A brief history of Scollay Square

 In what is today Government Center, near the traffic island at the intersection of Cambridge and Court Streets, this wooden building was built during the latter part of the 18th century.  In 1795 it was bought and the new owner - William Scollay - named it after himself.  Citizens, horse car and stagecoach drivers alike began to call the spot Scollay's Square, and by 1838 the city made the name that everyone was using anyway, official – and Scollay Square was born. We recently learned from 1862 to 1870 the Boston Fire Department's Engine 4 was housed here.  (Courtesy of the Bostonian Society / Old State House) 

 Cotton Hill, one of the original three Trimountains of Boston, sat across the street from the Scollay Building. It was leveled in 1832, its dirt used to fill in a part of the Charles River.  A small neighborhood of bowfront homes, named Pemberton Square, was built on the newly flattened land,. They housed some of New England's richest residents. Meanwhile, just below Pemberton Square a row of buildings was constructed along Cambridge Street. Tremont Row was a collection of shops and boutiques for the Brahmins and bluebloods on Beacon Hill.  In the 1850s it was also where J J. Hawes, one of Boston's first daguerreotypists set up shop. (Courtesy of the Bostonian Society / Old State House) 

 Just around the corner from Tremont Row was Howard Street, where the Howard Athenaeum entertained a generation of Bostonians with some of the finest actors and actresses of the English speaking world, including the great Junius Booth, his upcoming December 14th, 1848 performance being promoted in the above broadside.  Junius was head of an entire family of classical actors, including John Wilkes Booth, whose fame would turn to infamy with his assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. (There's more on the Old Howard page)

 In the 1850s, here on Tremont Street, (between School Street and Scollay Square) was The Boston Museum, founded by Moses Kimball.  As explained in the terrific And This is Good Old Boston website, "The facility actually was a museum, containing stuffed birds and animals, and other natural curiousities. During the 1840s, Kimball became a friend and associate of P.T. Barnum, and often shared exhibits with him. The (in)famous Feegee Mermaid was one of these, a half-orangutan/half fish construction that had a great popularity."  But the museum was only part of what made this place one of the more popular attractions around Scollay Square - it also had a full-size theater where Bostonians could hear lectures from such luminaries as Mark Twain and where, according to researchers at Rutgers University, was the first American production of H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878.  That production (according to the Rutgers website on a landmark silent film titled "The Headhunters,") featured the musical direction of prominent musician and conductor John Braham.  (The Rutgers site also notes Braham was also music director at the Howard around the same time.) 

 Just across the street from the Boston Museum, was the office of Dr. William Thomas Morton, who is credited by some as the discoverer of ether as an anesthetic.  His was the first dentist office to offer “painless” dentistry, and advertised such in the Boston Post in the 1840s.  (Also note the ad just above Dr. Morton's, for a book binder on Cornhill.)

 That the Square was geared for the well-to-do is underscored by the dance academy opened by Lorenzo Papanti.  As described in Cleveland Amory's classic, The Proper Bostonians (E.P. Dutton, 1947) Papanti was "a tall, skeleton thin, fiery tempered Italian Count..." who became a favorite of Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, who had chosen the Count as her partner to dance the first waltz ever seen in Boston. Amory wrote "...By 1837 Papanti has become so successful that he was able to move his academy to a new and palatial quarters on Tremont Street [this side of which was also known as Tremont Row]. Here he built a hall with a $1200 chandelier, five enormous gilt-framed mirrors and the first ballroom floor in America to be built on springs."  Amory later wrote that "...it was on Papanti's sprint floor that four generations of Boston's best - from 1837 to 1899, when the hall finally closed - were initiated into the art of the Boston ball beautiful." (pg 262, Proper Bostonians)  The Papanti Dance Studio is also where Charles Dickens read from his novel, The Pickwick papers during his first visit to Boston. (Courtesy of the Bostonian Society / Old State House.)

 In 1868, here on the upper floor of 109 Court Street, a young Ohioan built his first patented invention, an automatic vote counter.  Although he failed to sell the device, he persevered, eventually building his first money-making invention - an improved stock ticker. In 1870 young Thomas Edison decamped for New York, In 1875, working in the very same laboratory space where Thomas Edison began his career, Alexander Bell and Thomas Watson first heard the sound of a human voice through an electronic device. The location of this lab - in front of the JFK Federal Building - is marked by a small monument.

 On September 17, 1880, a statue of the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, was dedicated in Scollay Square.  Sculpted by Richard Greenough, it was a duplicate of the statue that had been placed in the U.S. Capital.  That the city chose Scollay Square as the site for such an important piece of public art speaks volumes about its stature of Square in Boston at the time.  Read more about the statue in Francis Bremer's web essay "Remembering–and Forgetting–John Winthrop and the Puritan Founders."  There is also this Boston Globe column by Sam Allis which looks an amusing look at the saga of the statue... 

 When the Irish came to Boston in the 1840s they settled first in the Fort Hill and North End neighborhoods, then into the West End. They and other ethnic peoples who followed in the 19th century, changed the character of Boston.  As the elite abandoned the West End and Scollay Square and moved further up Beacon Hill and into the Back Bay (under construction beginning in the 1850s), Tremont Row and the surrounding businesses in Scollay Square adapted to meet the needs of the immigrant class. So no more silk top hats - but cloth Scally caps, instead. The Square became, by the 1880s, a commercial center of Boston.  Here's a grand shot of Court Street in 1905 simply bustling with activity. 

 Scollay Square played a role in the 1919 Boston Police Strike, perhaps none more dramatic than the cavalry charge, ordered by Governor Calvin Coolidge, to disperse the huge mob which had gathered there.  The story is told in detail in Always Something Doing.  Another great source is Francis Russell's terrific book on the strike, City in Terror. 

 Courtesy of the Boston Public Library's Leslie Jones collection, the remarkable picture above shows Scollay Square at its height, during the Second World War (note the sailor in the lower right-hand corner near Simpson’s Loan).  Today, as we look north from the same spot, City Hall would be on our right and the curved 1-2-3 Center Plaza building would be on our left.  As it had been since the beginning, the Square was also a transportation hub, and a highly popular destination, as evidenced by the all the double-parking in front of places such as the Crawford House, Jack’s Lighthouse, and, under the PM Scotch sign, the famous Half Dollar Bar.  The Crawford House was, most notably, the "home" of Sally Keith, whose remarkable act is chronicled her own page on this site.)  Just above the Tasty restaurant was Frank Liberty's tattoo parlor, whose story is chronicled here, on the wonderful TattooedBoston.com website. 

Last, but certainly not least, were the thousands of servicemen who swarmed into Scollay Square when on leave. The West End Museum has devoted a terrific page on their website to the sailors and their artistic interests which often took them to one of the many tattoo parlors in the Square. (The picture above from Derin Bray, the author of Loud, Naked, and in Three Colors, his book on tattooing in Boston.