Tales from the Old Corner: Celebrating 300 Years

Tales from the Old Corner: Celebrating 300 Years

Susan Wilson

Tales from the Old Corner: Celebrating 300 Years

Susan Wilson h

Historic Boston Inc. Boston, Massachusetts 2018

This book was published in conjunction with the 300TH anniversary celebration of the Old Corner Bookstore building in Boston.

It was first released at a celebration in honor of

Anthony Pangaro

and in support of the building’s preservation on November 13, 2018.

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Published by Historic Boston Incorporated 20 Eustis Street, Roxbury, MA 02119 www.historicboston.org

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HBI

HISTORIC BOSTON INCORPORATED

© Text 2018 by Susan Carolyn Relyea Wilson All rights reserved.

Book design by Joanne Kaliontzis

ISBN-13: 978-0-578-40439-4 Printed in the United States of America

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Table of Contents Foreword ............................................................................. iv Introduction to an Icon ................................................... 1 In the Beginning: 17th Century Puritans .................... 4 The 18th Century Apothecary ........................................ 6 Beyond the Cradle of Liberty ....................................... 10 The 19th Century Bookstores: Ticknor and Fields ........................................................... 12 Old Corner Building Over Time .................................. 16 A Most Literary Neighborhood ................................... 2 2 Fellow Tenants — and Surviving The Great Fire ....................................... 28 Salvation in the New Century: Parnassus, Pizza, and Preservation ............................. 30 Epilogue .............................................................................. 35 iii

Foreword Countless narratives have been written about the Old Corner Bookstore building’s rich and storied past. Less has been told of its quiet but extraordinary contributions to historic preservation and economic development throughout the city of Boston.

The founders of the non-profit Historic Boston Incorporated (HBI) established the organization in 1960 to save the Old Corner Bookstore from the wrecking ball. Their decision to restore it and put it back into commercial use is their lasting contribution to the building’s survival and to historic preservation in Boston. It also set the stage for the HBI we know today.

What started with one building has become a national model of urban investment and renewal through historic preservation. Since 1979, HBI has been acquiring and rehabilitating endangered historic buildings throughout Boston’s neighborhoods. Beginning in the 1980s with historic buildings on Main Street in Charlestown, and spreading to every neighborhood of Boston, HBI has been applying the lessons learned from the Old Corner Bookstore to dozens of at-risk buildings. And by doing so, the organization has proven over-and-over again that direct intervention in the fate of endangered historic buildings and their re-use for contemporary needs is one of the most effective ways of preserving the unique character of Boston while also strengthening the social fabric of the city.

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To mark the Old Corner Bookstore building’s 300th year, HBI is pleased to introduce Susan Wilson’s new history of the site. This very special place is a physical expression of Boston over time and, as it continues to inspire us, it is likely to make more history in the centuries to come.

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Introduction to an Icon

t’s a quaint and picturesque little building, perched on the corner of School and Washington streets in downtown Boston. The modern hustle-and-bustle of commercial enterprises, both within and without, may seem at odds with the structure itself, given its old red brick façade, gambrel roof, and curiously antiquated bay windows. But the fact is, this wonderful oddity is a place where literature, history, and business have intersected, flourished, and been nourished for three centuries, in a variety of incarnations and combinations.

The building in question is, of course, the Old Corner Bookstore. And its significance to Boston and American history is legend. The editor of New York’s Home Journal once observed that, with a little exaggeration, all of Boston could be said to pass through the Old Corner in a day. That’s a bit far-fetched, of course. Still, anyone versed in Boston's literary history knows that the Old Corner Bookstore building has been a mecca for avid readers, illustrious men and women of letters, and other curious Bostonians since the mid-nineteenth century.

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Between 1845 and 1864 in particular, when the shop was run by the prestigious publishing team of Ticknor and Fields, the guests on any given day might range from Norwegian violinist Ole Bull or popular American actresses Charlotte Cushman and Fanny Kemble, to authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. British novelist Charles Dickens passed frequently through the shop’s portals, as did local literary heroes such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

When you add to this group a broad array of doctors and lawyers, ministers and midwives, artists and professors, abolitionists and librarians,

Origins of “Athens” and “The Hub” It was two of Boston’s nineteenth century literary lights that gave Boston its nicknames, often noted as “The Athens of America” and “The Hub of the Universe.” William Tudor, a founder and first editor of the North American Review and an original member of the Boston Athenaeum, is credited with making the first comparison to Athens, in a letter of 1819. Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed Boston“ the hub of the solar system” in his 1858 work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. Later generations freely interpolated and expanded Holmes’ phrase to include a much larger chunk of the heavens.

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historians and educators, retailers and restaurateurs, and just plain people, it becomes clear why the intersection of School and Washington sometimes looked a bit like Grand Central Station. What's more, it was nicknamed Parnassus Corner, after the sacred Greek mount where the Muses and Apollo once held forth. If Boston was “the Hub of the Solar System,” the bookstore was arguably the cultural “Hub of the Hub,” at least during the tenure of William D. Ticknor and James T. Fields.

