Highland Street

Paralleling Brattle Street, Highland Street (and the nearby areas on Appleton and Sparks streets) provides especially fine examples of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century domestic architecture. Moving from west to east, 54 Highland (1886, Chamberlin and Whidden) contributed to the emerging Colonial Revival experiment of nearby houses. Here a hipped-roof brick mass is organized symmetrically but enlivened by the Palladian stair window to the left and vertical oval window to the right of the distyle-in-antis projecting Ionic porch. Next door at number 48, Allen Jackson, architect for many early-twentieth-century Cambridge houses, designed a robust English half-timbered pile organized on a Y-shaped plan. At the corner of Highland and Appleton streets, the animated red and black brick 71 Appleton Street rose in 1876 to designs of W. P. P. Longfellow. Finally, at the intersection of Sparks and Highland streets stand two fine houses. Longfellow, Alden and Harlow designed the Noyes House (1894, NR) at 1 Highland, one of the handsomest Colonial Revival examples in the neighborhood. Historic New England, Inc. (originally the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) holds the Noyes' scrapbooks detailing the building and decoration of the house; Charles Eliot designed the garden. Set well back from Sparks Street at the end of Highland, 70 Sparks Street (1878) by W. P. P. Longfellow and Clark is a picturesque Queen Anne rumination on H. H. Richardson's influential William Watts Sherman House (1874–1876) in Newport, Rhode Island.