A Chipotle off the old block

William D. Ticknor, February 21, 1857, Maturin Murray Ballou's Pictorial

Whenever a historic landmark is rebranded as a familiar restaurant, café or retailer, it loses a lot of its historical identity and drowns in the sea of chains that are making everywhere look like everywhere else. Such has been the struggle of Boston's Old Corner Bookstore virtually since its most lionized tenant, Ticknor & Fields, moved out in 1864 and its last bookstore left in 1903.

Now it is known primarily as the ever-familiar Chipotle Mexican Grill, where anyone can slip inside for a grab-and-go taco or Mission burrito and motor without ever knowing that this building was once a choice haunt of the likes of Alcott, Dickens, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Tennyson, Thoreau, and other literary figures, many of whom met here at the Saturday Club to schmooze about the latest in letters before taking their monthly repasts at the Parker House Hotel down the street. Many Chipotle customers don't even get a sense of when the building was built – 1718 – unless they bother to stop and read the green plaque on the wall, which is so upstaged by Chipotle's in-your-face signs it often escapes notice.

Commuters are likely more captivated by the mouthwatering colors, eating and mingling they could find inside any old Chipotle than the intricate brickwork, brownstone quoins and slate gambrel roof that are more telling about the old building's one-of-a-kind history.

Which I'll share with you now, so you'll really know what you're going into the next time you get a craving for a quesadilla.

It was built in 1718 by Thomas Crease as his residence and apothecary shop on the site of Anne Hutchinson's home, which had burned down in the Great Boston Fire of October 2, 1711, after she was banished from Massachusetts in 1637 for anti-Puritan heresy. The first bookstore to occupy the house, in 1828, was Carter & Hendee. Ticknor & Fields had set up shop in there by 1844, at which time it became a major mecca for Boston's literati, having sparked "positive literary and intellectual magnetism" since the bookstore's occupancy, according to writer David Emblidge.

More than a store, it became a haven "to gather and exchange greetings and ideas," according to The Boston Daily Globe. In Sitting Room No. 2, writers exchanged lively anecdotes and views, which could be nuggets of inspiration for their literary pursuits – a far cry from Chipotle's upstairs "sitting room," where the modus operandi is eat-and-split.

"Charles Dickens Reading to his Family" by C.I. Doughty.

Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and others could be seen in literary parley in Sitting Room No. 2. Ticknor & Fields even published Dickens' works for the first time in America. Fields coordinated Dickens' historic 1867 visit to Boston, during which he gave the first public reading of A Christmas Carol in the U.S. at Tremont Temple, acting out his legendary story of miserliness, spiritual renewal and redemption with voices, gestures and expressions of Ebenezer Scrooge, Jacob Marley's ghost, the Three Spirits, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, and other memorable characters. Many local literary figures were present for the reading, including Emerson, Longfellow and Lowell, and it was received with resounding plaudits, helping to fuel the story's everlasting popularity and holiday appeal.

Other British authors Ticknor & Fields published works of included Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as such New England authors as Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau.

Eminent literary works published by Ticknor & Fields in their first editions included: The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne's historical novel set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century, in 1850; Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe's anti-slavery novel, in 1852; Thoreau's Walden, in 1854; The Courtship of Miles Standish, Longfellow's narrative poem concerning the Mayflower Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, in 1858; and Little Women, Alcott's coming-of-age novel about the maturation of four sisters, published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869.

Walden featured on its title page a vignette of the square cabin in the woods Thoreau had built on woodland owned by Emerson near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and had stayed in from July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847, during the transcendentalist social experiment in simple living and self-reliance in natural surroundings he conducted and later chronicled in his book. 

The Atlantic Monthly was founded in a back room at Ticknor & Fields in 1857 as a major literary, cultural and political periodical that included commentary on the abolition of slavery and other hot-button issues of the day. 

Under the founding editorship of James Russell Lowell, the magazine premiered such seminal works as Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow's poetic Civil War message to Northerners to rally for the nation's founding ideals of freedom through the example of a Revolutionary patriot (and a perennial standard for classroom reading and rote memorization), in 1861; and Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe's rallying cry for the Union to crusade for human freedom in the Civil War, running right on the front page in 1862.

The periodical is still published today as The Atlantic.

Following Ticknor's passing in 1864, Ticknor & Fields had outgrown its home and relocated to Tremont Street, opening the building up to a succession of five new booksellers, beginning with E.P. Dutton in November 1864 and ending with its namesake, the Old Corner Bookstore, in 1902. 

Interior of Old Corner Bookstore, 1891.

Though Old Corner occupied it for only one year, its name stuck and made it "still the favorite haunt of the author and the reader," as The Washington Post put it, despite now being the favorite haunt of the jalapeño junkie. "But Ticknor & Fields' successors moved the store away from Old Corner in 1903 and the toboggan-slide from fame began," reported The Herald News in 1960. 

And they weren't kidding. As you can see from the shifting of signage in the chronology of images below, the Old Corner Bookstore post-Ticknor attracted a stream of other commercial tenants, furthering its devolution from an erudite intellectual salon to a generic shopper's world, all the while retaining its basic colonial form as a plea for salvation:

This final photo, taken in 1960, shows the Old Corner Bookstore at its nadir as a combination billboard building and beanery, totally obscured from its literary glory. Thus sparked the rallying cry for its preservation, which Mayor John F. Collins made possible by encouraging the formation of the Old Corner Committee, chaired by historian Walter Muir Whitehill, author of Boston: A Topographical History. The committee raised the full $275,000 needed to buy the building and the adjacent Cunningham House from developer Samuel P. Coffman, who had planned to replace it with a motel, and Whitehill co-founded Historic Boston Inc. to own and operate the restored Old Corner Bookstore.

In 1964, its new tenant was The Boston Globe, and its restoration returned it to a conjectural image of its appearance spanning 1718-1828, with sash windows of wobbly glass replicating 18th-century handmade glazing in a forced, fake way akin to Colonial Williamsburg. The abutting Andrew Cunningham House, first built in 1728, was restored in time for the Bicentennial of 1976.

Old Corner Bookstore, 2009. Photo by Céline Harrand.

What I've always liked best about the Old Corner Bookstore is its corner anchorage of an historic block, not being a "holdout" amid newer abutters that raise the question of what occupied their sites before. The left-hand "wing" block was developed in 1828 by Timothy Harrington Carter of Carter & Hendee, Old Corner's first bookstore. 

The Globe Corner Bookstore, 1988. Photo by Russell Kord.

What I've always liked least, of course, is its failure to maintain a proper tenant that fully honors its history and heritage. It was on the right track when The Globe Corner Bookstore, a retailer of travel literature and New England-related books, occupied it from 1982 until 1997, when it was squeezed out by overhead costs and competition with the big-box Borders Books and Barnes & Noble chains down Washington Street. After a brief fling as The Boston Globe Store souvenir shop and Internet café, followed by an Ultra Diamonds jewelry-chain tenancy in 2005 (above), the Old Corner Bookstore regrettably became another Chipotle Mexican Grill in 2011, which emblazoned it with its commonplace brand signs that mar the history it's supposed to bespeak to Freedom Trail blazers. Which means the Old Corner Bookstore is back to its old self as a bastion of commercial tenant switcheroos, this time as a Chipotle off the old block.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!