I took an architecture walk in the neighborhood this afternoon, instead of walking around the Pond. Jamaica Plain has a lot of Victorian-era architecture, which I love to look at.
This house is on a little cul-de-sac off Greenough Avenue. The blue color is relatively new. It is one of many 1880s houses in that immediate area. It may have been designed by the architect William Ralph Emerson, who was a nephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson. As I've learned on walks with the Jamaica Plain Historical Society, he often used the stylized pine tree motif in the gable as his mark. Some of the houses on Greenough Avenue are definitely his; I'm not sure about this one.
I have a slight history with this house as I once spent a night here before I moved into Boston. One of our graduate students at MassArt rented a room here, and she let me stay over in order to attend an early morning workshop the next day. She introduced me to the neighborhood, which I moved into a few months later, and I'm still here over thirty years later.
Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood of Boston, and yet it has many neighborhoods itself. We live in Pondside, which as the name implies is near the Pond. This house is on Sumner Hill, which has a concentration of large Victorian-era houses, many by some of the best architects then practicing in Boston. There are many other neighborhoods within JP, and I've been on the Historical Society walks around most of them.
