Westland Gate is a pair of fountains that borders the Back Bay Fens

Back Bay Fens

The Back Bay Fens, most commonly called simply The Fens, is a parkland and urban wild in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States.Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to serve as a link in the Emerald Necklace park system, the Fens gives its name to the Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood, and thereby to...

 at the end of Westland Avenue in Boston, MA.

History

Westland Gate was designed by Guy Lowell

Guy Lowell

Guy Lowell , American architect, was the son of Mary Walcott and Edward Jackson Lowell, and a member of Boston's well-known Lowell family....

, architect of the Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and was built in 1902 and erected in 1905. The fountains were originally named the Johnson Memorial Fountain after a wealthy Bostonian, Jesse Johnson, whose widow donated money to erect them. The fountains consist of two large pillars made of granite

Granite

Granite is a common and widely occurring type of intrusive, felsic, igneous rock. Granite usually has a medium- to coarse-grained texture. Occasionally some individual crystals are larger than the groundmass, in which case the texture is known as porphyritic. A granitic rock with a porphyritic...

 and Tennessee marble

Tennessee marble

Tennessee marble is a type of crystalline limestone found primarily in East Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. Long esteemed by architects and builders for its pinkish-gray color and the ease with which it is polished, this stone has been used in the construction of numerous notable...

  flanking the street with four copper cat heads near their bases that originally spouted water.

From the gates' plaque (installed in 1991):

"This entrance to the Fens, originally known as the Johnson Memorial Fountain, was donated to the City of Boston and erected in 1905 through a generous bequest from Mrs. Ellen Cheney Johnson

Ellen Cheney Johnson

Ellen Cheney Johnson is the woman who changed how females were treated in the American prison system. Johnson single-handedly made way for women to change their futures after they paid out their dues to society...

in memory of her husband Jesse. A grant from Boston's Edward Ingersoll Browne Trust Fund and monies from the gates' maintenance endowment made possible a 1980 restoration. The Ellen C. Johnson Trust Fund provided for subsequent renovations in 1990. The gates are under the management of the City of Boston Parks and Recreation Department."

Restoration Efforts

The fountains were first restored in 1980. It appears that the 1980 restoration involved either sandblasting or honing to address inconsistencies in the stone, as well as application of a protective treatment (to resist graffiti) using Browne Fund money. The gates were rededicated in a ceremony that followed this restoration in August 1980. The 1990 restoration involved cleaning of the marble, repointing and repair of cracks in the stone, application of protective treatment, and cleaning and repair of the metal components (decorative frieze, cat heads, and commemorative plaque). A new lighting system was proposed for the gates at this time, but seems never to have been installed. No restoration has been done on the gates since 1990. On May 4, 2008 a spokesperson for the Boston Parks Department stated that the "fountains are on a list of projects to be repaired". However, over a year later, the fountains still remain in poor condition and are non-functional.