Amory Houghton Sr.

The home · 61 OTIS

A Greek Revival row house

The Houghton family were the first occupants of 61 OTIS, built by William and Lewis Hall and completed in 1851 as part of a continuous brick row extending from 55 to 61 Otis Street.

The history

The property is documented by the federal Historic American Buildings Survey as the Amory Houghton House, recognized as “one of the finest row houses in East Cambridge.”

The neighborhood · America's glass capital

East Cambridge was built on glass

Glass enables vision, discovery, and connection. It gives us windows and lenses, the test tubes and beakers of modern science, the bulb that lit the electric age, and the screens and fibers that carry the digital one. Few materials have shaped modern life as profoundly—and in the mid-1800s, the American center of this craft was East Cambridge.

The New England Glass Company, founded in 1818 just a few blocks from Otis Street, grew so large that an 1851 account described it as the largest glassworks in the world: thirteen buildings, hundreds of workers, and a 240-foot chimney that rose above the nearby Bunker Hill Monument. Glassmaking employed thousands in East Cambridge and shipped products worldwide. It was the neighborhood's defining industry.

The investor · Amory Houghton Sr.

Houghton didn't make the glass.
He funded it.

Amory Houghton Sr. (1812–1882) never blew a single gather of glass. He was a Cambridge businessman who had already put his own money into real estate, contracting, and the wood-and-coal trade, and in 1851 he bought into a struggling glassworks — Bay State Glass, a neighbor of New England Glass.

He did not run the furnaces himself; he financed them — and then kept financing the next, larger one — in Somerville, Massachusetts, Brooklyn, and finally Corning, New York. His willingness to stake and risk his own capital on the glass business anticipates the way Kendall Square would be built, with private money backing young companies long before anyone can know whether they will succeed. Houghton simply did it 175 years earlier, and he did it in glass.

The route · Cambridge to Corning

Four factories, seventeen years

In 1854 Houghton left Bay State to found his own factory, the Union Glass Company, in nearby Somerville. A decade later, in 1864, he and his son Amory Houghton Jr. — by then the firm's glass chemist — bought the well-regarded Brooklyn Flint Glass Works in New York. And in 1868, drawn by cheaper fuel, better transport, and local financing, the family moved the whole operation one last time, to a town on the Chemung River called Corning, New York.

The payoff · Corning Glass Works

The glassworks that enabled the modern world

Renamed Corning Flint Glass Works and incorporated in 1875 as Corning Glass Works, the company turned glass into one breakthrough after another. It blew the envelope for Thomas Edison's light bulb, built the high-speed “ribbon machine” that made bulbs cheap enough to wire the world, created Pyrex, cast the 200-inch mirror at the heart of the Palomar telescope, and drew the optical fiber that carries the modern internet — work that earned Corning the National Medal of Technology four times. Corning protected those advances the way it still does — with patents on the inventions and trade secrets on the exact recipes and processes.

One of Corning’s glass products is almost certainly within arm’s reach right now: the tough, scratch-resistant cover glass protecting your smartphone screen. When Steve Jobs demanded a scratch-resistant glass for the first iPhone in 2007, Corning supplied the strengthened cover glass that became the first generation of its trademark Gorilla® Glass, and it remains the dominant maker of hardened smartphone cover glass for major brands like Apple and Samsung.

The arc · Return to Cambridge

The Houghton family kept returning to Cambridge

Glass making moved to New York, but generations of Houghtons returned — just a mile up the road from 61 Otis Street — to Harvard Square as Harvard students and later as stewards. Arthur A. Houghton Jr., Class of 1929 and head of Corning's Steuben Glass, built and endowed Houghton Library — Harvard's home for rare books and manuscripts, and the first free-standing special-collections library in the country — paying for it with Corning Glass Works stock.

His nephew James R. Houghton, great-great-grandson of Amory Houghton Sr., Harvard Class of 1958 and the company's longtime chairman, went further: he served fifteen years on the Harvard Corporation, the University's seven-person senior governing board, and as its senior fellow led the search that chose Harvard's first woman president. From a Cambridge row house to a New York glassworks that funded a library and earned a seat at the head of Harvard — all one family's arc.

Past · Present · Future

61 OTIS turns 175 in 2026

This row house was completed in 1851 — the year the Houghton family moved in, and the same year Amory Houghton made his first investment in glass. As the United States marks its 250th, the row house quietly turns 175.

When you pick up your smartphone, the Corning glass under your thumb traces its origins to 1851, when a Cambridge investor bought into a struggling local glassworks and set in motion a 175-year business success story.

Just as generations of Houghtons came back to Cambridge, five successive generations of Houghtons led Corning. The last was James R. Houghton, who came back in 2002 at age 66 to turn around the company. He used a financial crisis to re-embed the seven Corning Values the family had long championed — and today the company is worth more than $160 billion, its stock near all-time highs.

Today's corporate guests at 61 OTIS experience both the architectural detailing of an 1851 East Cambridge row house and a direct link to the early career of Corning's founder and early glass investor Amory Houghton. That layered history gives contemporary corporate stays in East Cambridge a richer sense of place and context.