But the history of the Old Corner Bookstore neither started, nor ended, with Ticknor and Fields. The building itself — a site on the Freedom Trail, the Literary Trail, and the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail — is owned and managed by Historic Boston Incorporated, a nonprofit group that saved the old bookstore structure from demolition in 1960, and continues to assist preservation efforts for other Boston landmarks.

But that’s getting a bit ahead of our story.

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In the Beginning: 17th Century Puritans

he corner on which the Old Corner Bookstore building sits is considered a prime downtown location. Oddly enough, that was also true in 1630, the year Boston was settled by the Massachusetts Bay Company. Many of the first colonists constructed crude homes near the freshwater spring that bubbled up where Spring Lane is found today. Boston’s first church, market, and townhouse (the last term meant a public building, not a private family condo) were all built within two blocks of the future site of the Old Corner Bookstore.

A prominent East Anglican Puritan named Isaac Johnson was the original owner of the bookstore site and several surrounding acres. But Johnson and his equally prominent wife, Lady Arbella Fiennes, failed to survive the severe Boston winter.

Mistress Anne Hutchinson, her husband William, and their children, who arrived in Boston on September 18, 1634, subsequently built a home on the half-acre corner lot that Johnson had once owned.

The spot was clearly at the heart of the village, where “the street leading to Roxbury” met “the lane leading to the Common.” The prestige of the area was also evidenced by the Hutchinsons’ immediate neighbor: Governor John Winthrop lived across the street, a circumstance that Mrs. Hutchinson would soon learn to regret.

Hutchinson became a popular, powerful woman, respected as a midwife and as the spouse of an established merchant. She was also a brilliant thinker, and a leader of the controversial Antinomian sect, which took issue with prevailing Puritan thought.

Hutchinson argued that both men and women could find true spirituality in the personal and the mystical — thereby challenging the Puritan establishment’s academic foundations, their religious

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disciplines, and the authenticity of their “learned clergy.” She also attracted more and more ardent female followers to the prayer meetings in her home.

Such mysticism and proto-feminism combined as a formidable affront to the eminently rational, all-male Puritan hierarchy.

As a result, Winthrop and his colleagues were incensed. In 1637, the General Court of Massachusetts banished Hutchinson for heresy. Like most religious refugees of the time, she fled to Rhode Island, along with her family and several friends. After her husband died, Hutchinson and her children moved to Long Island, where they were killed in 1643 by Siwanoy Indians who were quarreling with the area’s Dutch settlers. Two year’s after her death, Governor Winthrop waxed philosophical about women like Hutchinson, whom he thought suffered from excess intellect — from too much reading, writing, and thinking; such a woman would have had a less troubled life, wrote Winthrop in his journal, “if she had attended to her household affairs and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger.”

Mistress Hutchinson has not been forgotten by history, either locally or nationally. In New York state, both the Hutchinson River and its eponymous Parkway bear her name to this day. Two blocks up the street from her former Boston home site stands a large-than-life bronze statue of Hutchinson with the youngest of her fourteen children, on the west lawn of the Massachusetts State House. The statue, by sculptor Cyrus Dallin, was scheduled to be placed on the grounds of the Boston Public Library in 1915, but was banned because of its “too protestant” subject matter (this was five years before universal suffrage was confirmed by the nineteenth amendment). No problem, since in 1922, the statue was given an even more prominent place on the state capitol lawn. Then in 1987, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis officially pardoned Anne Hutchinson, revoking Governor Winthrop’s order of banishment made 350 years earlier.

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The 18th Century Apothecary

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t the turn of the eighteenth century, Boston was already a thriving center of the New World. Since the majority of immigrants here were still from Britain, the town began to resemble a typical English seaside village, replete with narrow winding streets and numerous docks, all lined with rows of shops and houses. Through the various pattern books brought to town — as well as the house-wrights and craftsman who moved to the colony in search of a new life — British architectural ideas clearly influenced building design in Boston during that period.

Following the Hutchinsons’ forced departure, their sturdy colonial house passed through a variety of owners and tenants, including Henry Shrimpton, remembered as “the brazier … to whom the Narragansetts brought their brass kettles to pay a debt of 1300 fathoms of wampum.” But the house — as well as its place in history — were both about to change.

An apothecary named Dr. Thomas Crease bought the Hutchinson’s old wood framed home in 1708, then lost it in the Great Fire of October 2, 1711, which swept away hundreds of downtown shops and residences. By 1718, however, the apparently well-to-do Crease had built a solid brick structure in its stead. Like many of his contemporaries, Dr. Crease constructed his progressive English-style townhouse with a shop on the ground floor and his residence

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Boston's first public school, the precursor to Boston Latin and namesake of School Street.

above. Classical features he used that were typical of that period included evenly-spaced doors with double-hung sashes of multi-panes. The building’s exterior had stately sides of rose-red brick and a sloping gambrel roof. On the School Street side, string courses of brick were laid as decorative bands dividing the building’s three stories. Squared blocks of Connecticut sandstone, known as quoins and probably at that time extending to the ground, added both visual flair and an air of importance to the exterior corners.

