Dorchester Illustration no. 2224
Architect W. Whitney Lewis designed two suburban stores in the 1880s: the market at Ashmont that became O’Brien’s Market and another market at Bowdoin Station at 200 Washington Street. Elevations of the two markets were featured in a double-page spread in American Architect and Building News in the issue of July 24, 1886. The buildings were both designed with brick arches at the ground level with residential apartments above. The market at Bowdoin Station has one more story than the market at Ashmont.
In his book Ashmont, Paul Douglass Shand-Tucci said: “… it was not until 1884 that Messrs. Jacques and Griffin began to build for their new market the building we now know as O’Brien’s Market … which takes its name from George O’Brien, who started as a clerk in 1895 in this store that a century later is now named for him, O’Brien having eventually bought the business. A red brick ground-story market with shingled upper residential stories, where at first, as was the custom of the day, the proprietors lived, each in his own four-room suite, no building could have set a better tone for the village center it inaugurated, Victorian fantasy! There is “checkerboard” brick patterning, formed by the interplay of receding and projecting bricks so as to animate the facade, especially in raking light; rough-faced red sandstone, worked particularly in the buttress offsets into robust shouldering profiles; decorative shingling in varying patterns; clapboards and stucco and fanciful “rock” scrollwork designs set in the stucco and centering on the numerals 1884 (the year the foundation stone was laid); all crowned by steeply pitched roofs and curiously shaped dormers and tall chimney stacks with picturesque chimney pots and a wonderful terra-cotta cresting that is almost the profile of frosting on a wedding cake.
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