Norfolk Street Historic District

Norfolk Street in Cambridgeport is a residential district whose buildings trace the neighborhood's growth from the 1840s to the 1880s. The street was laid out as a spacious suburban address near the Cambridgeport meetinghouse, on land once held by the Cambridge almshouse, which burned in 1836. Its early character comes from fifteen Greek Revival houses on the west side, arranged around three cul-de-sacs and flanked by porticoed cottages. That arrangement is not repeated elsewhere in the city. The house at 79 Norfolk Street, built in 1843 by housewright Zenas Crowell, remains the least altered of the group. Later additions include an Italianate row house at 68-72 Norfolk Street, a Richardsonian Romanesque brick apartment block, and Queen Anne four-story flats then called 'hotels,' a building type unique to Cambridge. Development ended after 1919, when the last building sites were filled. The district is listed for its record of increasingly dense nineteenth-century housing.