route to Providence. It’s a Georgian house, commonly known in New England as a saltbox. It is a symmetrical building with 5 windows. If you are viewing the 25 Thomas Street side, the porch was a later addition.
From this vantage point at the corner of Brewer and Thomas Street there is a good view of the development of this area in the nineteenth century. As the lines of transportation developed, this progress enabled easy commuting to downtown Boston. Middle class residents began to build more modest houses in the area (as opposed to the summer estates that had previously been built). These were suburban houses that included many of the styles popular in the Victorian era. We can see three different styles right here.
5 Brewer Street
This house is in the Italianate style. It has a typical Victorian house feature, the mansard roof. This type of roof configuration was created by François Mansart (a French architect) in the 1600s. It cleverly created another floor to the house inside the attic space providing more dwelling space but avoiding taxes (which were calculated by the number of stories in your dwelling). Italianate houses feature brackets under the cornices – this one has lovely carved ones at both the roofline and on the porch. Itanaliate houses are symmetrical and square (in an approximation of the ideal of an Italian villa). Italianate was the most popular style of building in the 1860s.
7 Brewer Street
Right next door we have an example of another house style popular in Victorian Boston. This house is in the Queen Anne style, which had superseded Italianate in popularity by the 1880s. This house was built in 1892. Queen Anne houses are asymmetrical and therefore quirky. This house has a bay on the right hand side and a rounded tower with a conical roof (“candle snuffer”) on the left. Notice the varying shingle styles and the lovely stained glass sidelights by the door. Queen Anne was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and its practitioners advocated a return to hand-crafted elements. Queen Anne houses bring in all sorts of elements and combine them in unusual ways, making them very eclectic.
9 Brewer Street
The final house in our trio is a Carpenter Gothic house that dates from 1843. This house is a country cottage, which was the popular style early on in the Victorian era. Its outstanding feature are the bargeboards (“gingerbread”) under the eaves of the steeply pitched roof. Andrew Jackson Downing and Alexander Jackson Davis created architectural handbooks and builder’s manuals which spread this Gothic Revival style of cottage across the country.