That is the former Garden Building, now known as Le Jardain. It is 250 Boylston Street, though the tax bills for the property used to say 29 Providence Street, and 29 was painted on the Providence Street / Park Plaza door.
I worked in this building from junior year of high school in 1985 until 1998, and I had been going into the building since I was a child, since my mother worked, as later did I, for R.M. Bradley & Co.
The building was built around 1910 as an office building with ground floor retail. The earliest retail I can remember on the first floor, where LaPerla is now was Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips, with a small space fronting on Boylston Street, to the right of the Boylston Street entrance that was called Transperama. The space was about 40 feet deep and no more than 7 feet wide and was occupied by a group of model railroaders. This was about 1978-1980. The Park Plaza area was extra special unnice around that time. (Lots of that good old grit that people on these posts seem to love. As a 10 year old, it was just plain old scary).
When the proposed monstrous Park Plaza developed was backed by Kevin From Heaven in the late 1970's, Jack Fallon, one of the owners of the building and the owner of R.M. Bradley fought back and renovated the building. The first floor, stretching all the way down Hadassah Street as offices, with 14 foot ceilings and fishbowl windows. The lobby, about 6-8 feet wide stretched the length of the building with the marble walls originally having large pictures of various Boston and Regional landmarks. The pictures, once faded, were painted over with painted versions of the previous pictures.
The building had two elevators, one freight, one passenger, which until the building was sold in 2000 were hand operated. The passenger elevator was staffed from 6AM until 6PM on workdays. The elevators had a reddish marble around the door frames in the lobby. It was always fun making someone's stomach flutter with a quick floor stop and then a quick up / down adjustment to level out at a floor. There was usually an up / down Mind The Gap watch because of the hand operated nature of the elevator.
For the last 20 years the R. M. Bradley appraisal group and residential sales group were on the first floor. The accounting group and portions of the management group were on the fourth floor, with the fifth floor being the corporate offices and commercial brokerage. From the early 1980's onward advertising company Cosmopolous Crowley and Daly were on the sixth floor and the seventh floor. The seventh floor was a half floor, with a great roof deck looking over the Public Garden.
The second and third floors had small offices for single or two person businesses or organizations, such as the New England Rugby Organization, and the offices of the women who ran the Cotillions in the city. (Josiah Spaulding's Mother was one of the women in there.) The uber weasel John Henry Williams (son of Ted Williams) leased space on the third floor overlooking the Public Garden and never paid rent. He was quickly kicked out. Jim Brett later took over the space. Ted Kennedy Jr., a great guy, had a small office there in the late 1980's facing the Statler.
The building was always coveted by the neighbors. If you stand on the westerly side of Hadassah Way and look up at the second floor of the Four Seasons, you can see what look like spots that would have held an extension bridge over the street for hotel expansion. When the Heritage was under construction around 1987-1988, welders caused a fire in the common wall between the building and the former bar next door.
R.M. Bradley declined in the late 1990's and the highest and best use for the building was for housing. The building was gutted but many of the building's highlights were retained.
For all of you lamenting the former office building, it was in bad shape on a base building basis. The aforementioned elevators did not work for everyone if not staffed. If someone took the elevator to the sixth floor on a weekend or holiday, you had to walk up a few flights to get to your office. The building had sprinklers put in the early 1990's. The AC was bad, though the windows opened in most places, except the first floor. The heating system was comparable to the one from A Christmas Story. The bathrooms were marble as in marble floors, marble partitions, wooden doors, with very non ADA compliant widths and very poor ventilation.
It was a great old building. For all of you thinking Druker's Shreve Crump and Lowe proposal is silly, all he is doing is replicating this building, just with much higher rents.
Once funny bonus about the building, which I?m sure the present occupants still can ?enjoy?, is someone in the morning throwing open their curtains at the Four Seasons and realizing that they and their state of undress is a morning guffaw for the people across the way.
