This large residence — perhaps the most impressive of the many mansions built on Beacon Street in the 1890s — was the home of Eben Dyer Jordan Jr., son of the founder of the Jordan Marsh department store. It was designed by the firm of Winslow & Wetherell (Walter Thacher Winslow and George Homans Wetherell) in 1890.
Jordan was born in 1857, six years after his father and Benjamin Marsh founded Jordan Marsh as a dry goods wholesaler. The younger Jordan worked in various capacities in the family business, starting in the shipping department, and eventually stepped into his father’s role as head of the firm.
He was a major supporter of the arts, particularly the Boston Opera House and the New England Conservatory of Music. (NEC’s Jordan Hall, for which he provided the funding, is named for him.) His Jordan Art Gallery, located in the downtown Boston store, displayed paintings from his private collection.
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Jordan acquired a large tract of land on Corey Hill after the widening of Beacon Street in the 1880s. The mansion he had built dominated the lower part of the hill, as seen in the photos below. Winslow & Wetherell went on to design the S.S. Pierce Building in Coolidge Corner (1898-99) and many other building in Brookline and Boston.
Eben Jordan moved to his parents’ home at 46 Beacon Street in Boston after the deaths of his father (1895) and mother (1897). He died in 1916 at the age of 59.
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The Corey Hill mansion remained unoccupied until 1905 when it was turned into apartments by the developer Peleg Briggs Wadsworth. It was sold again, in 1919, to Augusta Choate, head of what had been the Guild & Evans School for girls in the Back Bay. Choate, a Vassar graduate, moved the school to the former Jordan home and renamed it the Choate School. (This is different than the Choate School in Connecticut, a school for boys whose alumni included John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson.)
The school remained in operation until 1950. (Augusta Choate died in 1962 at the age of 88.) The building was torn down in 1955. Remnants of the cobblestonestone wall can be seen on Beacon Street, at the foot of Summit Path, and on Westbourne Terrace (below).
Photo and description provided by the Brookline Historical Society and the Public Library of Brookline. For more Brookline history, visit http://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org and https://www.brooklinelibrary.org/what-we-have/local-history/
