Westland Gate (also known as the Johnson Gates) is a pair of fountains that borders the

Back Bay Fens The Back Bay Fens, often called The Fens, is a parkland and urban wild in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. It was established in 1879. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to serve as a link in the Emerald Necklace park system, the Fens ...

at the end of Westland Avenue in

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

History

Westland Gate was designed by

Guy Lowell Guy Lowell (August 6, 1870 – February 4, 1927), was an American architect and landscape architect. Biography Born in Boston, Lowell was the son of Mary Walcott (Goodrich) and Edward Jackson Lowell, and a member of Boston's well-known Lowe ...

, architect of the

Boston's Museum of Fine Arts The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

, and was built in 1902 and erected in 1905. The decorative bronze was produced by the Hecla Iron Works. The fountains were originally named the Johnson Memorial Fountain after a wealthy Bostonian, Jesse Johnson, whose widow,

Ellen Cheney Johnson Ellen Cheney Johnson (December 20, 1829 – June 28, 1899) was an American prison reformer. She founded the New England Women's Auxiliary Association to the United States Sanitary Commission, worked with homeless and vagrant women after the Civil ...

, donated money to erect them. The fountains consist of two large pillars caped with bronze frieze panels made of

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies undergro ...

and

Tennessee marble Tennessee marble is a type of crystalline limestone found only in East Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. Long esteemed by architects and builders for its pinkish-gray color and the ease with which it is polished, this stone has been ...

flanking the street with four bronze lions heads near their bases that originally spouted water.

Restoration efforts

The fountains were first restored in 1980. It appears that the 1980 restoration involved either sandblasting or honing to address inconsistencies in the stone, as well as application of a protective treatment (to resist graffiti) using Browne Fund money. The gates were rededicated in a ceremony that followed this restoration in August 1980. The 1990 restoration involved cleaning of the marble, repointing and repair of cracks in the stone, application of protective treatment, and cleaning and repair of the metal components (decorative frieze, lion heads, and commemorative plaque). A new lighting system was proposed for the gates at this time, but seems never to have been installed. On May 4, 2008, a spokesperson for the Boston Parks Department stated that the "fountains are on a list of projects to be repaired". However, over a year later, the fountains still remain in poor condition and are non-functional. A new restoration effort spearheaded by the Fenway Civic Association (FCA) began in 2012, securing funding for conservation assessments, performed in October 2013. In 2013 the bronze elements were cleaned, repatinated, and treated with wax sealant. In 2014 Preservation Massachusetts designated the Johnson Memorial Gates as one of the Massachusetts Most Endangered Historic Resources. In 2015, grant funding from the Browne Fund restored the two horse troughs and provided weather tight covers on Hemenway Street. For fiscal year 2017 the city of Boston approved $820,000 for Johnson Memorial Gates monument conservation, accessibility upgrades, and landscape rehabilitation. These funds were complemented by a $67,985 grant administered by the Boston Planning and Development Agency in 2017. For fiscal year 2019, the city of Boston approved the increase of project funds for the monument and surrounding parkland to $1,002,000; these funds were complemented by a Community Preservation Act pilot grant awarded to FCA in June, 2018.

References

External links

{{coord, 42.3440, N, 71.0900, W, type:landmark_scale:500, display=title Buildings and structures in Boston Emerald Necklace Fountains in Massachusetts