Tyler Park Historic District

The Tyler Park Historic District represents the suburbanization of Lowell at the turn of the 20th century.  An expanding electric trolley system in the late 19th century made Tyler Park one of Lowell's most desirable new residential areas for the city's middle class.  Home include those built in the Federal, Italianate, Shingle, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, and Bungalow/Craftsman styles.  Tyler Park designed by Charles Eliot, is believed to be the smallest park ever designed by the famous Olmsted firm.  The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 and includes 409 structures.  In 2005, the Tyler Park Neighborhood District was created, utilizing the same National Register boundaries, requiring review by the Lowell Historic Board of demolition, partial demolition, and new construction projects.
The area encompassing the district was open land until the late 1880s.  Streetcar lines through the Highlands encouraged residential development by 1886 and by 1888, Gibson Street and Florence Avenue had been laid out.  When the trolley lines were electrified and extended west to Pine Street around 1893, Mrs. Samuel Tyler sold a large pasture that was subdivided into a fashionable neighborhood known as the Tyler Park Lands.  The parklike setting soon attracted many middle class families, businessmen, professionals, and merchants.

A small number of buildings in the district pre-date the area's subdivision with most of the residences built between 1890 and 1924.  Exempted from the construction was a 2.74 acre park site that Mrs. Tyler and her daughter donated to the City for a public park.  Tyler Park, designed by Charles Eliot, and constructed under the supervision of landscape architects Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot, became the central feature of the subdivision.