Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. 17 historic topographic surveys show this location, the earliest from 1893.
From the record
“Richmond Court is a historic apartment complex at 1209-1217 Beacon Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. Designed by Ralph Adams Cram and built in 1898, this was probably the first apartment house built in the northeastern United States that resembled an English Tudor manor house.”
Wikipedia article Richmond Court, CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of 342 National Register listings published here for Norfolk County · listed in 1985 · category: District.
National Register reference number.85001575- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
What happened here
An account from the chapter on Brookline town. The inset identifies its exact
source book and publication year.
"T shall be able to begin to travel home slowly in about 10 days, and shall, with the blessing of God, soon see you all. After being wounded I walked back to my tent, and in about an hour had only one arm, a circumstance which does not afflict me, my dear father, and must not you. But let us both thank God that he has so formed us that you have lived almost all your life happy & respectable, notwithstanding the loss of an eye, and I may spend the remainder of my life in the same manner with the loss of a limb, of all the most conveniently spared.
Fisher's Hill, sometimes called Henshaw Hill, is two hundred and forty feet high, and is near the corner of Brighton and Boylston Streets, has a fine broad top, from which the view of the surrounding country is exceedingly elegant, and on account of the eleva- and on the southerly side of the old Boston reservoir. The prospect from this hill, like all the hills in Brookline, is fine, but quite limited in comparison with many The north side of this is covered with residences, and there are more fine locations here to be found.
Harbor. larly circuitous that in passing from Dover to Sherburne over its bed in a straight line to its estuary or outlet is fourteen miles, while, taken by the serpentine course of its water, it measures thirty-eight and into the " Back Bay," sometimes called ' Charles River Bay," the centre of the stream forming the boundary line between Roxbury (Boston) and Brookline. The early settlement of the locality called " Muddy River" was named from the fact that this river was naturally muddy, owing to its peculiar location. itants there were two landings on this stream, known as "Cotton Landing" and " Aspinwall's Dock," where bricks and wood were landed. In order to a proper understanding as to how these docks were of use, direction, it empties into Muddy River near the works of the Brookline Gas Company. its rise near W. B. Cowan's farm and the vicinity of Warren Street, running in a northerly direction, and between the old reservoir belonging to the city of
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 29 fires within 5 miles of Richmond Court
between 2015 and 2020, burning about 22 acres in total. None started naturally. 2 were recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
14
Recreation and ceremony
7
Smoking
4
Arson/incendiarism
2
Equipment and vehicle use
1
Debris and open burning
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. Museums hold 12,535 specimens
collected within 10 miles of Richmond Court between 1810 and 1975: 5,155 Plantae, 3,810 Fungi, 3,103 Animalia, 193 Protozoa, 177 Chromista, 64 Unrecorded, 33 Bacteria.
12 distinct Species records are shown.
Collected by (MARSDEN, H W), ?, ? ex Herb. W.G. Farlow and others. Each is a
physical object with a catalogue
number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was
collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be
concluded from a species being absent.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists
10 workings within 5 miles of Richmond Court: 8 plants, 2 past producers.
8 still produce. What was taken out: Iron, Lead, Tantalum, Niobium (Columbium). Distance is straight-line from the
map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring
settlement's page as well.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
Brookline, the town this property stands in, in 19 storm reports between 1995 and 2022: 13 thunderstorm wind, 3 flash flood, 2 flood, 1 hail.
No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
Several trees and wires on Cottage Street and Dean Road were downed by thunderstorm winds. In addition, an amateur radio operator reported a 58 mph wind gust.
In Brookline, at 1259 PM EST (159 PM EDT), a tree was down onto a building on Perry Street. At 101 PM EST (201 PM EDT), a tree was down on the 200 block of Walnut Street.
Portions of Route 9 (Boylston Street) were flooded with up to three feet of water. Newton and South Streets and Clark Road were impassable due to flooding.
United States Geological Survey topographic
sheets whose coverage includes this point. Matched by taking the coordinate the National Park Service records for this property, then
testing that coordinate against the published boundary of every sheet.
When this property was proposed for the
National Register, someone wrote the case for it: what the building is,
and why it matters. That document is a federal record in the public domain.
It is quoted below word for word, never summarised. The text was read off the scanned case file by machine, so the
occasional stray character is the recogniser's and the 1970s
typewriter's.
Description of the property
N/A Dating from 1898, Richmond Court is a four-story brick apartment house with sandstone trim designed by the renowned Boston architect, Ralph Adams Cram. It is significant in the architectural development of apartment houses as an early example of the Jacobethan style and as a prototype for later courtyard apartments. It is located in the south side of Beacon Street between Coolidge Corner to the west and Auburn Circle (at the Boston line) to the east. Conceived by the 01msted brothers in the 1880s as a spacious throughfare accommodating streetcars, pleasure vehicles, and pedestrians, Beacon Street is noted for its fine masonry apartment blocks and commercial establishments.
Richmond Court was designed as five attached apartment houses, symmetrically arranged around a U-shaped courtyard that is screened from the street by an iron picket fence supported between brick piers with sandstone finials. The fence incorporates four gates; the two narrow outer gates are for pedestrians while the larger inner gates, spannedby decorative arches with lanterns, accommodate vehicular traffic. The courtyard itself is laid out as a small private park in the formal Italian fashion. The grassed area surrounded by the driveway contains gravel footpaths and a central fountain ornamented by Lee Lawrie's bronze statue of anymph.
The courtyard concept, employed here for the first time in the Boston , provided several amenities lacking in apartment houses of conventional It supplied more windows per apartment, thus increasing air circulation and the admittance of light; it provided each apartment with a pleasant view of an elegant and private park; and finally, it allowed a setback from the bustle of Beacon Street.
(in one paragraph) Ralph Adams Cram Richmond Court possess integrity of location, design, setting, materials, and workmanship as well as significant associations with the late nineteenth century development of Brookline, and with the development of the apartment house building Constructed in 1896-1898, to the designs of noted Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram, Richmond Court was the first apartment house in the Boston area to be designed in the dacobethan or English manor style, and to be arranged about a central courtyard. Richmond Court was also a relatively early apartment house built along Beacon Street after its transformation into an elegant boulevard by the 01msted brothers in 1886; in plan and style, it served as the prototype for many later apartment houses of the higher class.
Thus, Richmond Court meets Criteria A, B, and C of the National Register of Historic Places on the local level. The historical development of Richmond Court has been recorded by the Brookline Historical Commission in their comprehensive townwide inventory (26-124-7). Richmond Court was built in 1898 by the Richmond Court Trust, Francis Peabody and Noah W. Jordan, trustees. Jordan was also a trustee of the Brookline Real Estate and Building Trust which built 1056-1064 Beacon Street as well as a stockholder in the West End Land Company. (The West End Land Co.
had been formed in 1886 by Henry Whitney for the purpose of improving Beacon Street, an end that was accomplished in that same year.) Born in 1846, he was listed as a financier, a trustee of the Boston and Worcester Electric Co., and a director of the Columbian National Life Insurance Co. Like most of the other investors in Beacon ISTERE Street buildings, Jordan lived in Boston....
Quoted from the National Register nomination
for reference 85001575, 20 pages, held by the National Archives in Record
Group 79. See the
catalogue record.
Listed places nearby
6 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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