Auburndale Station: H. H. Richardson's Lost Masterwork

The commuter rail stop here in Auburndale is about as undistinguished as a transit platform gets, a bare slab of concrete with a shelter, easy to miss. But in eighteen eighty-one, something extraordinary stood on this exact ground, and its loss is one of the great acts of architectural destruction in Massachusetts history.

Henry Hobson Richardson was the most celebrated American architect of the nineteenth century, the man who gave the country Trinity Church in Boston and created a style of massive, rough-hewn, round-arched stone buildings so influential that it still carries his name, Richardsonian Romanesque. Between eighteen eighty-one and his death in eighteen eighty-six, he designed a series of small railroad stations along the Boston and Albany line, several of them in Newton, each one a gem of warm granite under deep overhanging eaves, many with landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted. Together they were considered among the finest examples of civic design in America.

Auburndale's station opened in eighteen eighty-one. It featured wide round arches, wood brackets, Olmsted's plantings softening the stone into the landscape. Critics praised it as a model of how the industrial age could honor the communities it passed through.

In nineteen sixty-one, the state needed to extend the Massachusetts Turnpike into Boston. The Auburndale station was in the way. They tore it down. Auburndale and other Richardson stations nearby were lost in the same period, replaced with parking lots and bare platforms.

The Library of Congress holds the measured drawings. Architectural historians still mourn what was lost. This plain platform you see today is what happens when a society treats infrastructure as disposable rather than as the expression of civic ambition it once was meant to be.