The plot of land where the Berwick Hotel was built was bought by Joseph Taylor in 1866. He built his house on the site and lived there until the 1880s when he moved into his Queen Anne stylehouse on the other side of town. The old house was torn down to make room for the larger structure covering the entire lot.[citation needed] Taylor chose the name Berwick from his bride's hometown of North Berwick, Maine.[2] The hotel opened to much celebration on August 16, 1887;[citation needed] it was a Romanesque Revival building.[2]
In November 1891, the hotel was destroyed by fire, but Taylor quickly arranged for the erection of a replacement. At the time, Cambridge was in the middle of a period of prosperity that had continued with little interruption since the first railroad came in the 1850s. Because the hotel sits on a sloped lot, it is irregular in its plan: parts of the building are four stories tall, while others are only three.[2]