Though the interior and shop-level exterior has been altered over the centuries, the building’s massing and much of its original fabric remain visible today. Moreover, Dr. Crease’s apothecary building remains one of Boston’s oldest brick structures, and a rare surviving example of eighteenth-century brick, gambrel-roofed domestic architecture in Boston.

For a hundred years after Dr. Crease built his dream house, a series of pharmacists and physicians lived upstairs while selling their wares on the busy street level below. As early as 1796, there was even a bookseller who set up shop there — presaging what would become the building’s identity in the following century. By 1817, ownership had fallen to Dr. Samuel Clarke, father of the celebrated liberal thinker and Unitarian minister at King’s Chapel, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke.

During this period, little changed at the Old Corner building except the address. When Crease bought the property in 1708, the intersecting streets were known as “the main street leading to Roxbury” and Schoolhouse

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Lane (Boston Latin School had been lodged up the street since 1645). Later that same year, a town committee officially named them School Street and Cornhill. Though School Street has maintained its 1708 designation, Cornhill became Washington Street in 1824, commemorating the nation’s beloved Revolutionary-era general and first President, who frequented this area before and during America’s War for Independence and who was later celebrated here with a grand parade. After Washington Street was lengthened in 1875, the Old Corner building became Number 283. “Twohundred-eighty-three Washington” remains its address to this day, though some tenants have periodically chosen to call it “Three School Street.”

The Old Corner building today, incidentally, is a combination of Dr. Crease’s shop at Number 283 Washington and a second adjacent building.

Some ten years after Crease built his house, Andrew Cunningham, Jr., constructed a private residence at today’s 277 Washington Street. Though this land once belonged to Crease, the area was split between two people when he sold it. Some have mistaken 283 and 277 Washington as connecting segments of the same building, since their design aesthetics are quite similar. The Cunningham house remained a private residence until the turn of the nineteenth century, when the first floor was converted into a shop.

Typical of the neighborhood, several the buiding’s tenants included publishers and booksellers.

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Beyond the Cradle of Liberty

rom the time of its founding in 1630, Puritan Boston placed a premium on literature and learning. It also created numerous educational and literary institutions that bolstered that cultured image, including British North America’s first public school (Boston Latin), first college (Harvard), and first printing press (at Harvard), as well as the nation’s first major metropolitan free public library (Boston Public). Though the American colonies had declared their independence from Britain in 1776, however, the new nation still depended heavily on the Old Country for both its culture and its economy.

Boston had always had its fair share of newspapers and writers of political and religious tracts. But the most sought-after literature — poetry, novels, histories, and the like — was invariably imported from England and Europe, not produced in the fresh-faced and brash young town.

The War for Independence had crowned Boston as the Birthplace of the Revolution, the Cradle of Liberty, and, as a result, an important political hub of the nation. But as the nineteenth century emerged, that all changed as places like New York City and Washington, D.C., began to wield much more political clout. In 1822, the town of Boston became the city of Boston.

And in the following decades, the town that had once been the center of America’s political revolution experienced what might be called a literary revolution. Some say it started on August 31, 1837, when Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered “The American Scholar” speech to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, an oration which Oliver Wendell Holmes called America's “Intellectual Declaration of Independence from the Old World and its literature.” Others suggest that it was a natural evolution of Boston’s rapidlygrowing wealth, literary interests, and educational opportunities — and that Boston became America’s literary mecca thanks to a broad, well-funded, community effort to make the city the cultural envy of the nation.

The moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex machinery to set a writer in motion.

— Henry James, Hawthorne

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Louisa May Alcott

Ralph Waldo Emerson

William Lloyd Garrison

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Julia Ward Howe

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Henry David Thoreau

Whatever the reasons, the city of Boston — creatively linked with Cambridge and Concord — became the spawning ground for an astonishing number of innovative thinkers, writers, poets, and social activists, whose interests ranged from transcendentalism and abolitionism to women’s rights and spiritual enlightenment. Among the heroes of this era were such household names as Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Julia Ward Howe.

But the evolution of Boston from Cradle of Liberty to Cradle of Civilization — and the city’s worldwide renown as the Athens of America and the Hub of the Solar System — required more than just innovative authors. It also counted on the creation of publishing houses, periodicals, bookstores, colleges, and libraries, and the fostering of hungry literary audiences, to support this new generation of talent. There’s no question that what became known as the Golden Age of American Literature might not have evolved without that quaint and picturesque building on the corner of School and Washington streets.

And that is exactly where Thomas Crease’s corner shop came into play.

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The 19th Century Bookstores: Ticknor and Fields

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he first glimmer of change for the old apothecary became visible in 1829, when young Timothy Harrington Carter obtained a lease from building owner George Brimmer for both the structure and land at what is now 283 Washington Street. Carter was a former bookseller’s apprentice from Lancaster, Massachusetts, who harbored ambitious ideas about the future of book publishing. He envisioned the old Crease house as an ideal location for the world of books, and spent $7,000 altering the aging pharmacy and private residence into a modern commercial space.

