adaptive reuse

Former Essex County Jail // 1811

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The former Essex County Jail is a large and significant building in Salem, Massachusetts, that has seen a recent rebirth thanks to the intersection of historic preservation and the demand for new housing in many New England communities. Constructed of large, Rockport granite blocks, the building was constructed in two phases—the section to the east was constructed in 1811-13 while the parallel west wing dates to 1884, with each of the construction dates inscribed at the top of the pediments on the south elevation. Completing the complex is the 1813 Jailer’s Residence which sits at the edge of the now enclosed courtyard. Those who were committed here were largely sentenced to short terms, many for the offense of drunkenness or petty theft. Inside, prisoners did all the labor, such as cooking, baking, firing the boilers, etc., with the female inmates making clothing for all inmates. The jail was in operation until 1991, and at that time was considered the oldest active penitentiary in the United States. Years prior, in 1984, several detainees had successfully sued the county for inadequate living conditions, leading to the closure of the building. A preservation restriction was established for the building and in 2009, the property was conveyed to a developer who converted the complex into 23 apartments, with 19 in the old jail, three in the old jail keeper’s residence, and one in a converted carriage house. The great preservation/adaptive reuse firm of Finegold Alexander Architects furnished the plans for the successful renovation that provided a new life for a once crumbling eyesore.

First Baptist Church of Salem – Essex Law Library // 1805

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The First Baptist Church of Salem was built in 1805 on Federal Street and is the oldest brick meetinghouse in Salem. The local Baptist congregation was established in 1804 when 24 parishioners formed the First Baptist Church, and began gathering funds to elect a pastor and build a house of worship. At the time, Baptists were a religious minority in Massachusetts, where nearly all churches were Congregational, so against large odds, the parishioners funded a brick building and lot on the prominent Federal Street in Salem. The structure was completed by 1805 and is said to have been one of only fifty brick structures that stood in the city at the time. A major renovation to the building occurred in 1850, when the church was renovated in the Italianate style. Its three bays are articulated as an English basement containing three identical entrances framed in heavy rusticated brownstone. A belt course separates this basement from a principal story composed of tall arched windows capped by drip-molded brownstone. A lunette window is the centerpiece of the strongly projecting modillioned pediment. The entire composition is very pleasing and showcases the ever-evolving architectural tastes in the 19th century. A tower was later removed due to structural issues. In the early 21st century, the site of the church was needed for an expansion of the Essex County Courts. The congregation sold the property and in the following year, the old brick church was moved a couple hundred feet to the west and restored and was converted into a law library for the new courthouse. Talk about historic preservation at work!

Salem Christian Science Church – Witch Dungeon Museum // 1897

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This Shingle-style church building on Lynde Street in Salem, Massachusetts, was built in 1897 as a satellite chapel for the First Congregational Society in Salem. The chapel was constructed from designs by the Boston-based architect Edward B. Stratton. From 1908 to 1979, the building was owned by the Christian Science Church and was eventually sold to private ownership in 1979, where it has since been home to the Witch Dungeon Museum. The building has retained much of its original design, including the large Gothic sanctuary window, tower, and decorative trusses at the gable. Sadly, the original shingles have been replaced by later siding.  

Old Salem Central Fire House // 1861

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This mid-19th century brick structure on Church Street in Salem, Massachusetts, was built as the Central Fire House for the City. The Salem Fire Engine House was erected in 1861 from plans by an unidentified architect, in an eclectic style focused on function over frills. The façade is dominated by three engine bays with five windows on the second floor, surmounted by a decorative brick cornice. The hidden feature of the fire house is the three-story hose-drying tower capped by a slate mansard roof at the rear of the building. This building remained a fire house for 115 years until 1976, when due to larger fire engines and the tight constraints of the lot and surrounding streets, made use of the building a burden for fire-fighting. The City of Salem sold the building to private owners in 1976  for $24,000, and they underwent renovations to the building from designs by David Jaquith undertaken under the direction of the Salem Redevelopment Authority which sought to promote renovation of select historic buildings within the Downtown Salem Historic District. The recessed entrances through the old engine doors is a nice touch and retains the original fabric of the building. The old Salem Central Fire House is now occupied by Crazy Good Kitchen and the East Regiment Beer Company.

