The "castle" has quite an interesting history. This is no Disneyland style
make-believe fortress. It is the real thing, a granite fortress with a six
story head-house, a two-hundred-foot long drill hall, and details such as
triple doors to defend against mob attack, a drawbridge and a light well
that looks like a moat. And why would Boston need this redoubt in 1891?
Homeland security. Back then. the fear haunting Yankee Boston was not
of Islamists, but of immigrants?-especially Irish Catholics.
The First Corps of Cadets was a Boston institution, having been chartered
in 1741 as the bodyguard of the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In 1774 the Corps Commander, John Hancock, severed the unit's
connection with the British government, and its members joined the
American forces. It served in the Revolution and in the American Civil
War and persisted as a volunteer militia of young upper-class Boston
businessmen. The armory they built in 1891 was one of a series of
armories constructed in the aftermath of the protests of the great
depression of the 1870s culminating in the 1877 railroad strike, and the
great upheaval of 1886.
The man who raised the money for the project was Robert Barnet, a
prosperous sugar merchant. Barnet had already made a name for himself
in local amateur theater circles when he undertook the armory project.
Dubbed the 'Extravaganza King' for his ever more elaborate productions,
held annually in Boston from 1891 to 1906, Barnet almost single-handedly
managed the lavish musical farces and Mother Goose burlesques, acting
as librettist, director, stage manager, and costume designer. The male
cadets, including several Harvard graduates trained in the Hasty Pudding
tradition, played all of the roles in these overblown affairs, and Barnet
himself starred as Queen Isabella of Spain in 1492, his most famous
work. Donning dresses and wigs for the female parts, the hefty, muscular
leading ladies raised laughter rather than eyebrows from the audiences of
prominent Bostonians who attended the shows.
The Armory was used in the Boston Police Strike of 1919 as headquarters
for law-and-order strike breaking forces, specifically as headquarters of
Motor Transport Corps during the strike. On the second day of the police
strike, as the striking officers gathered support from the organized
firefighters, carmen, and other unions, machine gun companies began
arriving in Boston, and, as Frances Russell wrote in A City in Terror: "By
evening the city's armories were humming like militant beehives, and
Boston itself with its various strong points began to resemble a besieged
fortress."
reviving old thread to find out if this steakhouse survived or soon went out of business....
