Memorial Drive Apartments Historic District

Four brick apartment buildings at 983-993 Memorial Drive in Cambridge form a riverside group of luxury housing built between 1914 and 1924. Strathcona-on-the-Charles (1914, W.L. Mowll) came first, with Elizabethan-style details and a plan that follows the curving site. Radnor Hall and Hampstead Hall (1916, Charles R. Greco) followed as Georgian Revival buildings with cast stone first stories and trim, and Barrington Court (1924, R.B. Whitten) completed the group with an unusually deep courtyard. Each is organized around a courtyard, a type introduced locally by Ralph Adams Cram in Brookline in 1898. The land had little development potential until Memorial Drive, designed by Charles Eliot, was completed in the late 1890s. The buildings face the Charles River and turn away from the working-class neighborhood to the northeast. Similar courtyards, brick, stone ornament and uniform height make them look like one complex, and together they were judged the most impressive concentration of apartment buildings in Cambridge, significant for architecture.