Carter added projecting, small-paned windows to the ground floor, giving the shop what’s been called a “Dickensian London touch.” He also re-bricked that first story and lowered the floor three to four steps to street level. On the School Street side, where Thomas Crease once had a garden, Carter added a brick extension to his structure — the section numbered 5, 7, and 11 School Street today. The corner apothecary was transformed into a bookshop, while the extension housed seven printing presses, first run by Canadian horses and later by steam (early printing presses were initially run by manpower, followed by horsepower, waterpower, and finally, steam). Consistent with the nation’s new century was the “new look” given those School Street extensions to the Old Corner. Like many commercial structures of the era, the grouping of three buildings was three stories tall and Neoclassical in design: larger shop windows were set on the first floor, while double-hung sash windows with multi-panes of glass adorned the floors above. Walls were fabricated from smooth, unadorned brick, topped by shallow pitched gable and hip roofs.

Taken together, the five buildings on Washington and School are a rare example of architectural and commercial history that has survived into the twenty-first century. It’s quite astonishing to find two vintage eighteenth century homes and workplaces in downtown Boston paired with an early nineteenth century complex of commercial buildings.

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In 1829, Timothy Carter set himself up as a silent partner, with brother Richard Carter and Charles Hendee as booksellers (a fourteen-year-old youngster named James T. Fields, from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was hired as an apprentice not long thereafter), and the Old Corner Bookstore was officially born, with Carter & Hendee as the first of ten firms of booksellers and publishers to be housed there over the next seventyfive years.

In 1833, Carter & Hendee were replaced by Allen & Ticknor.

When John Allen left that company in 1836, William D. Ticknor (1810Fields, Hawthorne, and Ticknor 1864) continued his book business alone. The consistent threads through these three original firms was one building — the Old Corner Bookstore — and one apprentice, the bright, witty, charming, versatile, and ambitious “Jamie” Fields (1817-1881).

While carefully and cheerfully scrutinizing his employers, other publishers and booksellers, artists, authors, and the book-browsing public, Fields developed a vision of the Old Corner as a magnet for the authors who were then creating the first body of truly American literature. Many of these writers, including Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier, lived in New England. Ticknor came to believe in Fields’ vision. In 1842 he made Fields a junior partner, and by 1845 the firm was officially known as Ticknor and Fields.

Before promoting Fields, Ticknor had a shop that was solid but nondescript, with no real specialty or personality. As with many booksellers of the day, he also published works now and then — generally at the authors’ risk and expense. But with the ideas, personality, and push of Fields, and the financial backing of investor John Reed, Jr., Ticknor and Fields eventually ushered in a whole new era of Boston book publishing.

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Fields wanted to publish and sell fine American and English literature, and his tactics were brilliant. At that time, authors were neither bound by legal contracts to a single publisher nor protected from later “pirate� editions of their work. Hence, there was little sense of loyalty or obligation between author and publisher. It was also customary for authors to be paid in a standard lump sum for their manuscripts. To lure authors and secure exclusive American publishing rights, Fields formulated the royalty system, which gave authors both the standard manuscript sum and ten percent of retail sales.

He also secured ownership of prestigious magazines like the North American Review (founded in 1815) and the fledgling Atlantic Monthly (founded at the Parker House in 1857), for which his writers became the literary backbone.

Instead of pirating the works of English authors, which was the general practice among American publishers, Fields either paid English authors a flat sum for their manuscripts or placed them on the same royalty basis as American authors. By the 1850s, these practices had made Fields the American publisher and friend of many of the greatest English writers of the time including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Browning, Thomas De Quincey, Matthew Arnold, and Leigh Hunt.

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Old Co The Family Tree of Booksellers in the 19th Century Old Corner Bookstore Building Carter & Hendee was the first of ten firms of booksellers and publishers to be housed in the Old Corner over the next seventy-five years.

Carter & Hendee Allen & Ticknor William D. Ticknor & Co. Ticknor, Reed and Fields Ticknor and Fields E. P. Dutton & Co. A. Williams & Co. Cupples, Upham & Co. Damrell & Upham The Old Corner Bookstore, Inc.

1829 1833 1836 1845 1854 1865 1869 1883 1887

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(moved to 27 and 29 Bromfield St., 1903, then to 50 Bromfield St., 1924)

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From 1982-1997, The Globe Corner Bookstore occupied the Old Corner building, selling regional literature and travel books. Then from 1998 until 2003, the Boston Globe Company Store sold local books and the newspaper's photographs and newspaper covers.

after renovation, 1960s

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rner Building over time

c.1869

c.1865

c.1929

1960s

1980s

Today

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But none of these British authors and poets was as important to Jamie Fields as literary superstar Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Fields’ first encounter with Dickens was in 1842, during Dickens’ first American tour. The two remained friends following that Boston sojourn, setting the stage for twenty-five years later, when Fields organized and publicized Dickens’ lucrative American lecture tour — the second of only two trips he ever made to the United States.

Dickens chose the Parker House on School Street as his home base for five months during his 1867-68 stateside visit. After arriving in Boston Harbor on November 19, 1867, the novelist was whisked away to the Parker House, accompanied by James T. Fields, then ushered into luxurious surroundings by the hotel’s owner and founder, Harvey Parker. While there, he dined with members of the prestigious Saturday Club, gave his first public American reading of A Christmas Carol at Tremont Temple, and generally created quite a stir. Guards were regularly assigned to his hotel room door since curious fans were eager to catch a glimpse of the colorful author preening and practicing his animated talks in front of a large mirror. When Dickens made Boston and the Parker House home, incidentally, Christmas — once actually “banned” in Boston — was slowly making a comeback. The author and his popular Christmas Carol contributed greatly to the modern version of Christmas that Boston came to embrace, stressing the importance of charity and good will towards all humankind.

