I Seek Newton, Part XIII: Newtonville (Section 1, The Orr Block/Trio Newton)

From Dave Brigham:

Welcome to the beginning of the end! Over the past eight years, I have done my best to find every backside element of my adopted hometown of Newton, Massachusetts (see bottom of this post for links to the articles chronicling the other 12 villages of this city). With this post -- the first of three -- I present Newtonville, the village where I live, and wrap up a series that I never thought would take this long for me to complete. Along the way, I have learned a LOT about Newton -- Gregory Steinsieck has established a cool outdoor sculpture garden in Newton Corner; the recreation hut at the Newton Centre playground is a former church; there were once rumors of a silver mine in Thompsonville; and, my favorite, a Cardinal's Coat of Arms carved in stone was years ago dumped in Cold Spring Park.

I have enjoyed receiving feedback from lifelong residents about places I missed, and corrected information about places I profiled; and reading residents' memories of their city and its history, both the places and the people.

With most of my posts in this series, I relied on my favorite resource, the Massachusetts Culural Resources Information System (MACRIS), as well as old maps and brochures available online in order to learn the history of buildings, companies, stores and schools of Newton. I occasionally asked folks in Newton-centric Facebook groups for background information.

In this post, however, I feature photos of several buildings that I made many years ago, before they were torn down, and write about retailers and other small businesses that I knew of first-hand. I will first discuss the assemblage of buildings known as the Orr Block, once located along Walnut and Washington streets. Then, I will talk about what replaced those buildings and businesses.

In the second and third posts, I will cover churches (current and former), apartment buildings, retail and restaurant spaces, industrial spaces and much more.

Perhaps if the Orr Building in Newtonville had been named after The Greatest Hockey Player in the World...Bar None, it wouldn't have been torn down, along with several of its neighbors. Razed a few years ago in the name of progress, this block at the corner of Walnut and Washington streets wasn't anything particularly noteworthy or beautiful, I'll admit. But aesthetically, I will almost always choose old brick buildings over newer ones made of glass and metal and composite materials of one sort or another. The circa-1896 Colonial Revival Orr Building, constructed of buff brick and home to several small businesses, stood for more than 120 years. Many of the adjacent buildings were of the same age and size - one, two or three stories - and were also populated by locally owned shops.

Collectively known as the Orr Block, these buildings "were developed for a variety of commercial uses by Horace W. Orr," according to MACIRS. "...A permit to build two brick stores and a Post Office at 659-61 Washington Street was granted to Mr. Orr in 1916. This building was designed by local architect W. Northrup Tudlay. Presumably the adjacent building at 663 Washington Street was built about the same time. Although the numbering differs today, contemporary Atlases and Directories show that Orr's Plumbing and Heating business, and later Orr's Hardware, was located at that address in 1917."

Mr. Orr was an important guy in Newtonville, evidently. These days, the important guy around the village, as well as other parts of the city, is Robert Korff, founding principal and CEO of Mark Development, which is slated to effect major changes across Newton in coming years (check the first few portfolio listings on the firm's web site to get an idea).

In spring of 2018, the developer began knocking these buildings down, to make way for new four- and five-story buildings featuring apartments, restaurants and retail spots. As you can imagine, opposition to this project was intense. People said the project was out of scale with Newtonville; feared an influx of traffic to the main and side streets; and worred that new students would overwhelm neighborhood schools. I don't know if I ever heard anyone say, "Hey, let's save those beautiful buildings!"

Before the wrecking balls began to swing, I shot a bunch of photos around the Orr Block. While I found some interesting details on several buildings, I didn't come across anything that made me say, "Damn, I'm gonna miss these places."

While I don't miss the buildings, I am sad that some of the businesses that had called them home aren't around anymore. I will discuss that below. I will also showcase photos of the buildings that replaced these old edifices.

The Orr Building was home to numerous ground-floor retailers, one restaurant, and, I assume, small businesses in the second-floor office space. Newtonville Camera, which moved here in 1980 from a spot around the corner on Washington Street, found a new location about a mile and a half away in Waltham. I bought a few things at the Newtonville location, and have continued to occasionally patronize their new location.

Joe's Barber Shop moved a short walk away, to 799 Washington Street.

I don't recall what other businesses were in this building, other than Karoun, an Armenian restaurant that closed its doors after 40 years once developers acquired these buildings.