Salem Water Company Offices // 1879

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Salem, Massachusetts, was first settled by Europeans in 1626, and it would take 170 years until in 1796, an organization of citizens was established for the purpose of supplying the inhabitants generally of Salem and Danvers with pure spring water. The Salem and Danvers Aqueduct Company was incorporated in 1797  “for the purpose of conveying fresh water by subterraneous pipes into the towns of Salem & Danvers.” As Salem grew, the need for a more central water district and distribution network became a necessity for the health and prosperity of the city. A 1864 law allowed Salem to construct its own water works, and it formed a Board of Water Commissioners who designed and constructed the system. From this, funding was acquired and paid for the laying of tens of thousands of feet of subterranean water distribution pipes connecting the reservoir to buildings and hydrants in Salem. Offices of the Waterworks were scattered and obsolete until 1877, when funds for the construction of this structure at 32-34 Church Street were set aside as the new Water Department Offices. Completed by 1879, the building is a great example of a Romanesque/Italianate style masonry structure with corbelled cornice and arched openings. According to the city directories, this building continued to operate as the Salem Water Works into the late 1930s. By 1945, it was the headquarters of the United States War Price & Rationing Board. In 1964, it held a number of city offices including: Civil Defense headquarters, Fire Department headquarters, Licensing Board, Planning Board, and the City Veterans Service, before being sold by the City of Salem to private ownership in 1976.

Roughwood Estate Carriage House // 1891

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Built on the expansive grounds of “Roughwood”, a country estate in Brookline, Massachusetts, this former carriage house has seen many iterations in its lifetime. Like the mansion house, the carriage house is a blending of Queen Anne/Shingle styles with fieldstone and shingle construction, designed by the architectural firm of Andrews, Jacques & Rantoul. When the Roughwood Estate was purchased and converted to Pine Manor College, the carriage house was adaptively reused and added onto as the Annenberg Library with a large imaginatively designed wing by Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson and Abbott completed in 1986. The building remains as a library as part of the newly established Messina College, a campus of Boston College, which opened in July 2024 for over 100 first-generation college students. Gotta love adaptive reuse!

Wright Carriage House – Soule Recreation Center // 1897

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The Soule Recreation Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, was originally the stable and carriage house on the John G. Wright estate. John Gordon Wright (1843-1912), was a Boston wool merchant who purchased farmland on this site in the 1890s and hired architects Chapman & Frazer , to design an estate house (since demolished), and this building to serve as a carriage house and stable for horses. The stone Tudor Revival style mansion house was complemented by the earlier wood-frame Tudor carriage house, resembling an English manor with grounds designed and laid-out by the Olmsted firm. In 1942, the property was purchased by the Rivers School (now located in Weston) and converted into classrooms and administrative offices for the private school. When the school moved to Weston, the Town of Brookline in 1961 bought property for recreational purposes. Sadly, in 1967, the mansion house burned down, but the carriage house and gate lodge remain as lasting remnants of a once great Brookline estate.

Boston Young Men’s Christian Union Building // 1875

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The Boston Young Men’s Christian Union was founded in 1851 by a group of Harvard students as a biblical and christian literature discussion group, which incorporated the following year. First located on School Street, the organization’s activities were to provide a focal point for the intellectual, religious, and social life of primarily middle-class, well-educated Christians. The organization grew to the point that a new building was needed, and in 1873, a site on Boylston Street was acquired as a perfect central location for the group. Architect Nathaniel J. Bradlee of Bradlee and Winslow was hired to design the structure, principally because Mr. Bradlee by then a prominent architect and public figure, was also a life member of the Union and the brother of one of its founders. The building was completed in 1875 and included ground floor retail with an auditorium, gymnasium, library, social and game rooms, and offices for the Union above and behind. Designed in the High Victorian/Ruskinian Gothic style, derived from a mixture of English, Italian, French, and some German Gothic precedents, the style emphasized complicated, asymmetrical massing, polychromy, ornate details, and lancet or Gothic arched openings, in this building a sandstone facade was used. The building became a City of Boston Landmark in 1977. In 2016, the building was converted to an affordable housing development by The Architectural Team Inc., and called “The Union”. The development provides 46 units of affordable housing, including 25 targeted to those who have experienced homelessness. What a great rebirth of the building. Historic Preservation and Affordable Housing can work together and create great projects.