Dickens made a wise choice in Jamie Fields during this American tour. He knew that Fields had long been a master of promotion. Fields was also a huckster who planted publicity in periodicals, “bought” reviewers, wrote his own glowing reviews under false names, and fabricated accolades for his stars. Equally important, he became the friend, protector, literary counselor, and guardian of his flock of writers. While the more solitary Ticknor had occupied a counting room at the back of the old shop’s book-lined sales floor, Fields held court in a cozy rear nook behind a green curtain. There, explains William S. Tryon in his 1963 book, Parnassus Corner, Jamie Fields blossomed. “In what appeared to be

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hopeless confusion he wrote his letters, read his manuscripts, and entertained his friends. Amid whispered consultations, endless talk and bright anecdotes, jokes and shouts of laughter, Fields was creating something new in the literary and business world of America.”

James T. Fields had a special talent for uncovering, encouraging, and publishing gems by local writers. One of his favorite stories, as recounted in his Yesterdays with Authors (1871), was pulling a particular manuscript from the reclusive Nathaniel Hawthorne. True or not — and there is a question about its authenticity — it’s nevertheless a fine tale:

I was hurrying down the stairs when [Hawthorne] called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a moment. Then quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of manuscript in his hands, he said: “How in Heaven’s name did you know this thing was there? As you have found me out, take what I have written, and tell me, after you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It is either very good or very bad, —I don’t know which.”

On my way up to Boston I read the germ of “The Scarlet Letter.”

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Fields, of course, had his literary misses as well. When a young teacher named Louisa May Alcott brought him some recent work, he responded, “Stick to your teaching; you can’t write.” He then loaned the young Alcott forty dollars for classroom books and chairs, saying she could return the cash if and when she made her fortune.

Three years after the roaring success of Little Women (1868), Alcott sent Fields the cash, along with a brief, bemused note:

Dear Mr. Fields Once upon a time you lent me forty dollars, kindly saying I might return them when I had made ‘a pot of gold.’

As the miracle has been unexpectedly wrought I wish to fulfil my part of the bargain, & herewith repay my debt with many thanks.

Very truly yours L. M. ALCOTT

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Illustration from

Little Women

In From the Easy Chair (1892-1894), George William Curtis beautifully described the allure of Fields and the Old Corner: The annals of publishing and the traditions of publishers in this country will always mention the little Corner Bookstore in Boston, …and those who recall it in other days will always remember the curtained desk at which poet and philosopher and historian and divine, and the doubting, timid young author, were sure to see the bright face and to hear the hearty welcome of James T. Fields. What a crowded, busy shop it was, with the shelves full of books, and piles of books upon the counters and tables…

[Here, at the Old Corner Bookstore] was the Exchange of Wit, the Rialto of current good things, the hub of the Hub. …It was a very remarkable group of men — indeed, it was the first group of really great American authors — which familiarly frequented the corner as guests of [Jamie] Fields. …It was that circle which compelled the world to acknowledge that there was an American literature. Of most of these authors the house at the corner came to be the publishers, and to the end they maintained the warmest relations with Fields, who was not their publisher only, but their apprecitive and sympathetic friend.

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While James T. Fields gained everlasting renown as the man who put the Old Corner Bookstore on the literary map of America, some of his peers have been less heralded by history. Fields’ first wife, Eliza Josephine Willard, died a few months after their marriage in 1850.

Four years later, he married Eliza’s 19-year-old cousin, Annie Adams. It was Annie Adams Fields (1834-1915) who helped consolidate Ticknor and Fields’ literary relations by hosting salons for authors in the Fields home on Charles Street. She also supported the work of many women writers of her time, in part by bringing together luminaries like Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett.

As it turned out, Annie Fields became a cultural icon herself, holding court and hosting salons for her literary, theatrical, and artistic friends in her home at 148 (originally 37) Charles Street. Her guests included many of the Ticknor and Fields and Saturday Club regulars, as well as Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) — Annie’s companion for many years in a “Boston marriage” following the death of husband Jamie — and their protégée, Willa Cather. Other literary women supported by Annie Fields included poet Louise Imogen Guiney and author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, in an 1881 Christmas letter to Annie Fields, recalled the galaxy of talent that congregated in her Charles Street home:

Under your roof I have met more visitors to be remembered than under any other. But for your hospitality I should never have had the privilege of personal acquaintance with famous writers and artists whom I can now recall as I saw them, talked with them, heard them in that pleasant library, that most lively and agreeable dining-room.

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A Most Literary Neighborhood

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he Old Corner Bookstore building was situated in the epicenter of an unusually literary neighborhood. Even in colonial and early federal times, the area near Cornhill and School Streets was a bustling center of book publishing and sales. Edgar Allan Poe’s first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, for example, was published anonymously in 1827 in a building at the corner of Washington and State (formerly King) streets. The Old Corner’s Jamie Fields, however, took no interest in Poe and deliberately shunned him for criticizing Ticknor and Fields’ authors.

