Newbury Street

A mix of architectural styles along Newbury Street near the Boston Public Garden.

Newbury Street is located in the Back Bay area of Boston, Massachusetts. It runs roughly east-to-west, from the Boston Public Garden to Brookline Avenue. It is lined with historic 19th-century brownstones that contain hundreds of shops and restaurants, making it a popular destination for tourists and locals. The most expensive boutiques are located near the Boston Public Garden end of Newbury Street. The shops gradually become slightly less expensive and more bohemian toward Massachusetts Avenue.

Newbury Street is an eclectic mix of shops in renovated brownstone buildings, with stores at all levels physically (basement, street level and above), stylistically (elegant to shabby), and financially (affordable to upscale). It is touted as one the most expensive streets in the world. High end stores include Chanel, Armani, Donna Karan, Burberry, Cartier, Loro Piana, Fendi, Gucci, Kate Spade, Bang & Olufsen, Valentino, Yves Saint-Laurent, Hermès, Versace, Prada, Marc Jacobs, and Ermenegildo Zegna, as well as numerous more.

Donlyn Lyndon writes that west of Clarendon Street,

"Newbury Street develops its own very distinctive and appealing character and becomes one of the nicest shopping streets in Boston, or anywhere. Renovated town houses with large glass bays on the ground floor produce a delightful urban landscape.... Owners and tenants... have further animated the street by using the 25-foot space between the building and the sidewalk for various purposes. Some areas are paved and used for displays or sidewalk sales. Others have thick planting... Some lots have stairs up and down to shops and galleries; others have show windows and display cases for flowers or fashions or other items for sale. But each contributes something extra, and together they make these blocks of Newbury Street genuinely attractive."^[1]

History

Newbury Street's name celebrates the victory of the Puritans in the 1643 Battle of Newbury in the English Civil War.

The first building completed in Back Bay after it was filled in 1860 was Emmanuel Church at 15 Newbury Street. Today, Emmanuel Church is an influential Episcopal church that also plays a significant role in the musical life of the city.

In the 19th century, Newbury Street was residential. The 1893 edition of Baedeker's United States catalogs Boston's "finest residence streets" as Commonwealth Avenue, Beacon Street, Marlborough Street, Newbury Street, and Mt. Vernon Street. William J. Geddis, however, notes that it was "the least fashionable Street in Back Bay."

Owen Wister's novel, Philosophy 4, set in the 1870s, mentions Newbury Street:

When you saw [Harvard student Oscar Maironi] seated in a car bound for Park Square, you knew he was going into Boston, where he would read manuscript essays on Botticelli or Pico della Mirandola, or manuscript translations of Armenian folksongs; read these to ecstatic, dim-eyed ladies in Newbury Street, who would pour him cups of tea when it was over, and speak of his earnestness after he was gone. It did not do the ladies any harm; but I am not sure that it was the best thing for Oscar.

A notable building designed by William G. Preston in the classical French Academic style was built in 1864 for the Museum of Natural History. It is located at the corner of Newbury and Berkeley street and now houses fashionable clothier Louis, Boston. Lyndon describes it as "a remarkably serene Classical building with none of the latent boosterism of its near contemporary, Old City Hall."

Newbury Street was the original location of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in another Preston building adjacent to the Museum. MIT moved across the river in 1916; the edifice has since been replaced by a life insurance building.

The first retail shop on Newbury Street opened in 1905 at 73 Newbury, now the location of a haute-couture salon.

The famous Ritz-Carlton hotel, built in 1927, fronts on Arlington but describes itself as "a Boston landmark on fashionable Newbury Street." But Newbury Street was not always considered the hotel's fashionable side. Sports journalist Heywood Hale Broun told the story of proudly mentioning one day to an acquaintance, Lil Darvas, that his publisher had gotten him a room at "the Ritz," an honor accorded only to stars. Lil replied, "Which side, darling, the Newbury street side or the Public Garden?" "Sure enough," said Broun, "when I arrived, I found myself on the Newbury street side. 'Darling,' she told me, 'if you're not on the Public Garden, you've got a long way to go.'"

On the corner of Exeter and Newbury Street—the address is given both as 181 Newbury Street and as 26 Exeter Street—is a striking building designed by H. W. Hartwell and W. C. Richardson in the Romanesque Revival style. It was originally built in 1885 as the First Spiritual Temple, a Spiritualist church. In 1914 it became a movie theater, the Exeter Street Theatre. The movie theatre was notable both for is ambiance ("You felt like you were in some kind of Tudor manor or English country church there") and programming ("It was a theater where people did not call to see what movie was playing, but called only to determine if the movie had changed)." The movie theater quietly closed in 1984. For a while it was a trendy Conran's furniture store, then Waterstone's bookstore. It briefly housed a dot-com named Idealab, and is now general office and retail space.