I went to Karoun twice. The food -- tasty kebabs and rice and many other Armenian and Middle Eastern dishes -- was really good, but this place was equally as well known for its belly dancers. I really felt transported to another time and place when the dancers were performing on the floor in the middle of the restaurant. I wish I'd gone there more often. Here's a taste of the experience:

Here are some shots of the rear of the Orr Building.

Across a driveway and to the north was a newer brick building that was home to Eastern Advertising, "a professional fundraising organization dedicated to law enforcement, firefighters associations, as well as civic organizations," according to its web site.

The organization is now located in Waltham.

Below is a not-so-great shot of a building located behind the old Eastern Advertising.

I have no idea what was here, but MACRIS provides information about earlier uses for this building and others in the complex. "A variety of brick garages and warehouses were located behind these buildings and fronted on Bailey Place. Earlier businesses, such as a blacksmith and carriage maker related to horse drawn transportation, while later ones were automobile oriented. A right of way beside 663 Washington Street lead to 'Orr Mart,' a pair of long narrow connected parking garages for the storage of automobiles."

My memory is a little fuzzy, but I believe that the building next to the Orr Building was home to a tailor shop and a dance apparel store, the latter of which I shopped at a few times for my daughter. According to MACRIS, the other buildings in this area dated to between 1890 and 1916.

There was a side street called Bailey Place that led to a parking lot behind the complex of buildings.

In addition to stores and perhaps offices, there were apartments on the upper floors.

As for The French Tailor, I'm pretty sure he relocated to Newton's Waban neighborhood.

I'm happy to report that Dancer's Image was also able to relocate, not far away on Washington Street.

Do the stores and restaurants that replaced these outfits -- Clover Food Lab, CVS, Mida, Fuji at Newton, The Barn shoe store -- capture the light and provide interesting layers of patina? Perhaps.

Heading west, the next building was home to J. Stevens Salon, which moved to a spot not far away in West Newton.

While at Karoun the focus was on belly dancing, just a few doors down there were ballerinas and danseurs at work, at Boston Ballet School. Again, I'm happy to report that the school relocated to Needham Street in Newton Upper Falls.

(I'm guessing this is one of the buildings where Mr. Orr stored autombiles back in the day.)

The last building to fall under the wrecking ball was a gas/service station, bordering a dead-end street next to the post office, which remains today.

(Before.)

(After.)

The two homes at the end of the dead-end street were torn down in late December/early January. I'm not sure what, if anything, will replace them. You can see one of them in the two photos above.

One last note of interest about the old buildings, before I showcase what replaced them.

Before the old structures had been torn down, the demolition company, or perhaps the developer, indicated, for some reason, where the lobby entrance to one of the new buildings would be. Which provides a segue to Trio Newton, the three apartment/retail/restaurant buildings that were built on the grave of the Orr Block.

As I said, I felt no great loss when these buildings were torn down. "As long as there are a few good restaurants and some decent stores," I said, "I'll be happy." At the corner of Walnut and Washington streets is where the best tenants have landed, in my opinion. Mida, sister restaurant to a well-established eatery in Boston's South End, serves modern takes on Italian food and (I'm told) great pizza. I love their food. Also in this building is The Barn shoe store. In business since 1948, this store moved from its longtime West Newton home, about a mile west on Washington Street, since Mark Development has also leveled several buildings in West Newton Square in advance of another retail/residential development.

Also located in this building is the New Art Center's public gallery, as well as a retail space.

The second building is home to a Clover Food Lab, a "fast" vegetarian restaurant. There are others in the area. There is also an outlet of Chipotle and a Chase Bank.

This photo shows the aforementioned "lobby."

The third building, below, is occupied by a CVS.

Make sure to check back for much more of the backside of Newtonville in the near future.

