1900 – The House Is Traded for a Back Bay Hotel

In December 1900 the Boston Globe’s “Real Estate Matters” column revealed how the house changed hands that year — not by an ordinary sale, but as part payment for a Back Bay apartment hotel.

William A. French, trustee of the Cruft estate — the same family that had held a mortgage on the newly-drawn house lot since 1894 — bought the Hotel Longfellow, a five-story stone-front apartment house at the corner of St. Botolph and Blackwood Streets, from its owner Israel Nesson. In exchange, French conveyed “an estate, situated on Chesley road, Newton, comprising a frame house and some 12,500 square feet of land, the whole taxed for $6700” — this house. The Cruft estate also threw in two Chicago parcels, transferred through Miss Harriet O. Cruft, “the deeds for the Chicago property go to Jacob J. Kramer.”

The recorded deed tells the last step differently: at the registry it is Kramer, not Nesson, who took title to the Chesley Road house (deed dated December 12, 1900 — six days after the Globe item). However Nesson and Kramer allocated the deeds between themselves, it was Kramer who held the house until he sold it to Asa C. Jewett in 1902 — for a stated consideration of one dollar.

For a few weeks at the turn of the century, then, this frame house in Newton Centre was a bargaining chip in a Back Bay hotel deal — valued alongside a $91,500 apartment house and two parcels in Chicago.

Boston Globe, December 6, 1900.