The Backside of America

It’s Really Big, Sometimes Beautiful and Always Worth a Second Look

Saturday, August 10, 2024

The Backside is Coming! The Backside is Coming - to Revere! (Part V)

From Dave Brigham:

Surely you must be interested in one of the busiest commercial areas of Revere, Mass.

Well, then, welcome to Shirley Avenue!

This is the fifth installment in my series of short posts about Revere. Links to the previous four are listed at the bottom of this post.

I love walking through commercial districts in the cities of Eastern Massachusetts. Many of the buildings in these zones date from the late 1800s through the 1950s, and have a wonderful human scale to them. I love the old signs, the hints of days gone by, the variety of locally owned businesses. In the first post in my Revere series, I chronicled part of the city's Broadway district. Today, I present Shirley Avenue, which runs east-to-west from Revere Beach Boulevard to the VFW Parkway.

On the side of Ocean Liquors, just steps from the Revere Beach MBTA station, is a mural that was funded through the Revere Cultural Council and private donors as part of the Shirley Avenue Gateway Initiative.

Artist Ann Steinman worked with Alex Gerasev to design and paint the mural. The work features Shirley Avenue businesses and organizations, as well as the nearby Revere Beach bandstand and people of all ages strolling, driving, riding bikes and communing with each other.

Next door to the liquor store block is the Revere Lodge of Elks Club.

Built in 1912, this brick building appears to have been altered over the years. MACRIS doesn't have anything on file about the lodge. The rooftop sign is great. I hope it lights up at night.

Shirley Avenue presents a mix of older and newer commercial and apartment buildings, which is no surprise, as the beach is a very short walk away. When I walk down streets like this, I find myself wishing that I'd been there five years earlier, or 10, so I could've seen more older buildings. At the corner of Shirley Avenue and Walden Street, I spied an older building that appears to be near the end of its life.

Home to seafood retailer and wholesaler Ocean Mac, Inc., this building dates to 1964, per the Revere assessor. I can't tell whether Ocean Mac is still in business; if it is, the building doesn't reflect that. If the seafood company has indeed gone under water, I suspect this property will sell and new apartments/retail will rise.

Continuing west a short distance, I fell for the old-school look of Tobie's Jewelers, with the hand-painted primary sign and fading secondary ones.

The building appears to date to the early 20th century. I found a listing online (the store doesn't have a web site) indicating Tobie's has been in business since 1997. I would guess it's older than that, but what do I know?

At the corner of Shirley and Nahant avenues is a building about which I wish I could find out more detail.

Currently home to Super Convenience Store, ICAN Chiropractic and Thmor Da Restaurant, this place was built around 1900. The main part of building used to have a name chiseled near the roofline, but there's nothing left of it. The stores seem to have been added on later. I'm not sure if this was a small factory, or just an apartment building.

The final place I spied before turning back east is home to Two Brother's Market II.

Offering American groceries alongside "productos de Centro, Sur America y del Caribe," the market is located in a circa-1920 building. I believe the market opened in 2011.

On the south side of the avenue, between a parking lot and North Shore Road, there is another commercial building from the early part of last century. Anchoring one end is Angkor Thom Market, which has been there for quite a few years.

The shop has another wonderful hand-painted sign, this one featuring a misspelling of the name of the avenue, and some symbols or letters up top that I'm unable to decipher. Next door is Ocean Plaza, which also has some pretty great signage.

I have a confession: I made a close-up photo of the sign earlier in my walk, and wasn't planning on taking another shot, but once the guy with the amazing pancho walked across the street, I couldn't resist a photo with him and the sign. Ocean Plaza is a mini-mall, I believe, with several small shops.

The final storefront in this block is empty; it was most recently occupied by a jeweler called El Brilliante.