Ames-Webster Mansion

This Beaux-Arts townhouse on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston's Back Bay is among the grandest of the opulent Gilded Age residences that lined the boulevard. Built in the 1870s and lavishly enlarged around 1900, it displays a carved stone facade, a conservatory, and a soaring stained-glass stair hall reflecting the fortunes made in trade and industry. Strolling the tree-lined central mall past such houses gives a vivid sense of upper-class urban life during the era when the city expanded into the filled tidal flats of the Back Bay.