The Crystal Lake and Pleasant Street Historic District encompasses a streetcar suburban residential subdivision developed between 1860 and 1895 in
Newton, Massachusetts
Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is approximately west of downtown Boston. Newton resembles a patchwork of thirteen villages, without a city center. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of Ne ...
. The district roughly bounded by the
Sudbury Aqueduct
The Sudbury Aqueduct is an aqueduct in Massachusetts. It runs for from Farm Pond at Waverly Street in Framingham to Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Boston’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood. A later built extension main runs from the Farm Pond gateho ...
, Pleasant Avenue, Lake Avenue, and Crystal Street and Webster Court. The subdivision was laid out in the 1850s after the Boston and Charles Railroad line (now serving the
MBTA
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (abbreviated MBTA and known colloquially as "the T") is the public agency responsible for operating most public transportation services in Greater Boston, Massachusetts. The MBTA transit network in ...
Green Line D branch
The Green Line D branch (also referred to as the Highland branch or Riverside Line) is a light rail line in Newton, Brookline, and Boston, Massachusetts, operating as part of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line. The ...
) was extended through Newton from
Brookline
Brookline may refer to:
Places in the United States
* Brookline, Massachusetts, a town near Boston
* Brookline, Missouri
* Brookline, New Hampshire
* Brookline (Pittsburgh), a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
* Brookline, Vermont
See ...
.
The district was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...
in 1986.
Description
The oldest houses in the district are on Pleasant Street, and date to the 1850s. The street has a series of well-preserved
Carpenter Gothic
Carpenter Gothic, also sometimes called Carpenter's Gothic or Rural Gothic, is a North American architectural style-designation for an application of Gothic Revival architectural detailing and picturesque massing applied to wooden structures ...
houses, with fanciful scroll-sawn vergeboard decoration in the gables, dormers, and porches. Another of the older houses in the district is the c. 1858 Bracketed Italianate house at 21 Lake Avenue. The only Second Empire house in the district is a modest cottage at 112 Pleasant Street.
[
Later styles are also well represented in the 23 properties in the district. 97 Lake Avenue is a particularly well-sited Queen Anne Victorian, with flared eaves, conical tower, and elaborate porte cochere. Stick styling is represented in the house at 908 Beacon Street, and an excellent Colonial Revival home is found at 38 Lake Avenue. This house was built c. 1893 for David Andrews, president of the ]Boston Bridge Works
Boston Bridge Works (also known as Boston Bridge Works, Inc.) was an engineering firm, building bridges throughout New England, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Operating out of Boston, they specialized in the drafting ...
Company, and has excellent views of Crystal Lake.[
]
History
Roswell Turner, a local businessman, began amassing land in this area in the 1840s. Turner was responsible for extending Beacon Street to the area, and laid out Lake Avenue. Many of his lots in his subdivisions were later developed by Charles Davis, a Boston-based piano merchant and local real estate developer. Crystal Lake was at the time also developed as a recreational resource.[
]
See also
*
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Crystal Lake And Pleasant Street Historic District
National Register of Historic Places in Newton, Massachusetts
Historic districts in Middlesex County, Massachusetts
Colonial Revival architecture in Massachusetts
Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts