The North Shore (Paperback)

In the nineteenth century, prominent Bostonians like Thomas Handasyd Perkins and Charles Greely Loring discovered the shore north of Boston as a summer escape from the heat and stink of the city. From the 1820s until the Great Crash of 1929, they and their social brethren built cottages and castles from Nahant to Ipswich, amusing themselves with lawn tennis, polo, yachting, and more eccentric pursuits. (Who can account for John Hays Hammond's castle in Magnolia, or Isabella Stewart Gardner's infatuation, if that's what it was, with gay blade A. Piatt Andrew on Eastern Point?) In this social history, originally published in two volumes as Boston's North Shore and Boston's Gold Coast, Garland offers an affectionate history of America's most civilized resort, with many previously unpublished photographs and maps.