Here are the previous posts in the series:

September 10, 2022, "I Seek Newton, Part XII: West Newton (Section 3)"

September 3, 2022, "I Seek Newton, Part XII: West Newton (Section 2)"

August 27, 2022, "I Seek Newton, Part XII: West Newton (Section 1: The Barn Redevelopment)"

December 31, 2021, "I Seek Newton, Part XI: Newton Corner (Section 3)"

December 18, 2021, "I Seek Newton, Part XI: Newton Corner (Section 2)"

December 11, 2021, "I Seek Newton, Part XI: Newton Corner (Section 1)"

April 10, 2021, "I Seek Newton, Part X: Newton Centre (Section 3)"

April 3, 2021, "I Seek Newton, Part X: Newton Centre (Section 2)"

March 27, 2021, "I Seek Newton, Part X: Newton Centre (Section 1)"

November 15, 2020, "I Seek Newton, Part IX: Nonantum (Section 3)"

October 29, 2020, "I Seek Newton, Part IX: Nonantum (Section 2)"

September 24, 2020, "I Seek Newton, Part IX: Nonantum (Section 1)"

March 14, 2018, "I Seek Newton, Part VIII: Upper Falls (Section 3)"

March 8, 2018, "I Seek Newton, Part VIII: Upper Falls (Section 2)"

March 1, 2018, "I Seek Newton, Part VIII: Upper Falls (Section 1)"

March 7, 2017, "I Seek Newton, Part VII: Thompsonville"

December 5, 2016, "I Seek Newton, Part VI: Chestnut Hill"

September 26, 2016, "I Seek Newton, Part V: Oak Hill"

June 3, 2016, "I Seek Newton, Part IV: Waban"

March 23, 2016, "I Seek Newton, Part III: Newton Highlands"

September 20, 2015, "I Seek Newton, Part II: Auburndale"

May 21, 2015, "I Seek Newton, Part I: Lower Falls"

Keep the Ladies in the House

From Dave Brigham:

I saw the plaque above and figured it was a historic marker or relic from a time gone by. But, just as with every single thing that Donald Trump has ever said, I was wrong. And what I assumed would be a simple blog post about a historic institution for women turned out to be something much more complicated.

Located on the outskirts of Boston's Kenmore Square, Our Lady's Guild House (OLGH) is a short-term residence in Boston for women, including students, according to its web site. The residence contains 137 single-occupancy rooms, along with a chapel, a lounge, a conference room and two shared kitchens. In operation since 1947, the house is run by the Daughters of Mary of the Immaculate Conception and is open to women of all faiths and national origins.

So far, so good.

In the early 2010's, though, there was a change in the Daughters' leadership, and the group "essentially stopped running OLGH as a charity," according to a September 15, 2021, article from The Boston Sun. "The Daughters hired Boston realtor Marc Roostaie (known as Marc Roos) to run the property. They raised rents, set time limits on the tenancies of residents, and began evicting long-term residents," the Sun article continues. "....[T]he Daughters rented vacant rooms as high-priced Air BNB (sic) units until Boston outlawed the practice....They set an illegal age limit of 50 years old for applicants and used discriminatory language to discourage applicants with disabilities. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) found probable cause to conclude that these actions discriminated on the basis of age and disability."

Not so good.

In late 2021, seven residents of Our Lady’s Guild House submitted a bid on the 20 Charlesgate West property, according to a December 14, 2021, article from Banker & Tradesman. Greater Boston Legal Services represented the group and asked the attorney general’s office to block any sale that would convert the building into market-rate apartments, attorney Margaret Turner told B&T.

"The charitable purpose of OLGH Inc. is to provide permanent [single-room occupancy] housing for low and moderate-income women," Turner said in the article. "The proposed sale to the highest bidder will undermine this purpose."

A Boston Globe article posted on the web site for the Fenway Community Development Corporation indicates that Fenway CDC and the Planning Office of Urban Affairs, an affordable housing developer affiliated with the Archdiocese of Boston, were interested in purchasing the Guild House and turning it into permanent affordable housing.

I've seen articles indicating that the Daughters agreed to sell the building, but I haven't seen confirmation that a sale went through, nor have I seen anything about who the purchasers might be.

Fenway Bas-relief Carving Honors Female Pioneers

From Dave Brigham:

When I first saw the work of art above, I assumed it was an old mural that had been uncovered during construction in an adjacent building. Located on the side of the Regal Fenway cinema, the bas-relief work is new, and appears to be part of a larger project honoring groundbreaking women in science and medicine.

When I happened by, the theater was under renovation, part of a project to overhaul the adjacent (and historic) Landmark Center and add a new building on the corner of Brookline Avenue and Fullerton Street. The Landmark Center, also known as 401 Park, started life in 1928 as a warehouse and distribution center for Sears, Roebuck & Company. After the retail giant closed the facility in 1988, it sat vacant for years.

