Allegro ma non troppo

Awakening of Cheerful feelings upon Arrival in the City.

At the end of the XIXth century, the Back Bay Fens became the best place to locate the old institutions that were willing to expand and didn't have enough space in the center of the city. As a chain, the improvement of the area, the renewed museums and colleges, attracted new private institutions to move towards the recently created land. One of them was Isabella Stewart Gardner. As shown in a short description of the foundation of her Museum by Rollin Hadley, a former director: "At first, she had wanted to turn the two houses she owned on Beacon Street into a museum. But her husband said, why not go to the out-skirts of town, buy a piece of land, and build a new building, with an apartment on top? And that is exactly what she did, after her husband died in 1898É. The Fenway at that time, at least this end of Olmsted new park, had no buildings at all. It was marshland that had just been filled in".