The Third Harrison Gray Otis House

When I came across this house at 45 Beacon Street, I recognized the Otis name because I had already visited the Harrison Gray Otis House near Massachusetts General Hospital. What I didn’t realize was that the Cambridge Street house was only the beginning of the family’s story. Harrison Gray Otis eventually built three Boston houses, all designed by his friend and fellow real-estate investor Charles Bulfinch.

The first, at 141 Cambridge Street, was completed in 1796. Otis, his wife Sally and their growing family lived there only until 1800. They then moved to a larger Bulfinch-designed house at 85 Mount Vernon Street on the newly developing south slope of Beacon Hill. That house lasted only a few years as their home. In 1806, Otis moved again to this much larger house at 45 Beacon Street.

This would be his final house. Otis remained at 45 Beacon Street until his death in 1848, more than forty years later. Sally lived there with him until her death in 1836. So unlike the first two Otis houses, which represent relatively brief stages in the family’s rise, this was truly their long-term family home. 

The location was significant. Otis was one of the Mount Vernon Proprietors, a group of investors that purchased approximately 18½ acres of John Singleton Copley’s former land on the south slope of Beacon Hill in 1795. The group helped transform what had been largely open land into one of Boston’s most prestigious residential neighborhoods. Otis wasn’t simply moving into fashionable Beacon Hill. He had helped create it.

When the house was built, it looked considerably different from the tightly packed Beacon Hill streetscape we know today. It was originally a freestanding mansion, with gardens and its own carriage facilities, facing Boston Common.

The house also reflected how far Otis had risen. He was a successful lawyer, businessman, real-estate developer and prominent Federalist politician. He served in both houses of the Massachusetts legislature, the U.S. House and U.S. Senate and eventually became Boston’s third mayor. His three increasingly substantial houses provide an architectural record of that rise.

The building itself is one of Bulfinch’s important surviving Federal-period residences. It is four stories high and five bays wide, with the symmetrical proportions’ characteristic of the Federal style. The elegant entrance with paired Ionic columns that we see in the photograph emphasizes the center of the facade.

After Otis died in 1848, the house passed through three subsequent owners. Then, in 1958, the American Meteorological Society purchased the property and undertook a renovation. Its staff moved into 45 Beacon Street in 1960, and the historic house remains the organization’s headquarters. The Society describes the building as containing 37 rooms, 15 fireplaces and the surviving carriage house. 

Harrison Gray Otis moved through three Charles Bulfinch houses in just ten years, but when he reached 45 Beacon Street, he stayed. For more than four decades, this was the Otis family home, and it stood in the very Beacon Hill neighborhood that Otis himself had helped create.