Historic Hotel Alexandra (Boston, Massachusetts)

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Construction of the Hotel Alexandra in 1875 was a speculative venture on the part of Caleb Walworth and Emil Hammer, president and treasurer respectively of the Walworth Manufacturing Company of South Boston. The Alexandra was a "residential hotel" with commercial space at street level, a common building type in Boston after 1870 that provided wealthier urban dwellers with sprawling, well-appointed rental flats in multi-unit buildings. The Alexandra’s imposing five-story height and richly patterned sandstone façade provided a bold contrast to the elegant symmetry of the fine brick rowhouses on Massachusetts Avenue. Its prominent corner site also created a grand approach to nearby Chester Square, an area that retained its cachet as a fashionable residential neighborhood of single-family homes through the 1870s, at a time when much of the South End had converted into boarding houses for immigrant and working-class families. By the turn of the century the fortunes of the Alexandra had changed: it too had become a boarding house, and construction of the Washington Street line of the Boston Elevated Railway in 1899 had obscured the building’s fine front façade and made Washington Street a noisy, less desirable place to live.