The Old South Building has joined a growing list of Boston’s commercial buildings that are being converted to residential spaces. This positive development results from Mayor Michelle Wu’s innovative plan to increase the city’s living spaces in a cost-effective way and without tearing down the city’s history to do it.

This building, located from 280 to 300 Washington Street with an additional entrance on Milk Street (due to an odd shape that wraps around Old South Meeting House) links Downtown Crossing with the Financial District. When people begin living there, they will bring new life to both areas. The Financial District will have residents after five p.m. and on weekends. These people will need many of the services that have been struggling to survive since the Covid pandemic.

Downtown Crossing will likewise profit from local residents eating, shopping, and walking the streets even when the retail shops and department stores are closed.

The Old South Building

Designed by Boston architect A. H. Bowditch, the structure was originally built in 1903 by the Old South Church. Like a number of other Boston buildings, including the Little Building on Boylston Street, it was meant to function like a “little town.” As Douglas Shand-Tucci says in his book “Built in Boston,”

“Each was designed with lavishly detailed exterior shops and extensive interior arcades on the lower two floors: filled with small shops then as they still are now. These and such later examples as the Park Square Building (1923) designed by Densmore, LeClear and Robbins, are among the most successful and exciting urban spaces in Boston. It is to be hoped they will survive long enough to be restored one day …”

Mr. Shand-Tucci did not live to see the renovation of the Old South Building, but I’m sure he would be happy to see the building gain new life. He did add a wish that,

“…every effort should be made to preserve the handsome Victorian shop fronts—one including protruding glass display windows enhanced by stained glass—at the Old South Building.”

Lavishly detailed, indeed. Rising 11 stories, the Old South Building has an ornate façade with columns, cornices, and other intricate elements typical of office buildings erected before form began to follow function and glass curtain walls replaced ornamentation.

Location, Location, Location         

It stands next to the Old South Meeting House (1730) on some of Boston’s oldest land. (The Old South Church still holds the deed.)

The Old South Building faces School Street where the first public school in the country was built in 1635. It looks across Washington Street at “Parnassus Corner,” and the home built for the apothecary Thomas Crease in 1712. (The house later became the publishing house Ticknor and Fields, then the Boston Globe’s Old Corner Bookstore. It is now the home of the historic Old Boston taqueria.🙃)

The Old South Building currently houses a range of commercial offices. The street-level retail businesses hold Luke’s Lobster and the Chicken & Rice Guys. Spring Lane, site of the Great Spring that lured the Puritans to the Shawmut Peninsula from Charlestown, is on the left side. The State Street T stop is only two blocks away.

New Residential Units

The renovation will deliver 255 rental units to Boston’s housing market. Its location will offer unique views of Boston’s historical structures. The top floors will look out toward Boston City Hall, the Common, and Back Bay. Skyscrapers permitting, residents might even have views of the harbor.

Converting mostly vacant offices to much-needed residential units is a win-win-win for Boston, the Financial District, and Downtown Crossing.