Home // April.6.2018 // Paul Lewis and Sandra Hughes

The Old Corner Bookstore, Home to Fast Food Restaurants, Turns 300

“The question of which old buildings should be devoted to memorializing and celebrating their history involves judgment, but the Old Corner Bookstore is not a close call. Would Salem be a better place if the House of the Seven Gables became a Century 21 real estate office?”

Imagine that you're walking along the Freedom Trail through the North End and come to the Paul Revere House. Now imagine that, instead of a historic house museum, the building has been converted into a McDonalds. As you approach the structure, below a conspicuous corporate logo, with its golden arches and bright red lettering, you see a small green-and-white plaque that briefly comments on its famous former occupant.

If this seems incongruous, you know how readers of American literature feel when they arrive at the Old Corner Bookstore at the intersection of Washington and School Streets and find not a bookseller, small press, or other fitting occupant but a Chipotle Mexican Grill. Saved from demolition in 1960 by its current owner, Historic Boston Inc. (HBI), the Old Corner Bookstore has been leased out to raise money for the organization's other preservation work. Since 2011, the most conspicuous, street-level space has been occupied by Chipotle; this past summer, the space around the corner was leased to another fast-food restaurant, Dig Inn.

The result is that the most significant literary site in the city of Boston stands as a monument to the corporatization of everything in the country. This is especially unfortunate in this 300th anniversary year of the building. Constructed in 1718 on the site of Anne Hutchinson's cottage, in the middle of the nineteenth century the Old Corner Bookstore was home to the variously named firm of William D. Ticknor & Co., Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, and Ticknor and Fields, which provided a model for how American publishers could nurture the growth of native literature.

Had Ticknor and Co. published only Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Thoreau's Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854), Emerson's The Conduct of Life (1860), Longfellow's “Paul Revere's Ride” (1860), and Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862), the building's place in the blossoming of United States literature would be well worth celebrating, but these few works only begin to suggest the range and significance of what happened at the site during decades in which Boston thought of itself as the Athens of America.

Recently an online petition—launched with the support of writers, teachers, scholars, and the leaders and editors* of American literature societies and journals, and as of the date of this essay, signed by over 3,600 people—called on HBI to develop a long-term plan for repurposing the Old Corner Bookstore into a museum of Boston's literary history. It did not take long for HBI to reject the idea, arguing that the Old Corner Bookstore has been used commercially for a long time and insisting that they will need to rely on the rental income indefinitely.

The question raised by this response concerns the obligation nonprofits have to serve the public interest. The very process of historic preservation is based on the recognition of a building's significance to the public, to all of us, as part of our collective heritage. According to its director, HBI collects about $250,000 a year from the Chipotle lease alone. But the Old Corner Bookstore—properly devoted to celebrating its contribution to the development of American writing, editing, and publishing—would be worth much more to the city and people of Boston in education, tourism, and civic pride.

In general, there's nothing wrong with a nonprofit raising money from a property it owns to fund worthy projects, and HBI has been a leader in the preservation and restoration of buildings in the city. But in this case, it makes no sense to rob Peter to pay Paul when Peter is the most significant literary site in Boston.

It's true that the Old Corner Bookstore has served different purposes and been operated commercially in the past, but this is also true of most now-cherished historic houses and museums. To take two beloved local examples, both the Paul Revere and Longfellow-Washington houses were owned privately and/or used commercially before being properly devoted to celebrating and teaching about the most important things that happened at the sites.

The question of which old buildings should be devoted to memorializing and celebrating their history involves judgment, but the Old Corner Bookstore is not a close call. Would Salem be a better place if the House of the Seven Gables became a Century 21 real estate office?

Comparisons can be invidious, but two points are worth noting: first, from their office in the Old Corner Bookstore, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851; and, second, Salem, Concord, and many other New England towns and cities do a far better job of celebrating their literary history than we do in Boston.

The history of the Old State House provides a model for what should happen to the Old Corner Bookstore. Built in 1712-13, it served as the seat of the royal government until George Washington's siege liberated the city in 1776. From 1776 to 1798 it was the Massachusetts State House; from 1830 to 1841 it was Boston's City Hall. Between 1841 and 1881 a wide range of companies held leases in it. But in 1881, to save the structure from being taken down and moved to Chicago (!), the city bought the building and helped create the Bostonian Society to manage it. In recent years, resisting the temptation to profit from what is the oldest public building in the United States, the Bostonian Society has operated the Old State House as a small, historic gift shop and lecture hall.

Unlike the Old State House and other 18th-century brick buildings in the vicinity—namely the Old South Meeting House (1729), Faneuil Hall (1740), and the New State House (1798)—the Old Corner Bookstore is operated in a way that fails to honor its historic significance.

What's new about the Old Corner Bookstore is that it's turning 300 this year and is owned by an altruistic, civic-minded nonprofit that can't see beyond money to the real value of a building that should bolster the literary component of the Freedom Trail and welcome, rather than disappoint, people who treasure what happened in it during the heyday of American letters.

* Signatories to this petition include the editors and publisher of The New England Review of Books. At the time of publication of this op-ed, the number of signatures is 3,689. Would you like to add your name to the list of supporters? Click HERE to view the petition, and to sign on with your own support. - Eds. //back

Banner graphic source: Photo (cropped) of the Old Corner Bookstore, appearing in the book Original and Historic Buildings in Boston, in Colonial and Provincial Times by William H. Halliday, published in Boston, 1893. In the public domain; sourced from the Flickr stream of the State Library of Massachusetts. The photo caption:

At the corner of School and Washington Streets. The oldest brick building in the business centre of the city, bearing the date, 1712. No store in Boston which has seen such long and such honorable service as this. For more than sixty years it has been a noted bookstore, and for a hundred years previous a well-known apothecary's corner. The building was designed as a residence, although, according to the custom of the time, the first owner, Dr. Crease, used the front room for his business as an apothecary. It is, however, chiefly as a literary centre that the old corner has acquired its fame. In 1828 Messrs. Carter & Hendee opened a bookstore here, succeeded in 1833 by Allen & Ticknor, followed later by Ticknor & Fields, E. P. Dutton & Co., A. Williams & Co., and the present firm of Damrell & Upham.