✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦✧✦ The Financial Misadventures of Charles Bulfinch jay wickersham HIS is a story about money: how Boston architect Charles T Bulfinch (1763–1844) went bankrupt; how his leading client, Harrison Gray Otis (1765–1848), grew wealthy; and how the architect felt about the two men’s relative failures and suc- cesses. It is also a story that dramatizes the difficulties of archi- tectural practice in the early years of the United States, showing how the choice of career and the pursuit of status, riches, and influence could make or break a man. The relationship between Bulfinch and Otis is one of the foundation myths of American architecture, for rarely have two men collaborated to shape a city as Bulfinch and Otis shaped Boston between 1794 and 1817. Bulfinch, in his dual roles as first selectman and police superintendent, headed Boston’s municipal government and effectively served as its first town planner; acting as an architect, he designed most of the town’s major public and private buildings. Otis, a successful lawyer and politician, was a pioneer of large-scale real estate develop- ment; he built his fortune through the development of Beacon Hill, which would become Boston’s most expensive residen- tial enclave. Bulfinch planned and designed all of Otis’s major projects, including his three homes, each one larger than the last. Bulfinch’s architectural vision gave outward form to Otis’s ambitions, and Otis’s projects gave Bulfinch a canvas on which he could express his artistic talents. Yet Bulfinch and Otis were not close. Otis was a prolific correspondent, but there are almost no letters extant between the two men. Otis was famous for the parties he gave at his Bulfinch-designed homes, but there is no evidence that the The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIII, no. 3 (September 2010). C 2010 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 413 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00023 by guest on 30 September 2021 414 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY architect was ever among his guests. Although they worked together for years, financial dependency and debt finally drove the two men apart. Otis and Bulfinch tracked each other’s lives like a pair of shadow-boxers, in a series of mirroring moves and countermoves. Bulfinch was haunted by Otis’s success. Early in his career, Bulfinch lost his family’s fortune in the Tontine Crescent, a real estate development that he had conceived, designed, and financed. Although conventional accounts assert that this failure transformed Bulfinch from a gentleman amateur into a profes- 1 sional architect, sources indicate that he was never able to support himself as an architect while he was in Boston. In fact, again trying to emulate Otis, Bulfinch made a second foray into real estate development—with equally disastrous results. His memoir narrates his rising hopes, his dashed expectations, and the continuing shame he experienced in the town of his birth. Where Bulfinch failed by trying to copy Otis’s success, Otis succeeded by learning from Bulfinch’s failure. Otis’s artistic tastes were conventional; he saw architecture and real estate primarily as a way of making money to finance his political career. He presided over the settling of Bulfinch’s Tontine Crescent debts—including the surrender of his 20 percent in- terest in Otis’s own Beacon Hill project. Using Bulfinch as his counter-example, Otis successfully structured Beacon Hill and his subsequent developments to minimize business risks and generate long-term profits. Bulfinch and Otis first became associated in business in 1794, when both men were in their early thirties, but they had known each other all their lives (see figs. 1 and 2). They had grown up across the street from each other in Bowdoin Square, a residential enclave on the north slope of Beacon Hill. Both had well-educated fathers, of relatively modest means, who had married into Boston’s colonial gentry. The sons had grad- uated from Harvard two years apart—Bulfinch in 1781,Otisin 1 Harold and James Kirker, Bulfinch’s Boston, 1787–1817 (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1964), p. 76. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00023 by guest on 30 September 2021 BULFINCH’S FINANCIAL MISADVENTURES 415 1783. Yet despite these parallels, their family backgrounds and temperaments had formed the two men quite differently. Bulfinch had absorbed an interest in architecture during his youth. His father, a doctor who had trained in Edinburgh and Paris, had married Susan Apthorp, the daughter of the richest merchant in colonial Massachusetts. The Apthorps were pa- trons of two significant Neo-Palladian churches, King’s Chapel in Boston and Christ Church in Cambridge, both designed by Peter Harrison, a gentleman-architect from Newport, Rhode 2 Island. As a child, Bulfinch pored over English and French editions of Vitruvius and Palladio in the family libraries, and he 3 doodled classical columns