Coolidge Corner was home to just one store—Coolidge & Brother—from the 1850s to the 1890s. Following the widening of Beacon Street in 1887-88 and the arrival of the S.S. Pierce store a few years later, a major new shopping district took root. Almost all of the existing buildings in this still thriving commercial area were built between 1890 and 1930. Join Brookline Historical Society President Ken Liss for a journey back to the initial development of the Coolidge Corner business district and get a glimpse of local shopping in the early decades of the 20th Century.

The Beaconsfield Terraces, on the south side of Beacon Street from Dean Road to just beyond Tappan Street, were one of the more unusual developments to follow the creation of the Beacon Street boulevard in the 1880s. Built by Eugene Knapp, a wool merchant, in the early 1890s the terraces were a residential complex in which people owned their units but shared ownership of a 6-acre park, stables, a playhouse (known as the Casino), tennis courts, a playground, and a central heating plant.A bell system connected the houses to the stables so that people could call for their horse and carriage. Today, only the residential buildings (Richter, Frances, Marguerite, Fillmore, Gordon, Bernard, and Parkman Terraces) remain.

Learn more about the Beaconsfield Terraces in this one-hour walking tour led by Brookline Historical Society president Ken Liss.

The tour will begin and end at The Village Works, 202 Washington Street, in a 19th century building that began as the shop of a local house painter and has been a fish market, a hardware store, and a series of restaurants (including The Village Coach House and Davios).

Highlights will include:

• Brookline’s earliest commercial center, featuring brick buildings from the 1870s
• The Lindens, one of the first planned residential developments in town (1840s)
• Emerson Garden and the Elijah Emerson House on Davis Avenue (1846)
• White Place, with one of the largest concentrations of vernacular architecture in Brookline
• The town’s civic center, site of the Town Hall, the public library, the Pierce School, and other municipal buildings.

In 1880, banker Arthur Welland Blake engaged Frederick Law Olmsted to draw plans for the subdivision into roads and lots of the Blake family estate on the lower part of Brookline's Aspinwall Hill. Olmsted's plans were never executed, and the estate remained something of an anomaly; a large tract of open land renowned for its landscaping in the heart of a community rapidly developing as a "streetcar suburb". Join Ken Liss from the Brookline Historical Society to learn how the neighborhood of "Blake Park" finally emerged — despite failed plans, untimely deaths, and financial scandal — four decades after it was first conceived.

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