Another building is joining the parade of projects converting underutilized commercial structures to residential buildings. This one is in the Chinatown-Leather District formerly known as the Textile District.
This kind of migration is as old as Boston’s history. Fashionable neighborhoods and elegant streets aged and lost their luster. Residents moved from downtown west. From Fort Hill to Beacon Hill. From the South End to the Back Bay. Something new and better always beckoned.
The buildings left behind changed, took on new purposes and housed new groups of residents. Elegant mansions became rooming houses, then apartments, and eventually tenements. Some burned and others were demolished to accommodate the ongoing need for growth. That process continues today.
In the 80s or 90s. Photo from the BPL’s BRA collection, courtesy of Universal Hub
Thus a vacant commercial building that formerly housed a still-prosperous business will become apartments in a part of the city where there have never been enough places to lives.
79 Essex Street in Chinatown
Beacon Communities will soon file plans to convert the eight-story structure at 79 Essex St., between Oxford Street and Ping On Alley, into a building that combines 47 income-restricted apartments with ground-floor retail space.
This low-rise mixed-use approach is typical of Boston’s current commercial-to-residential conversions. The retail space keeps the street scene lively, provides places for residents to shop and eat, and helps to pay the mortgage.
A Street-Level View
From the street, the building doesn’t currently look like an historic structure worth preserving. It has been vacant and abandoned, scheduled for demolition. The façade today displays rust, dirt, decrepit storefront shutters, and a replacement door. Behind the wear and tear of years of hard use, however, stands an Art Nouveau-style building.
Constructed in the early 1900s, 79 Essex Street is a classic, mid-rise urban commercial building characteristic of the early 20th-century downtown district. It features a historic entrance door noted for an ornate carved Phoenix-and-Dragon engraving on its upper portion.
The carving depicts the wedding balance of the female Phoenix and male Dragon energies. This represents the most auspicious balance of Yin and Yang.
The façade also displays some wonderful stonework, especially on the first two floors and at the cornice line. It’s the kind of detail we don’t see on buildings very much these days.
Ping On Alley
Nearby Ping On Alley has its own history and even an official marker placed by the Bostonian Society. The marker says:
“ In 1989 Oliver Place was renamed Ping On Alley, “Alley of Peace and Security,” in honor of Boston’s first Chinese immigrants. They pitched their tents here beginning in 1875, and since that time this site has been central to the lives of a growing Chinese community.”
Home of Ho Toy Noodles
In the late 1980s or early 1990s, the building housed Chinatown’s venerable Ho Toy Noodle Company and, on the ground floor, the Cheng Hmong Seafood Market. Today a colorful mural titled “Where We Belong” that celebrates the Ho Toy Noodle company wraps along the building’s Oxford Street side. It depicts numerous noodle dishes intertwining to eventually form a dragon with its mouth opening on the old Ho Toy Company door.
The building’s then-owner, Oxford Properties Group, commissioned the mural along with the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC) with the goal of brightening the area. Thai artist Ponnapa Prakkamakul painted it.
Affordable Housing in Chinatown
79 Essex Street Today
The building’s development into a residential property will be a joint venture between Beacon Communities LLC and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New England. It will create approximately 47 units of affordable housing in the vacant building with associated resident amenities and property management offices.
You can find 79 Essex Street by walking down Boylston Street from the Common until it turns into Essex. Along the way and in the Chinatown neighborhood you may sees some of these interesting buildings:
- Three Building Facades on Essex Street
- The Boston Medical Dispensary’s Good Samaritan
- Boston’s China Trade Gate
The entrance to the T’s Orange Line is nearby. Formerly named the Essex station in 1967, it was renamed Chinatown in 1987.
