Our Pick
Posted on @rawstates
The Cambridge Almshouse, a poorhouse built to look like a prison
1850
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Cambridge held a design competition for the job, which was rare for a municipal building in 1850, and hired Gridley J. F. Bryant working with Louis Dwight, founder of the Boston Prison Discipline Society. What went up was an octagonal administrative core with four wings radiating off it, in gray-green and ocher ledgestone that the almshouse residents quarried themselves. The result reads as a penitentiary rather than a house, which is what institutional poor relief in Massachusetts looked like at the time. It was listed on the National Register in 1982 and the International School of Boston occupies it now.
That was 1 of the hidden places.
Location: documented spot
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