Boston Department Store Blog

Hey Ron,
First up Brockton...Westgate Mall
Gilchrist's/Jordan Marsh (73,000 sq ft.) (Gilchrist's opened in 1963, closed in 1975. Jordan Marsh opened 1977. Converted to Macy's in 1996, closed 2006 as Macy's moved to former Filene's. Store razed. Being replaced by 12-screen cinema)

More as I find them:)
 
Quincy Gilchrist's:

GILCHRIST CO., Clivedon Street & Parking Way, Quincy, Massachusetts (Boston)
announced 1.23.39, opened 3.18.39
Manning Waters (Boston), architect
1 story + basement, 26,500 square feet (selling space), municipal parking 1000 cars
in store block with supermarket
extant, altered (7.98)


Framingham:
the link...
http://www.framinghammass.info/Gilchrists1948.htm

Stoneham seems to have had shops in Redstone?? Not sure about where or what that was. It may have been part of a shopping strip of some sort...Stoneham readers help!!!!

Cambridge, Dorchester and Waltham remain a mystery....anyone out there recall locations of Gilchrist's in those towns??

Let us know:)

Charles:)
 
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Anything more about Gilchrist's Cambridge location? I'm still intensely curious about that.
 
Also, this photo is amazing. Do you happen to know what year it was taken?

Filene%27s+Window+circa+late+1940%27s(from+Michael).jpg
 
^^I'm pretty sure that is from the MIT collection, so... 1956?

edit: I was wrong. From the image name: Filene%27s+Window+circa+late+1940%27s(from+Michael).jpg
 
Hello, Glad you enjoyed the photos.
The TV photo is late 40's and before the MIT Boston set was done(mid-50's to 1960ish).
I would place it at 1948 as a guess.
It may have been a testing of network broadcast ability and could be as early as 1947....but late 40's:)
So, Ron I think you may have found the right bit of information...Well, done:)

Keep talking:)

Charles:)
 
The Gilchrist ad says Basement branch in Cambridge -- could this have been the now-vacant space under Shaw's (Star Market) in Porter Square? In my memory that has been Decelle's and then Burlington Coat Factory.

I have a treasured copy of that Boston 200 Bicenntennial guide book and should take another look at the ads there. Thanks for reminding me of it.

It features mapped-out walking tours of several neighborhoods, including the South End which is described as "a tour for city-watchers, not for sight-seers. The South End is a grab-bag of ethnic and income groups: elderly people living on fixed incomes, newly weds, and middle-aged millionaires share the same block.... in a neighborhood composed of over forty different nationalities, no one of them can ever dominate.... The South End hasn't decided whether to tempt the middle-class away from the suburbs or build low-cost apartment complexes; its future is open-ended."

Also: "Visit the South End late in the morning or early in the afternoon, when it's safe but lively. Women alone will be harassed (in a wide variety of dialects), winos may appear on every other street corner, and restaurants and restrooms are few and on the tawdry side. But a visit to the South End will give you a richer picture of urban life than the view from the Hancock tower ever could."
 
There's also a full-page ad for Woolworth's on page 77 (THE LARGEST WOOLWORTH STORE IN THE WORLD), Kennedy's on page 233 (Come to historic Summer Street and weigh yourself for free on Kennedy's old fashioned scale! It's accurate, and a great way to meet people!), Saks Fifth Avenue on page 243, Bonwit Teller on 245 (A Boston Landmark), Paine Furniture on 249, Lord & Taylor on 251, and Shreve Crump & Low on 253 (Spoons for a Boston Tea Party).

So many vanished business names among these ads:

New England Life
Filene's
Howard Johnson's (81 restaurants and 22 motor lodges in historic Massachusetts)
New England Telephone
the Fenway hotel chain
the Ritz-Carlton on Arlington Street
The First National Bank of Boston
Woolworth
The Boston Five (See our collection of antique coin banks)
United States Trust Company
New England Merchants National Bank
The National Shawmut Bank of Boston
Finast (The 17,000 people at Finast are proud to be part of Boston's 200th anniversary)
The Provident Institution for Savings in Boston (Nation's Oldest Savings Bank Charter, Founded in 1816)
Gilchrist
Kennedy's
GTE Sylvania (Danvers, Waltham, Needham, Fall River, Salem, Ipswich)
Bonwit Teller (A Boston Landmark)
Jordan Marsh
Paine Furniture
R. H. Stearns
Martini Arl (The Man of Fashion Shops at ...)
Scotch 'n Sirloin
Maison Robert & Maitre Jacques (the latter in Charles River Park)
The Boston Half Shell (Why come to the seafood capital of the world if not to eat the world's finest seafood?)
Brigham's (Over 100 stores serving the ice cream, candy and sandwiches Boston grew up on)
Zayre (Charge the Redcoats! And the blue jackets. And the yellow dresses ... )
 
Thanks, Ron!!
I had no idea so many little treasures lived in this book.
I do not have a copy of my own....not sure if I ever did even back then...but it is a great list of places to shop and eat in the Boston area that are no more.
I would love scans of Kennedy's and Woolworth's to add to the blog update I just did.
Any chance???
If you could send them to my email, I will place them with the others for a more complete picture of Boston 1976:)

Let me know....Thanks:)

charles65ofboston@yahoo.com
 
I'm sending you the Kennedy's and Woolworth ads, as well as Shreve Crump & Low, Zayre, Brigham's, and Howard Johnson's. Let me know if you want any of the others I listed above. The bank ads may be the most interesting.
 
by the way, any idea where the Kennedy's in Cambridge was, or the Filene's in Winchester? Of all the former suburban downtown branches of Jordan's and Filene's, I think only the former Filene's in Belmont Center survives today as a Macy's.
 
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Bonwit Teller was a Boston landmark? It was a branch of a New York store. It would be like calling Macy's or Saks a Boston landmark today.
 
Bonwit Teller was in the former Natural History Museum building, later replaced by Louis. The building is definitely a landmark, and it's featured in the ad.

(The Prudential Center is a Boston landmark even though the company has never been headquartered there.)
 
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Found at preservenet.cornell.edu...

WM. FILENE'S SONS, Main & Thompson streets, Winchester, Massachusetts (Boston)
Federated
announced 1.24.40; opened 3.2.40
2 stories, @ 5000 square feet
in Locatelli Block
additional space in building opened ca. 1942, ca. 1945, 1946
building extant (8.96)
Click to expand...

It closed in 1968. Here's the googlemap of the location. Not sure in the street view which is the Locatelli Block - Starbucks?
--------------------
Adding the link to the word document, if anyone wants to take a look at the list of former department stores across the country:
http://www.preservenet.cornell.edu/publications/Longstreth Branch Store.doc

The book Longstreth wrote on department stores was just recently published: The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960
 
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http://www.sec.state.ma.us/mhc/mhcpdf/townreports/Boston/wnt.pdf describes the Locatelli Block in Winchester as "a two story brick Georgian Revival structure, built in 1935."

That document also confirms that Gilchrist in Cambridge was in the basement of the Porter Square shopping center (later Decelle's and Burlington Coat Factory, now vacant)

I can't figure out where this was, however:

WM. FILENE'S SONES, Routes 128 & 2, Lexington, Massachusetts (Boston) Federated
announced 4.18.57, project
Raymond Loewy Corporation (New York), architects
in shopping center
Raymond Loewy Corporation, architects
Arthur and Sidney Shurcliff (Boston), landscape architects
Wm. Filene?s Sons, developers
500,000 square feet, 108 acres, parking 5000 cars

There's no big mall or shopping center anywhere around there today.
 
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