Another nearby literary magnet was the Parker House, a first-class hotel and restaurant founded at the upper end of School Street in 1855.

Harvey Parker’s “Marble Palace” provided a meeting place for many of the brightest minds of the ninteteenth century in the form of the Saturday Club, a select group of talented men who assembled there on the last Saturday afternoon of each month. Though the Club’s members varied over the decades, the early elite included philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, poets John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “autocrat of the breakfast table,” Oliver Wendell Holmes — and, of course, the Old Corner’s Jamie Fields.

The Saturday Club’s festive roundtables were often taken up with poetry readings, impassioned discussions, and book critiques. According to enduring urban legends, some great moments in literary history transpired in those

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Parker House afternoons. There, in the folds of the Saturday Club, Longfellow drafted portions of “Paul Revere’s Ride,” the idea for The Atlantic Monthly was born, and Dickens gave his first American reading of A Christmas Carol (All of these claims have been contested, but none definitively proven one way or the other). As important to the group as intellectual pursuit, however, was camaraderie — and a hefty dose of mirth, gossip, revelry, and seven-course meals, all washed down with endless elixirs.

One block up the street from the Parker House, at 10 1/2 Beacon Street, stood the Boston Athenaeum. One of the oldest cultural institutions and the largest membership library in North America, the Athenaeum was, by 1851, one of the five largest libraries in America, boasting 50,000 volumes — the same number as the Library of Congress. Feminist journalist Margaret Fuller studied there, as did statesman Daniel Webster, author Lydia Maria Child, poet Amy Lowell, and the aforementioned Longfellow, Holmes, and company.

Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was typical among the Athenaeum’s nineteenth-century members: he would take the train to Boston from his home in Concord, then visit the Old Corner Bookstore and the Athenaeum before dining at the Parker House. Less typical, perhaps, was Nathaniel Hawthorne, who communed with the polite ghost of one Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris in the old Athenaeum’s reading room in 1842, while the specter was browsing over the Boston Post.

The Parker House in 1855.

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Hawthorne often wandered the neighborhood here after leaving the Athenaeum or the Old Corner. A fan of graveyards and tombstone inscriptions, the young writer may — or may not — have gotten inspiration for the Hester Prynne character of The Scarlet Letter from a headstone in the nearby King’s Chapel Burying Ground. In Yesterdays with Authors, Jamie Fields recalled Hawthorne’s affinity for burying grounds: “He very rarely described himself as inside a church, but he liked to wander among the graves in the churchyards and read the epitaphs on the moss-grown slabs.”

Beginning in the 1920s, a legend grew that the gravestone of Elizabeth Pain (d. 1704) was a source for the character of Hester Prynne. Though the connection is unsubstantiated and unlikely, the heraldic symbol on Pain’s grave, on the path nearest the side wall of King’s Chapel, can be vaguely seen to resemble a stylized “A.” Inspired by Pain’s headstone or not, the vision of Hester Prynne’s grave provided Hawthorne with a chilling finish to his novel:

And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King’s Chapel has since been built. …All around there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate…there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon… “ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.”

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Newspaper Row, 1940s

The neighborhood’s literary connections extended beyond beautifully bound books and inspirational burying grounds. From the nineteenth through the middle of the twentieth century, the area around Washington, Court, and State streets was known as Newspaper Row. This strip was once the home of many of Boston’s most powerful newspapers — including the Boston Globe, the Transcript, the Herald, the Post, the Traveller, and the Journal — and was renowned as “the Cradle of American Journalism” (after fiftynine years in in Dorchester, the headquarters of the Boston Globe returned to the neighborhood in 2017). Off Washington Street is the long alcove known as Pi Alley, so named for the small jumbles of press type often strewn about there.

Though modern Bostonians have grown used to seeing two daily newspapers, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, their forebears were offered many more newspapers, and many more editions. In The Proper Bostonians (1947), Cleveland Amory mused on the heyday of the old Transcript, the Hub’s society rag, whose offices stood at the corner of Milk and Washington streets:

It is doubtful if Boston’s institution men would ever have achieved such prominence in their city if they had not had a voice to carry their “way of life” to the Proper Bostonian masses. They found this voice in one of the all-time curiosities of American journalism, the Boston Evening Transcript …Not to read the Transcript was unthinkable. It was never a newspaper in the vulgar sense of the word. The story of three representatives of the press who were received into a Beacon Hill home with a servant’s announcement, “Two reporters from the papers, Sir, and a gentleman from the Transcript,” was actually a legend once removed from the London Times, but it became the Boston paper’s trademark. The loyalty of its readers was proverbial. In the wind of its editorial opinion they swayed, said the poet T.S. Eliot, “like a field of ripe corn.”

Detail from Map of the Central

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Blue highlights show newspaper offices and their proximity to the Old Corner Bookstore.

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Business District of Boston, 1896.

