plants which has a better chance of thriving in the unirrigated beds and which provides more openness to the space . Puddingstone Gardens was transferred from the Urbans Wilds Initiative to the Conservation Commission after our restoration project provided an increased maintenance budget .
Warren Gardens
Warren Gardens is located on the edge of Dudley Square , between Warren Street , Walnut Street , and St . Richard ’ s Street , and has a rich history extending far back to John Eliot and 17th century Boston . In 1873 , a wealthy clothing merchant , Issac Fenno , purchased a large parcel of land and built a mansion which he named “ Buena Vista ” for the views visible from the summit in all directions . When his widow , Almira Fenno Gendrot , died in 1955 , she left the property to the city to be developed into a park . A portion of the estate was developed as Warren Gardens housing in 1964 by the Boston Redevelopment Authority , after demolishing the aging mansion , leaving its foundations , and preserving this existing piece of land as open space . In many ways , the development of this landscape paralleled that of Roxbury : from pasture land to suburban residential development to an urban neighborhood of the city of Boston .
In July 2014 , we held a public meeting in the community to discuss concerns , the site ’ s history , and to talk about what this landscape could become . At the meeting , we asked the neighbors : if we were to interpret this history in the landscape ( by exposing the mansion foundations and clearing the viewsheds ), and interpret some of the story of John Eliot and Almira Gendrot then how would they like to see the Roxbury of today represented
Issac Fenno Estate
Photo | City of Boston Archives
in the landscape ? The response was simple : they wouldn ' t . They told us that the modern stories of Roxbury are so well told in other locations , and this parcel presented a unique opportunity to interpret Roxbury ’ s history and those were the stories that should be expressed .
So that is what we did . We designed five engraved stones with plans of the old estate , a poem written by the merchant who built the mansion , interpretations of the sketches of the buena vistas drawn by his widow , an 1875 map of Boston and Roxbury , and an excerpt of John Eliot ’ s Algonquin translation of the Lord ’ s Prayer .
The stones , remnants from the mansion extracted from the summit of the hill , were then placed around the new loop trail encircling the summit . At the base of the hill , by three of the new trailheads , interpretive panels were created to tell a more complete story of John Eliot ’ s role in Boston , of the estate of Buena Vista , and of art on the estate — Gendrot ’ s second husband was a painter and she was a student of William Morris Hunt , acclaimed portraitist and noted American proponent of the Barbizon school of landscape painting .
Stone engraved with Almira Fenno Gendrot ’ s sketch Photo | KZLA
Warren Gardens is a secluded site and was heavily wooded with a dense canopy and surrounded almost entirely by streets . On all of our early site visits , we encountered dozens of discarded needles . On a few occasions , our construction meetings had interrupted people using the site as a remote place to take drugs . But during the
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