Category: before and after

Building 19

1970's 1980's before and after Norwood Ma Norwood Mass Norwood Then and Now Route 1 Then and Now Norwood Then and Now Comments

Building 19 was a chain of unique warehouse style New England discount stores that offered “good stuff cheap” for over 50 years before being forced into bankruptcy in 2013.

The store sold a wide variety of items obtained in fire sales, closeouts, bankruptcies, overstocks and customs seizures. They also sold items with small defects, “seconds” at large discounts.

The first store opened in 1965 in the Hingham Shipyard, where the warehouse buildings were numbered. Too cheap to replace the “Building 19” sign, owner Jerry Ellis instead used the building number as the business name and it stuck.

After opening a second store, Building 19 1/2 in Burlington, Ellis opened the Norwood store located in a 65,000 square foot building at 1450 Providence Highway and designated it Building 19 3/4.

Ellis used humor in signs inside the store as well as in sale circulars. The circulars had a comic book quality to them thanks to the artwork of Scituate cartoonist Mat Brown.

 

Signs both in and outside the store poked fun at the company, their products and sometimes even the customers.

Ellis proudly called Building 19 “America’s Laziest and Messiest Department Store.”

Part of the stores appeal was that you never knew what new thing you’d find on the shelves.

 

For husbands who were impatiently waiting for their wives, there was the “official husbands bench”.

The company gave away free coffee in cups that warned customers not to make fun of the taste because “someday you’ll be old and weak yourself!”.

WalMart, Target and other big retailers as well as online shopping led to a decline in sales and after a decade of struggling, the company closed all the Building 19 stores in 2013.

In 2014, the Norwood and the Burlington stores were the final two locations to close after a short period of time as rug wholesalers.

The Norwood location was purchased in 2016 by GRE Norwood LLC and turned into Extra Space Storage.

Owner Jerry Ellis died on November 11, 2017. His daughter has written a paperback all about him and the company called “Good Stuff Cheap!: The Story of Jerry Ellis and Building #19, Inc”.

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Norwood Airport Aerial View Then and Now

1950's Aerial Airport before and after Neponset street Norwood norwood airport Norwood Ma Norwood Mass rotary Route 1 Then and Now Norwood Then and Now Comments

The view of Norwood Airport from 1953 shows how relatively undeveloped the area still was.  Center right of the photo shows that the airport itself was much smaller, with most of the airport buildings close to the bend of access road.

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The wooded area in the center of the photo houses many of the planes and helicopters in hangers today.

Toward the bottom of the photo in the center is the intersection of Neponset Street and Route 1. Today you have to use the Pendergast circle rotary (right side of the 2018 photo) to access the other side of Neponset street one section of Neponset is a dead end street.

 

Norwood Airport Proposed Plan

1930's Aerial before and after map Norwood Norwood Ma Norwood Mass plan proposal Then and Now Norwood Then and Now Comments

https://easyzoom.com/image…/eb903bb44ed54b528ff7b55c292886a3

Use the above link to see the notes and zoom in on the map.

This is a proposed 1930 plan to build the Massachusetts Air Terminal and Arena (MATA) along the Norwood and Canton border. Interest in aviation was great enough after Charles Lindbergh visited in 1927 that investors were able to gather up $130,000 in private funding in the midst of the Great Depression to buy up the 1298 acres of land. It was said to be the largest single piece of land ever purchased by a private company in Massachusetts history. The location was prime real estate- just off the new US Route 1 in Norwood and adjacent to a mile and a half of railway lines in wetlands that were marked for industrial development. In addition to 8 runways, hangars and blimp docking bays, there would be an aviation club and a dedicated fire station. The area containing the arena would have a sports stadium, athletic complex, tennis club, 9 hole golf course with country club and various athletic fields. This was to be a major transportation center with a “world class” airport, ready to handle the future transatlantic air travel that the developers saw as the next big thing. On June 26, 1931 Canton opened the first airfield of the project, just East of present day I-95. At that time, the airport was the 3rd largest in the state. Several times when weather conditions in Boston made landing at Logan unsafe, flights were diverted to Cnaton airport and passengers were shuttled to Boston via Canton Junction. On August 19 of 1936, the German airship Hindenberg visited Canton. Less than a year later on May 6, 1937 it passed over the airport at around 300 ft, low enough that people on the ground could see the passengers. By 7:30 that same night, the Hindenberg burst into a flames attempting to moor in Lakehurst, NJ, killing 13 passengers and 22 crew members. A 1940 survery recommended moving the airport to the Norwood side of the Neponset river. During WWII Canton Airport came into competition with Bedford airport for government contracts and expansion funding. Bedford won the competition (and has a military base there today) partly because the town of Canton was slow to modernize their airport. in 1946, Wiggins Airways moved to the present day site and still operates the airport in Norwood today. The Canton airport closed sometime between 1957 and 1959 and was later used as a junkyard before being bought by the MDC for sewer piping. Today the Canton site has been developed into a park.