Newbury Street

Description

East of Massachusetts Avenue, Newbury Street is a mile long street lined with historic 19th-century brownstones that contain hundreds of shops and restaurants, making it a popular destination for tourists and locals. The most "high-end boutiques" are located near the Boston Public Garden end of Newbury Street. As the address numbers climb, the shops become slightly less expensive and more bohemian up to Mass Ave. West of Mass Ave the street abuts the Mass Pike on its unbuilt southern side; the northern side is mainly parking and rear service areas for buildings on Commonwealth Avenue. A proposed, major decking project over the Pike at the "annex" end would involve new structure(s) for the southern side beyond the confines of the Mass. Ave. intersection. This could allow for expansion of the shopping district.

Newbury Street has an eclectic mix of shops and eateries. Its renovated brownstone buildings feature stores at all retail levels, -- physically (basement, street level, and above), stylistically (shabby chic to elegant), and financially (affordable to exclusive). There are coffee shops, trendy cafes and an array of restaurants to suit many tastes. Yet due to the concentration of up-scale stores at its lower end, it is touted as one of the most expensive streets in the world.

Donlyn Lyndon writes that west of Clarendon Street,

Early history

Newbury Street's name celebrates the victory of the Puritans in the 1643 Battle of Newbury in the English Civil War. Newbury Street was one of the earliest roads in Boston, its portion was renamed Washington Street by the end of the 18th century. The current road was created during the filling in of Back Bay in the mid 19th century.

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:

The first commercial establishments probably opened around 1905. By the late 1920s, lower Newbury Street had begun to establish itself as a destination for well-heeled society. With the establishment of Boston's Junior League in 1907, formal dances became very fashionable, and elegant apparel shops prospered. By 1911, 24 Newbury St. featured a salon for lessons in "social and aesthetic dance." As more retailers moved in, many lower floor shops began to feature wide glass windows to exhibit luxury goods. In the late 1950s fashionable boutiques included Darée, Charles Sumner, Miss Harvey (at #32), furriers and Joseph Antell. One of Newbury's oldest and most established retailers is the tony Brooks Brothers department store which occupies its original quarters at the corner of Berkeley St.

Transformation into 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.

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 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 former JP Licks ice cream parlor and the Hynes Convention Center at Massachusetts Avenue. In 2012, the Boston Business Journal announced that Clover Food Lab would lease the 275-square-foot sidewalk space for a year and open a café. However, the plan has not yet been realized as of November 2014.

Once famous for a wealth of bookstores, Boston, like nearby 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 2004. Currently, 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, it was closed 2002, though the space was soon occupied by another equally huge music store, Virgin Megastore.

Recent history

Since the turn of the 21st Century, Newbury Street has maintained its transformative shopping experience along side an evolving retail industry. Made-to-measure suits, eco-friendly products, guideshops and concept stores are offerings now commonly found in the area. The street has retained both its sophisticated architectural style and its eclectic mix of retailers, from steadfast luxury brands and high-end boutiques to innovative up-and-coming companies, cafes and restaurants. Stores such as Tiffany & Co, Cartier, Valentino, rag & bone, Jack Wills, Woolrich, Steven Alan, Uniqlo, Zara, Urban Outfitters compose the diverse retail landscape.

More recently, the district has become a popular destination for highly-produced pop up shops. Many e-commerce brands use temporary storefronts on Newbury Street to test the Boston market for expansion, often landing as permanent fixtures on the street. Local and national celebrities such as Julian Edelman, Kanye West, Martellus Bennett, and Gretta Monahan have also done pop up activations on Newbury Street.

Notable places