Old Corner Bookstore Audio Guide

Old Corner Bookstore: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to the Old Corner Bookstore

   This section of the Mappu audio guide to the Old Corner Bookstore highlights Welcome to the Old Corner Bookstore and points out what to notice during your visit.

   Welcome to one of the most quietly remarkable corners in downtown Boston. You are standing at the northwest corner of Washington Street and School Street, in front of a brick building with a gambrel roof, the kind of steep, two-sloped roofline that once shaped the colonial streetscape. Today it is a stop on Boston's Freedom Trail, and it also appears on the city's Literary Trail and Women's Heritage Trail. That is a lot of storylines for one corner. The main building at 283 Washington Street went up in 1718 as a home and apothecary shop, and it became a bookstore in 1829. It is celebrated as the oldest surviving commercial building in Boston. Over the next few minutes we will look at what the building is made of, who made it famous, how it narrowly escaped demolition, and how people keep asking the same question about it: what should this place look like? Take a moment to look at the corner itself. What seems like a single building is really four attached structures, each with its own chapter. We will untangle them together.

2. 02

   Built from Fire: Brick, Georgian Style and Four Buildings in One

   This section of the Mappu audio guide to the Old Corner Bookstore highlights Built from Fire: Brick, Georgian Style and Four Buildings in One and points out what to notice during your visit.

   Start with the brick. In 1711, a large fire destroyed nearly 100 buildings in this part of Boston, and wooden construction was banned downtown afterward. When this corner was rebuilt in 1718, it went up in brick. The home that had stood here before, Anne Hutchinson's house from 1634, was among those lost in that fire. So the building in front of you is a rebuilding born from disaster. The corner structure and its neighbor, the Cunningham House, are among the oldest brick buildings in Boston. They are also rare survivors of residential Georgian architecture in the downtown. Georgian was the dominant style in the English colonies between 1700 and 1780, but very few examples endure in a city that grew as fast as Boston did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now look along the facades. The complex is made of four attached structures: the main corner building at 283 Washington Street, an annex at 277 Washington Street, and annexes at five to seven and at eleven School Street. Their dates range from 1718 to about 1820, and each was built in the style of its own time. The Cunningham House and the bookstore properties were consolidated into one building between 1917 and 1922, which is why four buildings now read as one.

3. 03

   Ticknor and Fields: Where Literature Found a Publisher

   This section of the Mappu audio guide to the Old Corner Bookstore highlights Ticknor and Fields: Where Literature Found a Publisher and points out what to notice during your visit.

   The building began as an apothecary for the druggist Thomas Crease in 1718. By the mid-nineteenth century it had become something quite different: a literary center. It became a bookstore in 1829, and its best-known occupant was the publisher Ticknor and Fields. Here is why that matters. Ticknor and Fields published the work of nearly every great American and British writer of its time. Imagine a catalogue that includes Tennyson, Dickens, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe. For writers on both sides of the Atlantic, this address stood for the business of making literature. It is a useful reminder that a literary landmark is not only a place where someone wrote. It is also a place where manuscripts became books and books found readers. That is part of why the building is recognized as nationally significant, and why it still appears on Boston's Literary Trail.

4. 04

   Saved from a Parking Garage

   This section of the Mappu audio guide to the Old Corner Bookstore highlights Saved from a Parking Garage and points out what to notice during your visit.

   For a building this old, the twentieth century was not kind. A historian later remembered that it had fallen on evil days before its renovation in the 1960s. By 1959 it was threatened with demolition under city renewal plans, with a parking garage as the proposed replacement. In response, the Bostonian Society helped form Historic Boston Incorporated, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the city's architecture through active reuse. The group acquired the building in 1960 and prevented the assemblage of eighteenth and early nineteenth century buildings from being torn down. It then restored the building, with the work credited to 1970. The timing was fortunate. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 soon gave the preservation movement national credibility and shared standards. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. In May 2025, the Boston Landmarks Commission voted unanimously to designate the Old Corner Bookstore and Cunningham House as official landmarks, placing them alongside Quincy Market, Boston Common, the Boston Public Library and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   This section of the Mappu audio guide to the Old Corner Bookstore highlights Before You Head Off and points out what to notice during your visit.

   As you look around, notice how the setting has changed too. This was once one end of Boston's Newspaper Row, and just to the south sits a small park, developed by the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank, whose building faces the Old Corner Bookstore. Architecture writers in 1987 felt that a neighboring parking garage made the old buildings look too small, like stage sets or dollhouses. See if the surroundings still change how the corner feels to you. There is also a question that keeps returning here: what should the Old Corner Bookstore look like? In 1937, a young architect named John Perkins Brown had his own answer. Struck by a building covered in advertising for the businesses inside, he made changes meant to evoke its colonial past. Today, Historic Boston is planning updates for elevator access to the upper floors, a smaller carbon footprint and greater climate resilience. The building remains commercial space, as it has been since 1718. Look closely at the brickwork, the rooflines and the way the four structures meet. Every layer was someone's answer to that same question.