OTIS HOUSE
Courtesy of Historic New England
141 Cambridge Street
Boston, MA 02114
Phone: 617-994-5920
www.historicnewengland.org/historic-properties/homes/otis-house
This is the first of three Boston houses built for Harrison Gray Otis (1765–1884). All three are red-brick mansions designed by Bostonian Charles Bulfinch (1763–1844) in the Federal style. The second (built in 1802) stands at 85 Mount Vernon Street, the third (1806) at 45 Beacon Street (now the headquarters for the American Meteorological Society). Of the three, only the Otis House is a museum.
Harrison Gray Otis was a notable figure in Boston. An attorney, congressman, and Boston mayor, he was also one of the Mount Vernon Proprietors who developed a large portion of Beacon Hill at the start of the nineteenth century. Portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Otis by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) hang in the house.
After Otis moved on to house number two, this house had a series of owners, and it was used successively as a private home, a clinic, apartments, a “genteel” boarding house, and by 1868, a rooming house. The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) bought the house in 1916 and restored it. In 1925 Cambridge Street was widened, threatening Otis House. To avoid demolition the house was moved back forty feet and is now attached to two pre-existing row houses on Lynde Street.
This is a three-story mansion, five bays across. Above the front door is a Palladian window, and above that there is a lunette window. The interior has been thoughtfully restored in the style of Robert Adam (1728–1792), an English architect who favored and promoted neoclassical design and furniture.