Little Building // 1917

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The Little Building sits prominently at the busy corner of Boylston and Tremont streets overlooking the Boston Common. Like the Colonial Theater next door, the Little Building was designed by architect Clarence Blackall and named after its developer and owner, John Mason Little. Blackall designed the Little Building in the Neo-Gothic style with a steel frame and a two-story Tudor-arched entrance on Boylston Street. The original facade was granite and cast stone, and the floors were made from reinforced concrete. The building replaced the Hotel Pelham which occupied the site since the 1850s. After being completed in 1917, the Little Building was considered significant enough that it was featured in American Architect and Building News, highlighting many architectural details inside and out. The Little Building was advertised as a “City Under One Roof” with 600 offices, dozens of shops, a post office, restaurants, and connections to the nearby subway and theaters. Emerson College purchased the Little Building in March 1994 for $5 million and converted the building to dormitories. After years of deteriorating masonry, Emerson College hired Elkus Manfredi Architects to oversee a full renovation of the building, including a sweeping facade restoration and the insertion of three glazed elevations between street-facing light wells. The “new” Little Building is a splendid re-imagining of a historic building, showing how old buildings can be renovated to meet contemporary uses through well intentioned design and care.

Walker Building // 1891

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On Boylston Street overlooking the Boston Common, this historic building with two distinct parts is not photographed as much as some of its neighbors, but it is an important visual reminder of the period of growth and development in the city in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is the Walker Building, an early office building that was constructed beginning in 1891 in two phases by owner Joseph W. Walker. Mr. Walker hired the architectural firm of Winslow & Wetherell to design the building, which was finished in the Romanesque Revival style with a notable cornice with nine-bay arcade of arched windows and ornate wreath and swag motifs. A major tenant in the building was the Boston office of the S. S. White Dental Manufacturing Company, the largest dental manufacturing company in the world. Less than a decade after the six-story Walker Building opened, Joseph Walker purchased and razed the parcels nextdoor and again hired the same firm (at this time renamed Winslow & Bigelow), to expand the Walker Building, building a ten-story addition in a similar style. The second Walker building housed piano company showrooms and offices along with professional offices of numerous architects and professionals. The Walker Building is now owned by Emerson College, and is used as classrooms, computer labs, and study spots for students with the dining center and bookstore in the former retail spaces.

Third Congregational Church of Chicopee // 1868

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The Third Congregational Church of Chicopee was built on a prominent lot on Springfield Street in 1868, replacing the congregation’s first church there, which was outgrown. The present building was designed by Charles Edward Parker, a Boston-based architect, who was an expert in Gothic architecture. He would design the Chicopee City Hall just years later. The building is constructed of brick and atop a granite base and features lancet (pointed arch) doors and windows, a corner steeple, and steep gable end with large rose stained glass window. The interior is preserved as well. Due to shifting demographics in Chicopee in the early 20th century, the church merged in 1925 with the Central Methodist Episcopal Church, forming the Federated Church of Chicopee. The congregation eventually closed and the church has sat vacant in recent years, and was briefly listed for sale in 2024, 9,339 square feet for just $200,000.

