Sylvester Baxter

Sylvester Baxter in 1893; photo by Elmer Chickering

Sylvester Baxter (1850–1927) was an American newspaper writer and urban planner in the Boston area. In 1893 he became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Metropolitan Park Commission and along with Charles Eliot was a chief force in the development of the Metropolitan Park System of Greater Boston.^[1]

Born in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, Baxter attended universities in Leipzig and Berlin in the 1870s before returning to Boston and becoming a writer for the Boston Herald. Baxter continued urban planning efforts into the 20th century. He also wrote for the Boston Evening Transcript, wrote poetry and published magazine essays.^[2][3] Baxter died in 1927 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.^[3]

Travel to Mexico: Spanish-Colonial Architecture in Mexico

Between 1920 and 1926 he traveled to Mexico. He wrote Spanish-Colonial Architecture in Mexico (La arquitectura hispano-colonial de México, in Spanish), a documentary registry of Colonial art and a critique to Colonial architecture in Mexico of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The translation into Spanish was published in 1934, including images by Henry Greenwood Peabody which were later part of the collection of images donated by Fondo Guillermo Tovar de Teresa to the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.^[4]

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