Lost Melrose, Volume Six

In this installment of Lost Melrose, we remember 775 Main Street, a significant modernist building that the Melrose Historical Commission helped to demolish.

In 2015, Melrose-Wakefield Hospital proposed demolishing five buildings, the entire block of Porter between Main and Rowe, to create temporary parking lots.

Attention immediately focused on 775 Main, and for good reasons. In 1936 this office building had been constructed by the firm of Royal Barry Wills, an architect who was arguably the most culturally influential Melrosian who ever lived. The young architect who drafted the plans for this building was Hugh Stubbins, who had just finished his studies under Walter Gropius, and would go on to become one of the foremost modernist architects of the 20^th century. This building seemed altogether too significant to let fall.

But there was a major problem with this story. Sometime in the intervening decades, an owner had remodeled the building in such a way that nearly all of its modernist elements had been removed or obscured. The roof, the doors, and the windows had all been replaced in a vaguely Colonial Revival fashion, splashes of brick were added, and the eaves of the roof were extended to cover up the distinctive sawtooth bays. In many ways, the cutting-edge structure that had been designed in 1936 was already gone.

Meanwhile, research on 12 Porter Street, one of the other buildings slated for demolition, revealed that it dated to 1820 at the latest, making it one of the few remaining houses in Melrose built in the first quarter of the 19^th century. Since the tenant of 12 Porter was putting up a fight to save his building, the Historical Commission made a calculated decision: we drafted a memorandum that called for the preservation of 12 Porter, while downplaying the significance of 775 Main.

Five years later, 12 Porter is still standing, and 775 Main is still a parking lot. But did we make the right decision? Please let us know in the comments below.