Examining 55-121 South market street

When examining 55-121 South Market Street in Boston’s North Financial District, the parcel’s building construction, landowners, and business types best explain the Boston strip. Eventually demolished for the construction of the John F. Fitzgerald expressway, the strip consisted of rich histories and buildings told vividly through Boston newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the Boston Post. The parcel 55-121 South Market Street’s life explains Boston’s North Financial District in the late 1800s and so on, by illustrating its strong mercantile atmosphere and how its accessible location between the wharf and railways promoted the South Market Street parcel for commercial use.

Within the city’s 1882 Sanborn map and key, the parcel’s unit construction varies in the number of stories, building materials, and interior features. The various components of the buildings highlight the merchants or businesses that inhabited the space and how the building materials, and interior features accommodated specific business needs and services. The parcel’s landowners mainly consist of absentee landowners. Yet the few landowners who owned the buildings which their businesses inhabited on the street, however, were well-to-do individuals or families who found success within their occupations and lived in elite neighborhoods removed from Boston’s South Market Street. Given its valuable location between the wharf and railways, commercial businesses occupy the parcel and manufacture or trade everything from wholesale groceries, tea, cigars, flour, oysters, and many more. The parcel’s location and resulting multifaceted mobility created a space with varying building structure, wealthy landowners, and commission merchants or trade businesses that shows the mercantile industry’s impact in North Boston.