See the video below for more on the latest redevelopment.

As part of the redevelopment, an office tower has risen next door, facing Brookline Ave.

OK, let's get back to the art and the subject.

The sculpture in question features Rosalind Franklin, a British chemist "whose x-ray diffraction studies provided crucial clues to the structure of DNA and quantitatively confirmed the Watson-Crick DNA model," per the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Born in London in 1920, she matriculated to Newnham College, one of two women's colleges at Cambridge University.

After receiving her degree in 1941, Franklin spent the next four years working for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. She "worked to elucidate the micro-structures of various coals and carbons, and explain why some were more permeable by water, gases, or solvents and how heating and carbonization affected permeability," according to the NLM. "In this original work, she found that the pores in coal have fine constrictions at the molecular level, which increase with heating, and vary according to the carbon content of the coal....Franklin was the first to identify and measure these micro-structures, and this fundamental work made it possible to classify coals and predict their performance to a high degree of accuracy. Her work at BCURA yielded a doctoral thesis -- she received her PhD from Cambridge in 1945 -- and five scientific papers."

It is her work related to DNA that made her sculpture-worthy, though. In 1949, she began a three-year fellowship at John T. Randall's Biophysics Unit at King's College London. It was there that she began doing x-ray diffraction studies of DNA. "Meanwhile, at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson were working on a theoretical model of DNA," the NLM continues. "Though not in close communication with Franklin, in January 1953 they gleaned crucial insights about DNA's structure from one of her x-ray diffraction photos shown to them by [a fellow scientist], and from a summary of her unpublished research submitted to the Medical Research Council. Watson and Crick never told Franklin that they had seen her materials, and they did not directly acknowledge their debt to her work when they published their classic announcement in Nature that April. Crick later admitted that Franklin was two steps away from realizing the correct structure in the spring of 1953."

So Franklin got the shaft, earning her the nickname "the dark lady of DNA," according to Wikipedia. Her trailblazing work continued nevertheless. "Working under John Desmond Bernal, Franklin led pioneering work at Birkbeck on the molecular structures of viruses," per Wikipedia. "On the day before she was to unveil the structure of tobacco mosaic virus at an international fair in Brussels, she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37 in 1958. Her team member Aaron Klug continued her research, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982."

Wow. A brilliant life cut short. I had never heard of Rosalind Franklin before making a photo of the artwork above. Now that we've learned about her, let's find out more about the artist who brought her to Boston's attention.

"Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto...has been interacting visually with the urban environment under the name of Vhils since his days as a prolific graffiti writer in the early-to-mid 2000s," per the artist's web site.

His bas-relief carving technique "was first presented to the public at the VSP group exhibition in Lisbon in 2007 and at the Cans Festival in London the following year," per the web site. "This striking form of visual poetry, showcased around the world in both indoor and outdoor settings, has been described as brutal and complex, yet imbued with a simplicity that speaks to the core of human emotions.

"An ongoing reflection on identity, on life in contemporary urban societies and their saturated environments, it explores themes such as the struggle between the aspirations of the individual and the demands of everyday life, or the erosion of cultural uniqueness in the face of the dominant model of globalised development and the increasingly uniform reality it has been imposing around the world," Vhils continues on his web site. "It speaks of effacement but also of resistance, of destruction yet also of beauty in this overwhelming setting, exploring the connections and contrasts, similarities and differences, between global and local realities."

Since 2005, Vhils has exhibited his work in more than 30 countries.

As for the project in the Fenway, Vhils says, per the LinkedIn account of Cox Engineering, which is working on the 401 Park Drive project, "As the building is intended to house leading organizations working in life sciences, the composition of the mural represents a unity between symbols and important historical personalities from this area of knowledge and iconic landmarks associated with the city of Boston.

"The intervention features 3 main figures: Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross and fought for women’s civil rights; Rosalind Franklin, the chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was essential to unlocking the secrets of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite; and Mary Mahoney, the first African-American to study and work as a professionally trained nurse in the United States and who played a foundational role in the fight against racial discrimination in the nursing profession."

I like Vhils' term "intervention." As you can see in the video below, his work is quite intricate and detailed and involves working directly with buildings and other surfaces (doors, walls) to create art.

Vhils mentions two other female science and medicine pioneers. I'm not sure where those components of the project will (or are) located. I'll keep my eyes peeled.