Newbury Street - History

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:

A notable building designed by William G. Preston in the classical French Academic style was built as the Museum of Natural History in 1864. It is prominently sited between Newbury and Boylston Streets fronting at Berkeley Street, and currently 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 MIT moved across the river in 1916; the edifice has since been replaced by a life insurance building.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 an haute couture salon. A list of former Newbury Street boutiques would be long indeed. The shops included "Daree" at 12 Newbury, Joseph Antell and Frederick Freed. One of Newbury's oldest and most established retailers is the tony Brooks Brothers, at the corner of Berkeley across from the Louis, Boston edifice.

From 1970 until the late 1990s, lower Newbury Street was lined with posh up-and-coming art galleries. Newbury Street mavens and hipsters spent Saturday afternoons gallery hopping and enjoying the ubiquitous "wine and cheese" art openings. The Newbury Street gallery scene was a veritable mini-Soho for perhaps a decade.

The famous Ritz-Carlton hotel (now The Taj), built in 1927, fronts on Arlington but once described 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 that his publisher had gotten him a room at "the Ritz," an honor accorded only to stars. His friend Lil Darvas had 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 had 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 Boston architects Hartwell and 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 its ambiance ("You felt like you were in some kind of Tudor manor or English country church") 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)." Beginning in the mid-1970s, the theatre's midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show gave the movie a popular cult following, often attracting patrons dressed up in costumes based on characters in the film.

Sadly, after a remarkable 70-year run, the Exeter Street Theatre quietly closed in 1984, due to declining box-office revenues caused by the growing home-video market. Its illustrious interior was dismantled and rather ruthlessly transformed into a trendy Conran's furniture store. After the failure of Conran's, it became a popular Waterstone's bookstore, whose extensive inventory was ruined by massive flooding caused by sprinklers set off by a fire in the T.G.I. Friday's restaurant next door. (Ironically, the fire itself was very minor.) Later, it briefly housed an ill-fated dot-com named Idealab. Since 2005 the Kingsley Montessori Elementary School has occupied the building.

(Note: It has been rumoured that the Spiritual Temple's original ghosts had haunted the Exeter Theatre and were perhaps quite unhinged by its 1984 demise. Whether or not one believes in ghosts, the fact that the building and its ensuing tenants have met with a string of disastrous blows since the demolition of the old hall, cannot be disputed.)