Autographed copies of Scollay Square (Arcadia Publishing, 2004) and Always Something Doing: Boston's Infamous Scollay Square (Northeastern University Press, 1999) can be purchased on our home page.
 
More pictures of Scollay Square

I guess this page is our "catch all," kind of like that kitchen drawer that everyone has which is crammed with items that you need, but can't find a place for...  If you have anything to add to our collection, then email it to us today!


Artist John Wood was kind enough to share with me this wonderful painting of Scollay Square
he recent;y completed.  It's so good, I can practically smell the hot dogs...  Thanks, John!

This picture comes, from all places, Castle Island.  It is part of a collection of old Boston photographs on display at Sullivan's (great French Fries there!) which is located near the fort.

The patriotic bunting draped over some of Tremont Row suggests a Fourth of July celebration or the grand opening of a business.  The pick-up truck tells us that we're well into the era of the auto and the style of clothes - dig the feathered hat on the woman near the kiosk - suggests the photo was taken before World War One.

Next comes a photo sent to us by Bev, another which we've never seen.  Taken from Pemberton Square, we can see the subway kiosk and, across the street, the Sears Crescent building:  But what makes this such a great picture is the horse drawn fire truck, with the horses seemingly in full gallop.  Our friend Chris, a fireman in a local town, wrote that the fire apparatus is a "Water Tower"  He believes it is a Kansas City FD model of  1890 (55 ft) or the American LaFrance model of 1912 (65 ft.)  Chris wrote that "both were motorized in 1915-1916 with American-British tractors, and received chassis mounted deck guns. If I were a betting man, I would go with the LaFrance."

Thanks, Beverly, for sending this great photo!

Acquired from an eBay auction in the summer of 2007 is a photo taken from a family album.  We see the Scollay Square subway station, surrounded by the newsboys who used to gather there to collect their papers before setting off to "hawk" them at city corners.  This gathering point was known to the paperboys as "the Canada Point" 


(What does "Canada Point" mean?  See this web site for an explanation.)


From a 1906 guide book of Boston, this really fine aerial view of Scollay Square, probably from Pemberton Square, looking north.  Down Brattle Street, on the left, we can see the Quincy House and on the right, down Court Street, is Young's Hotel.  The Sears Crescent Building, on Cornhill, anchors the center of this picture.


We just LOVE eBay, where heretofore unknown items related to Scollay Square show up - like this article from the November 1948 issue of Sport Life Magazine, on Earl Torgeson of the Boston Braves, which was titled THE EARL OF Scollay Square.

Funny thing is, there is no mention of Scollay Square anywhere in the article.  It would seem to have been used by author Bob Holbrook as the headline for the piece on Torgeson simply because he was playing in Boston and - even though he was only in his second year in the majors (see his whole career record here) - Torgeson had already developed a reputation as a character.

Here's another recent eBay find.  It's an October, 1898 issue of "The Youth's Companion," a large format magazine that featured an article (click here to read the entire piece) on the building of Boston's subway system, quite a feat of engineering for its day.  The cover, as you can see here, featured the Scollay Square subway kiosk.

A third eBay story: a Boston area resident was selling a lot of antique items, one of which was the following photograph, what appears to be a First Holy Communion portrait of a mother and daughter.  As you can see from the magnification at the bottom, the photo was taken at one of the many photo studios in Scollay Square, proving, if nothing else, that they weren't just for sailors on leave!

Last eBay story, for now, is about an item we didn't win but which we have a picture.  It's an amazing view of Scollay Square in 1876, showing what we surmise was a Centennial Parade as it wound its way through Boston.


 
 


A kind reader sent us this never-before-seen 1930s image of
Tremont Row, apparently taken from the Crawford House.
Click on the image to see the full-size high-res scan.


A really fine view of Tremont Row in the 1930s, taken by Leslie Jones (BPL)


The Harvard boys LOVED Scollay Square, as indicated in this 1951 Crimson article titled
"Saturday Night in Scollay Square: Burlies, Girlies, Bars, and Bums"

Another visitor sent us the following image, with the question:
What are these two bears doing in Scollay Square?

The answer is that this page was from a book called "The Roosevelt
Bears: Their Travels and Adventure," originally published in 1906.

LOOK WHO VISITED SCOLLAY SQUARE!


Recognize the man in the car heading up Hanover Street towards Scollay Square?
If you said General Dwight D. Eisenhower, you'd be right.  And isn't it appropriate
after all those soldiers and sailors under his command visited the Square, 
that the Supreme Allied Commander in World War Two do the same?

One of the most acclaimed American etchers of the early twentieth century was Dwight Case Sturges, who was born in Melrose and studied at the Cowles Art School in Boston.  Sturges made this etching of Scollay Square probably in either 1912 or 1913, when the subway line from East Boston was extended to Bowdoin Square and points north.


The alley between Brattle and Cornhill, sometime in the late 1950s.  The Brattle Bookstore had yet
to make it's first of many moves around the Square to avoid the wrecking ball.


You can't say that the people at the Social Law Library at the John Adams Courthouse in Pemberton Square (where I gave my Scollay Square speech several years ago) have forgotten their roots.  This is the cover to their 1996 annual report; a really fine painting of Scollay Square in the 1950s.


A fantastic photograph of the Square taken on September 19 1945, just 17 days after the
official end of World War Two.  The Square would never be the same...

Patrick is the Great-Grandson of one of the proprietors of the Coleman & Keating bottling company, which was located, as the imprint on these bottles indicate, Sudbury Street in Scollay Square.  Coleman & Keating figure in the story of Boston Police Strike of 1919, as one of the places where criminals took advantage of the city which was, for a few nights, without protection.  Thank you, Patrick, for the photo.

In Boston's Transportation Building, near the Theater District, is a splendid mural of Boston landmarks from the present and past.  How surprised - and delighted - we were to see this rendering of the facade of the Theater Comique, which was located on Tremont Row and was, when it opened in 1906, the first theater in Boston built expressly for showing motion pictures.

You never know where you will run into Scollay Square.

or continue to