Tad Stahl in front of his Hancock home, a rare 1875 French Second Empire Egyptian Revival.
By Sandra Miller
The 57 Hancock Street home of local activist Frederick “Tad” Stahl is an 1875 French Second Empire Egyptian Revival home, with papyrus around the entryway, and a unique red sandstone exterior.
When he and his wife, Jane, were living on Beacon Street in the early 1960s, they started looking around for a new home, something historic, something special. They found just the home on Hancock Street, which needed new electrical wiring, heating, and plumbing. But he saw the bones of the building, and, being an architect who specializes in historical renovations, he knew he could restore the home to its former glory.
The house, zoned as a three family, was actually a hotel at one point for visitors to the nearby statehouse. But the north slope area had devolved a bit. Most of the buildings in the area were rundown rooming houses, during a time when the old Scollay Square was being demolished nearby. When they went looking for a loan, they had trouble finding interested banks.
“No one would look at this project,” Stahl recalled. “This area was totally redlined.”
But then he talked to friends, and found an interested banker in Salem. “He had been through the Depression,” said Stahl. “He saw the long view of the neighborhood.”
They were able to buy the home for $34,000, a bargain where friends on Pinckney Street were paying $50,000 and on Chestnut Street $100,000. Hee thought he’d be able to tear down some of the walls, but they were bearing walls. He fixed up the fourth floor and a basement apartment, and was able to install storm windows. But otherwise, he said, “The house wins.”
He was determined to make it not only livable, but also to honor the work of architect William Washburn, a notable designer of area hotels and theaters, who in his retiring years decided to build this home as a sort of vanity project, incorporating lots of the elements he fancied. “He pulled out all of the stops,” said Stahl. “This is the only Washburn house we know of.”
While he renovated his own home, he also came to the aid of other historic area homes under siege, offering help in preservation planning and creating Historic District safeguards.
He joined the Beacon Hill Civic Association’s Board of Directors, serving from 1963 – 1973, and in 1965, founded and chaired the BHCA Planning Committee. At the start, that was when his first major battle arrived, a proposal to demolish the Richard Upjohn Double House on Mount Vernon Street, and the adjoining Ralph Adams Cram Chapel on Chestnut Street. The Historic District Commission had never given permission to demolish a sound structure, and many argued that the proposed building was an out-of-scale luxury residence that wouldn’t fit in. “The building being proposed was simply awful, a Queen’s Boulevard Georgian Revival,” he said. “It was developers saying, ‘I don’t like this building, tear it down.’”
As the opposition’s architectural adviser he drew up a case that went before the architectural commission, and the buildings were saved. “It became a battleground for friends and neighbors, who’d never talk to each other again,” he said.
The property ended up being renovated into apartments, and led to other properties being held up to feasibility studies, in order to weigh the value of preserving historic properties versus tearing down buildings that no longer were viable.
“This was not a case of ‘old ladies with an emotional attachment,’ this was in fact a sustainable argument. We had to prove that these buildings still had life left in it.”
The neighborhood he took a chance on still had life in it, too. Stahl set down deep roots, raising three children along the once-scruffy northern slope of Beacon Hill, and he watched the area thrive over the years, partly due to his work as Beacon Hill Civic Association president and area preservationist.
In the 1960s, Stahl was beginning the most energetic period of his life. Not only was he trying to save the historic nature of Beacon Hill, he also decided to rescue downtown Boston.
Stahl was a preservationist with F.A. Stahl & Associates, which he launched in 1961 as a young man.
He was a graduate of Dartmouth College, and received his master’s in architecture in 1955 at MIT, followed by a fellowship in London with a firm rebuilding its post-war schools and housing. Inspired by architecture by LeCorbusier and Palladio, he decided to head out on his own, to create something important. He started out with bank renovations, a medical office building, and various interiors and renovations. But he had an idea.
He knew there was talk about moving downtown Boston to the up and coming Prudential Center district. The conventional wisdom during the 1960s was that the financial district was defunct. No major buildings had been built for 40 years. But he knew that a city’s financial center never really moves. And the city was also balking at Prudential Center developers who were asking for special tax breaks.
“We thought that there was a real opportunity in Boston that no one saw,” said Stahl. “The Financial District wasn’t dead. This was the time to do it.”
Ironically, however, the only property companies he could find were from London, who like Stahl understood what post-war financial centers were facing. Most Boston bankers were tying their capital to oil, but then Stahl found a kindred spirit in Mayor John Collins, who also wished to revitalize downtown Boston. Eventually, Stahl and his team was able to convince State Street Bank to invest in a tower, which Stahl had envisioned would take on a mathematical tone similar to Stahl’s hero, Palladio.