Beginnings of a shopping district

Newbury Street's shopping district

The transformation that turned Newbury Street into a trendy shopping district for young people began in the 1970s. The original Newbury Comics, now part of a chain of over 20 stores whose business (despite the name) is primarily the sale of CDs, was founded by two MIT students in 1976, where it still stands today.

In 1989, 360 Newbury Street, which had been a plain yellow-brick building, was renovated under the direction of architect Frank Gehry and won the Parker Award as the most beautiful new building in Boston. According to architecture columnist Robert Campbell, Gehry "took a blandly forgettable building and transformed it into a monument... It's the first significant example in Boston of a movement known as deconstruction. Deconstructionist buildings are designed to look as if their parts are either colliding or exploding, usually at crazy angles."

"The Slab" is a large flat rectangle of concrete between the JP Licks ice cream parlor and the Hynes subway station at Massachusetts Avenue. It is often occupied by spare-changings punks, bored suburbanites, the homeless, and folks busking for money. An attempt was made to fence it off in the early 2000s but failed.

Once famous for a wealth of bookstores, Boston, like other cities, has suffered a steady decline in the number of independents. The beloved 150,000-volume Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop on Newbury Street, one of the last holdouts, closed in 2002. (It did, however, outlast Waterstone's, the British chain whose giant, well-regarded store just off Newbury Street was a source of pressure on the independents. When Waterstone's closed in 1999, a Boston Globe staffer opined that "the Athens of America feels a bit more like Elmira.") Today, Trident Booksellers and Café on Newbury Street is amongst the few independent bookstores still remaining in Boston.

Close to Berklee College of Music, Tower Records at 360 Newbury Street was a favorite spot among music lovers for over a decade. A 1991 Boston Globe article says that "Tower Records stomped into Boston with the nation's largest music store three years ago,"^[2] while another says that "When Tower Records opened its astonishing store on Newbury Street, it altered the Boston compact disk market forever, and remade Newbury Street's commercial scene."^[3] Long the largest record and CD outlet in the Boston area, its closing in 2002 marked the end of an era (though the space was soon occupied by another equally huge music store, Virgin Megastore).

On April 27, 2006, The Boston Globe reported: "Virgin Megastore is moving out of its Newbury Street digs to make room for a new high-end retailer at the landmark Frank Gehry building where luxury condominiums are opening this fall. It was reported that Dolce & Gabbana bought 11,000 square feet worth of retail in the now vacant Virgin megastore lot. Virgin has agreed to vacate its 40,000 square-foot music store by June 2007 and seek an alternative location in Boston in the near future, according to a statement released this morning." Electronics retailer Best Buy has since signed a 10 year lease, and opened their doors in late July of 2007 to a 41,500 square foot store encompassing 3 above ground floors, and a basement that is used for storage.

Jake Spade recently opened in a 200 sq. ft. spot underneath the Kate Spade boutique, and is the second store of its kind in the world. This summer, Ruehl No.925, will open up an assessories boutique which will be a full resemblense of their store in Greenwich Village. The store is three floors and 9,500 sq. ft.

New additions to the upscale shopping destination include: True Religion (1,984 sq. ft.), Ruehl No.925, and Zara (24,000 sq. ft.). Prada, Chloé, Van Cleef & Arpels, Harry Winston, Versace, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior and Dolce & Gabbana all have been rumored to be scouting the 8 block street for an acceptable location.

References

• ^ Hemp, Paul. The Boston Globe. November 7, 1991. p. 61
• ^ Muro, Mark. The Boston Globe. October 5, 1991. p. 16
• Campbell, Robert. "360 Newbury: A Bold Beauty". The Boston Globe. December 6, 1991. p. 59
• ^ Lyndon, Donlyn. The City Observed: Boston, A Guide to the Architecture of the Hub. Vintage Books, 1982.

External links

• Newbury Street Website
• Newbury Street Interactive Map
• Architectural history of Newbury Street, essay by William J. Geddis
• Photos of Upper Newbury Street
• 360 Newbury Condo Development, photos of Frank Gehry designed loft development above Best Buy
• Article on Trident Bookseller and Cafe, a Newbury Street business

42°20′57″N 71°5′3″W