in the margins of his schoolbooks. In 1785 Bulfinch’s parents used a bequest from an Apthorp uncle to send their son to Europe. Bulfinch was abroad for a year and a half, visiting London, Paris (where he met Jefferson, then the United States minister to France), south- ern France, and Italy, reaching as far south as Rome. From the trip he received a firsthand knowledge of European ar- chitecture unmatched by any American of his generation. But the Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque buildings that Bulfinch saw in France and Italy would have far less influence upon his 4 work than what he saw in England. Particularly in London, Bulfinch observed that a mercantile society demanded new 2 Carl Bridenbaugh, Peter Harrison: First American Architect (Chapel Hill: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 1949), pp. 54–63, 112–17. See also William H. Pierson Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects: The Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 142–50. 3 Harold Kirker, The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1969), pp. 1–4. 4 Pierson, American Buildings and Their Architects, pp. 246–61; Kirker, Architec- ture of Bulfinch, pp. 1–12 (intro.) and subsequent descriptions of individual buildings. A recent article argues that Bulfinch’s early work was more heavily influenced by con- temporary French neoclassical architecture, such as the recently completed church of Saint-Sulpice, than has been previously acknowledged (Thomas E. Conroy, “‘Charmed with the French’: Reassessing the Early Career of Charles Bulfinch, Architect,” Histor- ical Journal of Massachusetts 34:2 [Summer 2006]: 104–31). However, Kirker estab- lishes English precedents for these works also (Architecture of Bulfinch, pp. 11–12). Bulfinch continued to order books on architectural subjects from England throughout his career, a fact that further reinforces evidence of English influence; see James F. O’Gorman, “Bulfinch, Buildings, and Books,” in American Architects and Their Books to 1848, ed. Kenneth Hafertepe and O’Gorman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), pp. 91–107. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00023 by guest on 30 September 2021 416 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Fig. 1.—Mather Brown, portrait of Charles Bulfinch, 1786, oil on canvas, 76.5 × 64 cm (30 1/8 × 25 3/16 in.). Image courtesy of Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Portrait Collection, gift of Francis V. Bulfinch, 1933,H428. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00023 by guest on 30 September 2021 BULFINCH’S FINANCIAL MISADVENTURES 417 Fig. 2.—Gilbert Stuart, portrait of Harrison Gray Otis, 1809. Image courtesy of Historic New England. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00023 by guest on 30 September 2021 418 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY types of buildings, built quickly and sparely: warehouses, banks, courts, hospitals, and houses for the middle class. The emer- gent architecture, of taut brick planes and flattened ornament, produced subtle effects by means of the proportion and ar- 5 rangement of simple rectangular volumes and voids. Looking back on his European trip from retirement, Bulfinch wrote in his memoir: This tour was highly gratifying. ...Iwasdelightedinobservingthe numerous objects & beauties of nature & art that I met with on all sides, particularly the wonders of Architecture, & the kindred arts of painting and sculpture . but these pursuits did not confirm me in any business habits of buying & selling, on the contrary they had a 6 powerful adverse influence on my whole after life. Throughout his life, despite the pleasure it afforded him, ar- chitecture would be a source of internal reproach and pain to Bulfinch. Bulfinch began designing houses and churches soon after he returned from Europe. For several years he practiced as an unpaid gentleman-amateur architect. As he said, he “passed a season of leisure, pursuing no business, but giving gratuitous ad- vice in Architecture, and looking forward to an establishment in 7 life.” He lived off family investments, including the shares he and his father each bought in the voyages of the ship Columbia, which opened up the Pacific Northwest fur trade. The quality of his designs rapidly improved, from crude early work that relied on colonial models to more sophisticated reworkings of the Neo-Palladian and neoclassical buildings he had seen in London. In 1793 Bulfinch received commissions for two major 5 On eighteenth-century London architecture generally, see John Summerson, Geor- gian London (rev. ed., London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1988). 6 Charles Bulfinch, memoir, c. 1835, Bulfinch Family Papers, Ms. N-1960,box2, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston. Long excerpts from the memoir are quoted in Ellen Susan Bulfinch, The Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch (1896;repr. New York: Burt Franklin, 1973); this passage appears at p.