The Bowdoin School

Walking through Beacon Hill, it is easy to concentrate on the neighborhood’s famous Federal-era houses. But scattered among them are buildings that tell a different part of Boston’s story. This substantial brick building on Myrtle Street was once the Bowdoin School, a public school whose history reaches back well before the building we see today.

There had been a Bowdoin School on this site for decades. An earlier school building stood here by the mid-nineteenth century, and an 1865 photograph survives showing that predecessor facing Myrtle Street. The school was part of Boston’s expanding public education system as the city’s population grew and changed.

The present building was constructed in 1896 and designed by Edmund March Wheelwright, one of Boston’s important municipal architects. Wheelwright believed school architecture should respond to its surroundings, and here he used a Federal Revival design that echoed the historic architecture of Beacon Hill. Behind the handsome brick-and-limestone façade were generously sized classrooms, a library on the second floor and an assembly room on the upper level.

There is another remarkable connection hidden beneath the building. The school stood on the site of the birthplace of Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator and one of the country’s most outspoken nineteenth-century opponents of slavery. When the new school was constructed, the principal’s office was reportedly positioned approximately where the room in which Sumner had been born once stood. 

The Bowdoin School served as an elementary school until 1936. After the children left, the Boston School Committee continued using the building for administrative offices, giving the old school another life within the city’s educational system.

Its next transformation came during the 1970s. When the city no longer needed the building, there was concern that this valuable Beacon Hill property would be converted into luxury housing. The Beacon Hill Civic Association instead advocated for housing that would allow elderly and lower-income residents to remain in the neighborhood. The former school was ultimately converted into 35 apartments, opening in 1977.

Today, looking at the tall windows and formal entrance, it is still quite easy to imagine this as a neighborhood school. Yet the children and classrooms are long gone. What survived was the building itself, adapted once again to meet the needs of the community around it.