Building 19

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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Raytheon Data Systems

In 1971 the Raytheon Data Systems division was created by merging the company’s information processing and display units divisions. Raytheon tried to integrate the Data Systems division with their word processing subsidiary, Lexitron, but it was unsuccessful.

In 1983, Raytheon Data Systems lost approximately $24.3 million and the division lost $6.2 million during the first four months of 1984.

Having experienced increasing difficulties in profitability, manufacturing and marketing commercial data systems, Raytheon no longer saw a profit opportunity to continue to serve the commercial data and word processing equipment markets and sold the division was sold to Telex in 1984.

1981 Raytheon Data Systems Ad

Of the 3,625 people worldwide employed by Raytheon Data Systems, approximately 1,500 worked in Norwood and 650 of them lost their jobs. At the time, Raytheon was the state’s largest employer, with 20,000 workers.

Today, Stop & Shop, Home Depot and a Chipotle sit on the former Raytheon site at 1415 Providence Highway / Route 1.

Norwood Airport Aerial View Then and Now

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.