Polish National Home of Chicopee // 1914

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The Polish National Home in Chicopee, Massachusetts, was organized in 1910 as a fraternal service organization catering to the needs of the local Polish immigrant and Polish-American communities. The organization was founded at a time where Polish immigrants were settling in Chicopee, finding work at local factories. The Polish population of Chicopee surged in the late 19th into the early 20th centuries from just 200 residents in 1885 to over 9,000 in 1914, the year this building was completed. One of the other goals for the Polish National Home was to provide class space for new immigrants to take classes in the english language and learn to read and write, to become eligible for U.S. citizenship. The club eventually would build this five-story structure on Cabot Street, architecturally rivaling any other building in town. The building was designed by architect Bruno Wozny, a German-born architect who settled in Springfield and ran his own practice. Spaces inside the building included retail stores, a meeting hall, small meeting rooms, and apartments for some recently arrived immigrants and their families. The adjacent building was designed by local architect George Dion, as a bowling alley and billiard hall. After WWII, the building was converted almost entirely to residential use, which remains today.

Church of the Holy Name of Jesus Rectory //1857

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In 1857, the same year that the Diocese of Springfield built the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Chicopee, they also broke ground on an adjacent rectory, a residence for its priest. Like the church, the brick rectory was possibly designed by Irish-born architect, Patrick Keely. The Italianate style building originally was capped by a shallow hipped roof, but a renovation in 1871 added the mansard roof, two-story bays, and the portico at the entrance. The building served as the church rectory for over a century but eventually closed by 2011, and the future of the site was uncertain. Luckily, the Polish Center of Discovery and Learning have rented and occupied the rectory, serving as an important cultural institution educating and collecting to tell the story of Polish history in Chicopee and beyond. Fitting that many early-arriving Poles in the late 19th century to Chicopee attended this church before establishing their own.

Ames Manufacturing Company Complex // 1847+

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Until the early 19th century, Chicopee, Massachusetts, was little more than an agricultural district of Springfield (from which it separated in 1848). Several early mills began to harness the power of a 50-foot drop-off in the Chicopee River, but it was not until the introduction of outside capital from Boston-based industrialists, that Chicopee became an industrial powerhouse. The Dwight textile mills which quickly developed required a wide variety of related manufactures. Edmund Dwight, owner of the Dwight Mills procured brothers Nathan Peabody Ames and James Tyler Ames to relocate their edge tool business from Chelmsford to Chicopee, they did. In 1834, the Ames Manufacturing Company was incorporated with a capital of $30,000 and buildings were erected along the Chicopee River, just east of the Dwight Mills. By 1835, the company was creating works in brass and bronze, and in 1845, an iron foundry was added. The company used the foundries for casting statuary and producing cannons and cannonballs for the US Military. Additionally, the bronze doors of the East Wing of the United States Capitol, Daniel Chester French‘s Minuteman statue at the Lexington-Concord bridge and the large equestrian statue of George Washington at the Boston Public Garden were cast at the Ames Factory. After a period of decay in the latter half of the 20th century, the largest buildings of the complex were restored and converted to housing, today known as Ames Privilege.

Dwight Manufacturing Company Complex // 1841+

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The Dwight Manufacturing Company is named for Edmund Dwight (1780-1849) of Boston, an industrialist who envisioned an industrial town on the Chicopee River. Dwight, having a country home in Chicopee, had begun a venture with his brother, Jonathan, at Chicopee Falls creating the Chicopee Manufacturing Company, to produce cotton cloth. Due to the company’s immediate success, the Dwights along with other investors formed the Springfield Canal Company in 1831, with the goal to create the “new Lowell”, an industrial community in what is now Chicopee Center. In 1856, the Dwight Mills purchased some earlier mill complexes, creating the Dwight Manufacturing Company and consolidating all their cotton cloth manufacturing into one organization. In addition to the mills, the Company also built employee housing
along Depot and Dwight Streets, a stone’s throw from the mills. The creation of employee housing allowed the Company to attract new employees in particular women and children, nearly all immigrants, who could be housed together. My favorite part of the complex is the entrance gate, built in 1894, connecting the Office and Cloth Building. It is amazing to think of all of the people who passed through this portal, working long hours for a better life. Overtime as production methods changed and technology evolved, nearly all the original mills would be replaced or retrofitted. Despite the changes, the Company could not remain profitable and shut down production in 1927 and ultimately selling the land and equipment in 1930. Some smaller manufacturing has since occupied some of these buildings, but they remain largely (if not entirely) vacant, awaiting a new life.