Stahl and his team had never designed a skyscraper before, and studied New York’s RCA building, among other structures. Everyone argued over dimensions, lobbies, floor height. The bank insisted on steel on concrete. The designers got ahold of an MIT computer to do an analysis on a high-rise steel building. Stahl argued for efficient, leasable space.
“In order to satisfy the bank, we were cranking out concepts one after another, getting nowhere,” he recalled. “It became a beauty contest, which is the worst possible thing for real architecture.”
Dozens of meetings and endless hours of sketches later, he was able to present the bank with an acceptable design, and created the State Street Bank Building, also known as 225 Franklin Street, at 477 feet with 33 floors, completed in 1966.
“It wasn’t a groundbreaking event for intellectual progress,” as Stahl put it. “The current design is a much more conventional design in its inner organization. It’s elegant in the mathematical sense.”
Nevertheless, he was pleased. Today it’s tied with 33 Arch Street as the 19th-tallest building in Boston. The building gained its name from the prominent "State Street Bank" lettering present at the top of the building for many years, although the sign has since been taken down.
In 1966, he also approached the Boston Redevelopment Authority to propose a study of the Fanueil Hall Market District, as part of the approved Waterfront Redevelopment Plan. The study would restore the building, and create a public-private funding strategy to implement the program. Stahl’s recommendations were presented to Mayor Kevin White in 1968, a $2 million grant was secured, and the Quincy Market project was launched, with Stahl hired as the architects in 1973.
Back on Beacon Hill, he helped find a place for the Hill House at 74 Joy St., and converted many nonresidential buildings such as the Bowdoin School building into an affordable-housing development.
“A lot of what we did was fight some really terrible ideas,” he said. Like the Massachusetts General Hospital plan for a garage on Cambridge Street. “We as a committee could see Cambridge Street destroyed,” he said. “I went on attack.”
They were able to push the garage back, formed the Cambridge Street Community Development Corporation, with a member on MGH’s board of directors.
Then Stahl went to battle against Suffolk University’s expansion plans, including a parking lot at the end of Hancock Street. “It was vicious,” recalled Stahl. “We went to the state Supreme Court. It took years.”
The planning committee also defeated plans for an Inner Belt Highway, The Leverett Circle High Bridge, and the original Park Plaza Redevelopment Plan.
After 10 years on the committee, he had to pull back to focus more on family as well as work.
Stahl helped renovate the Park Street Church; the Parkman House; the Hotel Vendome before and after its fire; the Old South Meeting House; served on the Back Bay Task Force to examine a Commonwealth Avenue high rise’s effect on the community; renovated numerous libraries around New England; and worked on hundreds of other buildings. His business was absorbed in 1999 by Burt Hill and Associates, where he’s now an executive architect. He is the author of “A Guide to the Maintenance, Repair and Alteration of Historic Buildings,” and a number of papers on related subjects.
Recently he was lured back to the BHCA to work on the impact that Suffolk’s freshman dorm project would have on the neighborhood, and today, he is doing extensive research with co-chair Ania Camargo for the BHCA’s cochair of the BHCA’s Planning and Research Committee’s very ambitious project: looking at the future of development around Beacon Hill.
It’s a project that had been talked about for years, but with new developments proposed by MGH, Suffolk, and others, the committee knew that in order to preserve the special neighborhood that is Beacon Hill, it needs to look at what’s going on around the neighborhood as well. This committee began to look at the hill’s demographic data and task planning documents from area residential associations.
“The central idea is to pull together some written documentation about what the neighborhood would be like in 10-20 years, and what Beacon Hill residents can do to improve life here during that time period,” said BHCA chair John Achatz.
If the residents don’t have a game plan, then they will be in danger of not getting their needs met, said Achatz.
So the committee is collecting data on the area, holding public meetings to assemble ideas, and looking into the need for another area public school.
Stahl is still concerned with making sure Beacon Hill is protected against the toll that can be taken by properties managed by absentee landlords and lived in by rowdy students, and by a growing Suffolk. It’s not all bad news about Suffolk, either. “I think that the building that they are proposing for 20 Somerset St. has the makings of a really fine building,” said Stahl.
But he’s also comfortable with his watchdog role.
“My biggest fear in the short term is just about reaching a tipping point with students in small units, which tends to make life impossible for many reasons. We want to keep the area accessible to families and elderly people, not the economically rich, to keep this a diverse community.”
And the neighborhood couldn’t have a more perfect advocate in its corner.
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