Fellow Tenants — and Surviving The Great Fire

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uring the seventy-five year period that ten consecutive firms of booksellers and publishers operated in the Old Corner building, a variety of tradesmen and women attracted customers to their shops in other sections of the same complex. Among the most prominent nineteenth century businesses were bookbinder George Gould, printer Isaac Butts, bootmaker Isaac Waitt, and the toy-vending Callender family. Even more notorious was famed Boston hairdresser, William Dudley, as well as Mrs. Abner Haven, whose popular, packed coffee room was known by contemporaries as serving “perfect toast,” thick lemon pie, and “an exhilarating boiled coffee suspected of brandy infusion.”

All of the businesses at the corner of School and Washington, incidentally, survived 1872 intact. On November 9 of that year, the most destructive fire in Boston history began in the basement boiler of a drygoods store and hoop-skirt factory on the corner of Summer and Kingston streets. From this initial spark, flames quickly lept across Summer to Otis Street, charring roofs, exploding windows, and sending off sheets of flame. The wind-fueled destruction swept Northeast and East, sending glowing bodies of burning gas and meteor-like granite blocks from mansard roof to mansard roof. Twenty hours later, most of the city blocks from Washington Street down to Boston Harbor, and from Summer Street to the backside of State Street had been scorched into an unrecognizable skeletal mass of melted granite and mounds of rubble. The Great Boston Fire of 1872 consumed some 60 acres of goods and 776 buildings, causing an estimated $60 to $75 million in damage.

But unlike the Great Fire of 1711 — which consumed Thomas Crease’s original corner shop — the 1872 conflagration was stopped at the Old South Meetinghouse, diagonally across Washington Street from the Old Corner.

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Salvation in the New Century: Parnassus, Pizza, and Preservation

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y the turn of the twentieth century, much had changed at the Old Corner Bookstore building. After William Ticknor died in 1864, Jamie Fields assumed sole ownership and moved the business to more spacious quarters at 125 Tremont Street, across from the Park Street Church.

The firm’s descendants later merged with The Riverside Press, established

by Henry Houghton in 1852, which evolved into Houghton Mifflin and Company, now Houghton Mifflin Harcout (in 1979, Houghton Mifflin Company restored the Ticknor and Fields imprint as a tribute to its predecessor).

The last of the ten booksellers to inhabit the corner building departed in 1903, though they used the name Old Corner Bookstore for their new, larger space on Bromfield Street. On Christmas Eve of 1979, that Old Corner Bookstore — then owned by Doubleday Books — closed its Bromfield Street doors and the business, a victim of competition from huge bookstore chains.

In the decades after 1903, the building at the corner of School and Washington went through a variety of incarnations. A local news item from 1923 noted that the former Parnasus Corner was then home to “a tobacco store,

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Oh, that some angel or group of angels would do this, for there would be grave difficulties in attempting to raise the money from the general public. Yet no more appropriate building remains to be preserved as a memorial of this period.

— M.A. DeWolfe Howe

a shoe-shine parlor, a victrola store, a haberdashery, a barber shop, a candy shop and an armchair lunchroom.” In that same article, the author bemoaned that “Its ancient brick walls … have been painted gray and covered with billboards. Its doorways blaze with electric signs day and night, its hallway has been sheathed with marble, its first-floor walls have been almost completely replaced by plate-glass windows.”

As the decades evolved, so did the building’s occupants. A men’s clothing store filled the first floor of the building in the 1920s and early ‘30s, followed by the United Cigar Store through the 1940s, then Pizza City in the ‘50s. The first floor of 5 and 7 School Street was generally a restaurant, starting with

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Albiani Lunch then, by the 1950s, Sandwich Time. Throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, Lawrence’s Tavern occupied the first floor of 11 School Street, while the upper floors were largely filled by offices of the Rosen Talking Machine Company.

By 1960, the nearly unrecognizable, and even more badly deteriorated Old Corner building hosted a massive billboard for the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank and was most prominently home to a pizza parlor plastered with billboards advertising “15 cents, Sliced Crispy Pizza.” Meanwhile, urban renewal was taking its toll on Boston. Certain developers viewed the building on the corner of School and Washington as worthless — and a prime space for a downtown parking garage.

In response to the threat of demolition, a public-spirited group of Bostonians — including Athenaeum director Walter Muir Whitehill and John Codman, Chairman of the Beacon Hill Architectural Commission — organized the nonprofit organization Historic Boston Incorporated.

With encouragement from the City of Boston, generous contributions of some $100,000 from dozens of private donors throughout the country, and a bank loan, HBI took title to the Old Corner building on December 30, 1960. The cost was $275,000 for the entire L-shaped complex, which included both the expanded 1829 bookstore building at 283 Washington and the attached Andrew Cunningham House at 277.

Historic Boston’s goal was to prove that small, historic, commercial buildings did not have to be turned into museums that were exempt from city taxes, and that such structures

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could indeed contribute to the city’s tax base and add value to the surrounding neighborhood without sacrificing their historic uses and appearances.

Hence, between 1960 and 1985, hundreds of thousands of dollars were used restoring the building’s exterior to what was thought to be its mid-nineteenth century look and modernizing its interior to accommodate contemporary needs for retail sales and office spaces.

