CultureNOW - Columbia Road at Dudley Street: Peter Vanderwarker

Columbia Road at Dudley Street

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ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
"Amos Upham opened a store at a rural crossroads in Dorchester soon after 1800, and people began calling the crossroads Uphams Corner. A century later, about 1900, his grandson, J.H. Upham, built a four-story brick building on the same site. It’s still there and appears at the right in both of these photos, the earlier photo dating from about 1910 and the later from 1988. In both views we’re looking south along Columbia Road, with Dudley Street on our right and Stoughton Street to our left.

About the time the younger Upham was building, the city decided that Uphams Corner was much too lowbrow a name for an important commercial center and renamed the intersection Columbia Square. Thus the proper name for J.H. Upham’s building is the Columbia Square Building. Luckily for the poetry of life, the name Upham Corner stuck.

The Columbia Square Building is a clean, handsome piece of architecture, a good example of the typical Boston commercial corner block. It housed a Masonic Hall on its upper floors and stores (including J.H. Upham’s grocery store) at the sidewalk. To the left of it in the old photo is the equally handsome Winthrop Hall Theatre, a vaudeville and move house that was built in the mid-1890s probably originally as a meeting hall. Fred Allen, the famous radio comedian, made his vaudeville debut at the Winthrop Hall Theatre around the time of World War I.

In the new photo a small white bank called the 1st American stands where the Winthrop Hall Theatre stood. Amazingly enough, it is, almost certainly, a remodeling of the old theater. The theater’s tower and upper floors were removed, and it was converted into a bank in the Art Deco style about 1930.

What gives the old view its great charm and drama is the curve of buildings at the left, now gone. We feel that we are being beckoned around the corner and down Columbia Road."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Uphams Corner: The Turning Point," Boston Globe, 28 August 1988

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Location

Columbia Road & Dudley Street
Boston, MA 02125
United States

Nearby Items

Stoughton Street Baptist Church		0.2 miles
Upham Corner Station Historic Murals		0.3 miles
Dorchester Voices / Dorchester History		0.5 miles
Copenhagen Foundation		0.5 miles
Anna Clapp Harris Smith House		0.5 miles
Shirley-Eustis House		0.9 miles
Winter Street		1 miles