Lowell City Hall
The same architects as the castle’s stable, the same rock-faced granite and the same love of a tower — a decade on and at civic scale.
Ten years after they drew the Atherton estate’s stable, Merrill & Cutler won the competition for a new City Hall and gave Lowell its grandest civic building: a granite pile in the Romanesque manner Henry Hobson Richardson had made the American style for public buildings, with round arches, rock-faced walls and a corner clock tower that still anchors Monument Square.
Otis Merrill (born 1844, Hudson, New Hampshire) had practised alone from 1873; Arthur Cutler (born 1854, Andover), his former draughtsman, became his partner in 1883 — the year of the stable plate. The firm’s other Lowell work includes the First Congregational Church (1884), the Central Fire Station (1889), the Armory (1890, demolished 1977) and the Howe Building (1894).
Still to check
- Whether Merrill & Cutler also designed the house at 236 Fairmount Street (no record yet says so).