In the beginning, Historic Boston Incorporated needed help to make this possible.

And in 1965, the Boston Globe provided the answer. It lent Historic Boston money to repay its bank loan, and agreed to restore the corner building in exchange for a long-term lease. For almost two decades, the Globe used the ground floor for in-town classified advertising offices, which were located amidst a mini-museum of the bookstore’s history. From 1982 to 1997, the building housed the busy Globe Corner Bookstore (a division of the Old Corner Bookstore, Inc.), which specialized in maps and books focusing on Boston and New England history as well as world travel. By the early 1990s, Historic Boston Incorporated, the Globe Pequot Press, the Liberty Bank, the Body Shop, Copley Flair, and other businesses had offices in other sections of the corner complex. During the winter holiday season, the Old Corner was also the downtown headquarters for the Boston Globe’s Santa, a charity that purchased toys for children with money contributed by Globe readers. Later that decade, the Boston Globe set up its own store space on site, selling Globe products and tourist memoribilia, while continuing to lease office space in the upper floors. They also provided space to non-profit philanthropic agencies like the Freedom Trail Foundation and the Boston Adult Literacy Fund.

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As downtown commercial real estate values soared, the Old Corner building’s value also increased. A national discount jewelry chain, Ultra Diamonds, occupied the primary corner retail space from 2005 until the company declared bankruptcy four years later. After the space was briefly used as a showroom for crafts created by students and faculty of North Bennet Street School, it was reinvented yet again as a Chipotle Mexican Grill.

Throughout these years of hosting varying tenants — some notably more suitable than others — Historic Boston Incorporated continued to care for their beloved commercial complex far better than the building’s previous owners. In the 1990s, they used nineteenth century photographic evidence to begin restoring the building exterior to its actual historic appearance — rather than the conjectural ones that preceded. At the end of the decade, Historic Boston commissioned a comprehensive historic structures report, aided by a matching grant from the Massachusetts Historical Commission’s Preservation Projects Fund. The report described the architectural history of the buildings, outlined standards and criteria for future changes, and established a detailed timeline of the various uses of this site as a commercial center for almost three centuries. The report confirmed that, in addition to its significance to Boston’s literary heritage, the Old Corner was a case study in the evolution of historic preservation practices.

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Epilogue

oday, hundreds of locals and visitors still bustle by, and wander through, the old brick building at the corner of School and Washington each day. Because the building is a site on historic Boston tours — including the Freedom Trail, the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, various downtown trolleys, and literary tours now given by Boston by Foot — some are aware of its historic significance. The Old Corner’s inclusion in Boston’s new Literary Cultural District, formed in 2014, also raised the historic profile of the building.

It’s ironic, however, that so many people still don’t know that they’re standing on a spot that was once home to radical Puritans, revolutionary publishers, commercial entrepreneurs, crispy sliced pizza ... and a potential parking garage. And it’s even more doubtful they’re aware that they’re in a structure that needed saving more than half a century back — and is now dedicated to saving others.

Saving other buildings, in fact, has been the primary goal of Historic Boston Incorporated for decades. Once stabilized and secure, the Old Corner Bookstore building became both the endowment and the home of HBI, supporting preservation projects in all parts of the city and providing a source of credibility for a charitable institution engaged in business transactions to preserve Boston’s cultural heritage.

Today HBI oversees preservation projects which foster stability in Boston’s neighborhoods, catalyze economic renewal in transitional areas of the city, and leverage additional public and private support. As it rehabilitates some of the city's most historic buildings, HBI deploys high quality restoration standards and works with surrounding neighborhood residents to plan those projects, thereby engaging new generations of Bostonians in the preservation of their history.

All of which simply shows that history was indeed made — and continues to be made — both in, and because of, the hallowed Old Corner Bookstore building.

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About the Author Susan Wilson

is an award-winning professional author, photographer, multimedia artist, and public historian, as well as a longtime member of the Boston historic community.

After earning a B.A. and M.A. in history from Tufts University, and teaching history at both the secondary school and college levels, Susan moved into journalism, photojournalism, studio photography, historic consulting to area trails and sites, and authoring accessible, multicultural books on Boston history, which include Boston Sites and Insights, Garden of Memories, The Literary Trail of Greater Boston, and Heaven, By Hotel Standards: The History of The Omni Parker House. A member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, she is the official House Historian of the Omni Parker House and a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women Studies Research Center.

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Image Credits pp. iii, 1, 12-13, 14, 16, 17, 30, 31, 32, courtesy Historic Boston Incorporated pp. 6, 7, 10, 22, 23, 24 courtesy the Omni Parker House pp. 3, 4, 36 © Susan Wilson p. 28 courtesy the Boston Public Library p. 34 © Joanne Kaliontzis.

All other images are public domain and accessed via various online resources.

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I never can go into that famous Corner Bookstore and look over the new books in the row before me as I enter the door, without seeing half a dozen which I want to read or at least know about.

The titles of many of them interest me. I look into one or two, perhaps. I have sometimes picked up a line of a sentence, in those momentary glances through the uncut leaves of a new book, which I have never forgotten.

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— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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HBI

HISTORIC BOSTON INCORPORATED

www.historicboston.org