Newton Cottage Hospital Historic District

Eleven small brick and wood buildings at the back of the Newton-Wellesley Hospital grounds in Newton Lower Falls preserve the layout of the Newton Cottage Hospital, which opened to its first patient in 1886. The cottage model, borrowed from an English system, favored small, homelike buildings over one large institution. The group includes the 1894 Pratt-Converse Nurses Home, Ellison Hall of 1905, contagious wards rebuilt in brick after a 1900 fire, a trio of operating and recovery buildings from 1898, the Georgian Revival Founders Memorial maternity building, a power plant, and the Tudor Revival Allen Riddle Hall of 1936. Kendall, Taylor & Stevens, a firm known for hospital design, produced many of them. Larger hospital wings built from 1927 onward are excluded. Because most turn-of-the-century hospital groups in Massachusetts have been lost to expansion, this surviving cluster is valued for its intact record of early hospital design and care.