March 16, 2020 City of Boston CPA Awards $3.5 Million in Historic Preservation Grants
Mayor Martin Walsh and the City of Boston’s Community Preservation Committee recommended $3,465,000 in grants for 16 historic preservation projects in the latest round of grants to be made from the City’s Community Preservation Act (CPA) Funds. The preservation projects were among 40 projects recommended to the City Council for grant funding totaling $24 million.
The Community Preservation Act was adopted by Boston voters in 2016. A surcharge of 1% on Boston property tax bills generates funds to be deployed exclusively for affordable housing, historic preservation and open space projects. A designated Community Preservation Committee had reviewed and recommended more than $67 million in funding for projects throughout the city’s neighborhoods since adoption of CPA.
The historic preservation projects recommended in the most recent competitive round include the following:
BACK BAY
- $100,000 to the Gibson House Museum to restore the ground floor structural system and its brick underpinning in order to maintain public safety and stability for the Victorian rowhouse
CHARLESTOWN
- $400,000 to the John F. Kennedy Family Services Center to restore the slate roof and prevent water damage to the historic school building that provides child care, after school, and senior services
- $20,000 to the USS Constitution Museum to protect its collections by relocating the sprinkler system at risk of failing due to flooding and sea level rise
DORCHESTER
- $400,000 to restore the steeple of the Second Church in Dorchester, one of the oldest wooden churches left in Boston, built in 1806 and home to a Paul Revere bell
- $20,000 to First Parish Dorchester, built in 1897, to remove and restore the Palladian window and complete the window restoration on the only Colonial-Revival clapboard meetinghouse in Boston
EAST BOSTON
- $400,000 to purchase the Donald McKay House, a Greek Revival style house built in 1844 by Donald McKay, the country’s premier clipper ship designer, to preserve as a community asset
JAMAICA PLAIN
- $200,000 to the Haffenreffer Brewery complex to restore the roof and windows for a “Prosperity Center” providing small business services, job training, ESL classes, and other programs
- $200,000 to the Footlight Club, the country’s oldest community theatre, to remediate structural problems and stabilize Eliot Hall, a Greek Revival wood-frame structure built in 1831
ROXBURY
- $40,000 to the Shirley-Eustis House to restore the wood shingle roof of the 1806 Carriage House to enhance its functionality as an accessible space for education, programs, and community use at the Georgian house museum
- $400,000 to the Nubian Gallery to restore the neo-Classical facade of the former Hamill Gallery on a surviving 19th-century commercial block in the Dudley Station Historic District
- $250,000 to the Dr. Marie E. Zakrzewska Building to continue restoration of the historic windows, so that the Dimock Center can create a residential recovery program in the space for men with substance use disorder
- $400,000 to the Eliot Congregational Church, built in 1873, to restore the facade and roof in preparation for reuse of the underutilized spaces as affordable housing and a commercial kitchen
SOUTH BOSTON
- $75,000 to the Kearsarge Memorial in Marine Park to replace the crumbling base and missing interpretive plaque, and restore the 1898 anchor honoring naval veterans of the USS Kearsarge, a class of battleships including one active ship in service today
SOUTH END
- $100,000 to the 1858 Francis Dane House, headquarters of the South End Historical Society, to repair windows and masonry on the facade of this Chester Square townhouse
WEST END
- $100,000 to the Greater Boston Legal Services to make repairs to the facade of their building in the Bulfinch Triangle Historic District
WEST ROXBURY
- $20,000 to Brook Farm, site of the transcendentalist experiment in the 1840s, for an archaeology dig and landscape improvements