The area west of Charles Street in Boston’s Beacon Hill is known as the Beacon Hill Flat, which is largely built on 19th century-made land along the Charles River. The area developed into housing with a high percentage of carriage houses and horse stables built by the wealthy families living on Beacon Hill. Today, many of these edifices have been converted into charming residences, shops, and in the 20th century, garages. As the personal automobile took over horses as the desired method of transportation, savvy developers developed garages where wealthy residents could “stable” their vehicles, especially important in a dense neighborhood like Beacon Hill without much off-street parking. Built in 1919, the Charles Street Garage stands four stories tall with large expanses of multi-light windows and ground floor retail spaces set within the bays to enliven the street.
Few buildings in Boston showcase the evolution of its neighborhood (or bring out the architectural critics) quite as well as the Lincoln Street Garage in the Leather District of Boston. This Post-WWII mixed use building was originally constructed in 1956, on the former site of the United States Hotel (1839), one of the first major hotels in the nation, which was razed in 1930. The original building was designed by architect Archie Riskin, and stood three stories high with parking on half of the second floor and on the 3rd floor and roof. A fifth floor of office space was designed and constructed by 1959 also by Riskin. Due to its site at the edge of a historic commercial/industrial district and adjacent to the Central Artery, a raised highway that snaked its way through Downtown Boston, the building was minimally visible and faded away to obscurity until the late 1990s when the highway was buried under the city as part of the “Big Dig”. The open scar and subsequent re-greening of much of the former highway spaces necessitated the owners to re-work the building, due to its newfound gateway presence into the neighborhood. Brian Healey Architects renovated the building, adding an additional floor of offices and reworked facades. The result is a Post-war mixed-use hodgepodge of a building that expresses its use visually on each floor in a no-nonsense way, making it a unique urban building. Additionally the building has long been rented to small businesses, almost all Asian-owned with direct ties to the Chinatown and Leather District neighborhoods. Recent plans have been approved for a new office tower on the site and supported by preservation groups stating that “the existing garage is historically significant or beneficial to the neighborhood”, but to me, the further erasure of quirky buildings for more out-of-context developments is not the way to go.
Buildings of New England 