Newbury Street - Beginnings of A Shopping District

Beginnings of A Shopping District

The transformation that turned Newbury Street into a trendy shopping district for young people probably began in the 1970s with the opening of the original Newbury Comics. Now a chain of over 20 stores whose business (despite the name) is primarily the sale of CDs, "Comix" was founded by two MIT students in 1976, where it still stands today. Aimee Mann of 'Til Tuesday fame was a cashier at the flagship store through 1982. Directly across the Street was the famed Newbury Sound, where Boston bands such as the Cars recorded early hits. Musicians such as Peter Wolf and Ric Ocasek were street regulars of this bygone era. The adjacent organic food store Erewhon was another bohemian magnet; TMax, the publisher of the seminal Boston Music Fanzine "The Noise" was a popular "produce clerk" there for many years. And with the bustling Johnson's Paints selling fine art supplies on its second floor, the last block of Newbury Street became notorious for its arty stream of shoppers and swarm of talented gadabouts.

The legendary music instrument retailer "E.U. Wurlitzer Music and Sound" was a part of the greater Boston music scene since 1890, and the store had been located at 360 Newbury Street (on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue) after moving from its LaGrange Street address in the mid 1960s. The building was a plain yellow-brick building by the time the company went out of business in the mid 1980s. In 1989, it 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 its neighbor Cambridge, has suffered a steady decline in the number and quality of independent booksellers. The beloved 150,000-volume Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop on Newbury Street, one of the last holdouts, closed in 2002. (It did, however, outlast the comparably short-lived 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, a Boston Globe staffer opined that "the Athens of America feels a bit more like Elmira.") Today, the youthful Trident Booksellers and Café on Newbury Street is amongst a small band of 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," 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." 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) (Now also closed; a Best Buy store occupies that space).

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. Electronics retailer Best Buy signed a ten-year lease and opened a store in late July 2007 on 41,500 square feet (3,860 m2) of space in three above-ground floors and a basement that is used for storage.

Jake Spade recently opened in a 200-square-foot (19 m2) spot underneath the Kate Spade boutique, and is the second store of its kind in the world.

New additions to the upscale shopping destination include True Religion (1,984 sq ft.) and Zara (24,000 sq ft.).

Two shops opened on April 1, 2010 of note. Raven Used Books at 263 Newbury street and shopCotelac at 168 Newbury St.. Raven Used Books, which also has a shop in Harvard Square in Cambridge, specializes in literature and the arts as well as stocking sections such as history, philosophy, children, cookbooks and much more, is a welcome addition. shopCotelac is a French womens' wear designer which brings something a little different to Newbury st with its feminine look that's marginal, and a little bohemian.

An end of an era may have been marked in 2008 when Louis Boston, an upscale retailer, announced that it would leave the area when its lease expires in 2010. Occupying the former home of the once indomitably chic Bonwit Teller store, the Louis edifice is an elegant and iconic 1864 building that once housed the Boston Museum of Natural History. The Boston Globe reported that the "Louis' move will mark the departure of one of the signature retailers from a street that has migrated away from its eclectic, locally-owned boutique roots to a mall-like scene dominated by chain stores." A spokesperson for the Neighborhood Association of Back Bay acknowledged that "There is a changing character from the funky shops to something more generic. And we regret that."