Hotel Boylston Materials Used in Jamaica Plain

What Is to Become of the Old Hotel Boylston?

The demolition of Hotel Boylston on the corner of Tremont and Boylston streets has begun in earnest, and will be vigorously pushed to completion. Workmen were busy yesterday removing the Steinert signs which have so long been a feature of the exterior, and arranging the interior staging to be used in the work of removal.

Hotel Boylston courtesy of Boston Public Library.

The first things to be taken out are the steam heating pipes, the doors and windows. Then the plaster, woodwork and other fittings of the interior will be removed. It will be necessary to take down the Tremont street walls from that side, as the guy ropes on the big derricks will not permit of swinging the heavy blocks of stone over to Tamworth street. The subway excavations will interfere somewhat with the removal of the building, and will necessitate backing the teams on to the sidewalk.

A Herald reporter asked Mr. Elston of A. A. Elston & Co., who are tearing down the building, what was to become of all the material. He replied that the second and fourth stories had been purchased in their entirety by a man who is building a new block in Jamaica Plain. He will erect a new first story with stores, and those from the Hotel Boylston will form the second and the third stories, respectively, of the new structure. The fourth story was selected instead of the third, as it was originally the top story of the building, and still has the cornice on it. The two large entrances on Boylston street and on the corner, will also be incorporated in the Jamaica Plain block.

Many of the doors, windows, the dado of the halls and much of the hard pine flooring will be placed in a new private school. A Brighton florist will use the two large steam heating boilers to warm extensive greenhouses, and several hundred thousand of the bricks are to be incorporated into the walls of a projected Roman Catholic church.

Future visitors to Whitman will find the combined wardrobes and wash bowls of the Boston building a convenience, for they are to be placed in a new hotel in that town. Many of the doors and plate glass windows will find the same resting place.

The building was exceedingly well built, and structurally was good for half a century more. It was planned by Cummings & Sears, and such was its original appearance before the roof was added, P. C. Keeley, a well known church architect, one day, as he stood looking at it from the corner of the Common, declared it was the finest piece of mercantile architecture in Boston, and perhaps in the country.

A large gang of men is busy on the Lagrange street end of the new hotel, placing the heavy granite blocks of the foundation walls in position and building some of the brick walls in the cellar of the smaller building on the corner of Lagrange and Tamworth streets.

This article originally appeared in The Boston Herald on June 2, 1896