The Calvin Coolidge House is located in a quiet residential area west of downtown Northampton, on the east side of Massasoit Street near its junction with Arlington Street. It is an architecturally undistinguished 2+1⁄2-story two-family wood-frame structure, with a hip roof and clapboarded exterior. Stylistically it is basically Colonial Revival, with projecting sections to the rear of each unit, and different porch treatments on each side. The Coolidge unit, on the left, has a gable-roofed porch supported by round columns, extending partly in front of a project polygonal bay window. The interior also has some Colonial Revival features, including a fireplace in the front parlor with flanking Doric pilasters.[2]
The house was built in 1900–01 by J.W. O'Brian, and its left side was rented in 1905 by Calvin Coolidge. The Coolidges occupied that unit until 1930. This period of occupancy coincides with Coolidge's political rise from city council to Governor of Massachusetts, then Vice President and President.[3] This property is one of the most unusual of those occupied by a US president on a long-term basis, in that he did not own it, and that it was a duplex.[2] In 1930, Coolidge moved to "The Beeches" at 16 Hampton Terrace in Northampton,[4] a move he said was necessitated by the increasing number of tourists coming to this address and the attendant lack of privacy.
