Mount Pleasant Historic District

Mount Pleasant is a residential district in the Roxbury section of Boston, containing 99 contributing buildings erected between 1833 and 1925. The earliest buildings are wood-frame, detached houses set back from tree-lined streets, many of them vernacular Greek Revival double houses and side-hall cottages. Gothic Revival cottages, Italianate houses and Second Empire townhouses followed in the 1850s and 1860s. After horse railroads extended along Dudley Street and Boston annexed Roxbury in 1868, development became denser. Brick row houses, such as the ten-unit row at 80-98 Mt. Pleasant Ave., and apartment hotels like Hotel Vine and Hotel Mount Pleasant brought the idea of horizontal apartments, or French flats, to the area. Yellow-brick apartment blocks of the 1890s and a brick mansion built for Thomas Ray in 1886 add further variety. The district is listed for its concentration of mid-nineteenth-century house types and for showing how a suburban neighborhood grew into a dense urban one. Most buildings are well maintained, though some are vacant or in poor condition.