The Backside is Coming! The Backside is Coming - to Revere! (Part IV)

From Dave Brigham:

Thanks to my impatience in the middle of heavy traffic, I found myself one day driving west on Revere Street and I stumbled across some fantastic sites that weren't on my radar. This is my way of bringing you into the fourth part of my series of short-and-sweet posts about Revere, Mass. (see bottom of this post for links to the previous three).

I've stumbled across a few recording studios over the past 14 years of exploring for this blog (see this post, and this one and also this post). But I've never seen one with a sign like Fleetwood Recording Studio.

I practically got rear-ended slowing down so I could turn around to make photos of that place.

The studio is important to music geeks because it's where The Shaggs recorded their sole album, Philosophy of the World. What's that you say? You're not a record-store clerk, fan of "High Fidelity" or someone who wears a "I Listen to Bands That Don't Even Exist Yet" t-shirt? Then let Wikipedia offer a primer on The Shaggs.

"The Shaggs formed at the insistence of their father, Austin Wiggin, who believed that his mother had predicted their rise to fame. Philosophy of the World was recorded in 1969 in Revere, Massachusetts, and released in limited quantities by a local record label. It received no attention and the Shaggs disbanded in 1975 after Austin's death. The Shaggs had no interest in becoming musicians and never became proficient in songwriting or performing. Philosophy of the World features bizarre songs with badly tuned guitars, erratically shifting time signatures, disconnected drum parts, wandering melodies and rudimentary lyrics about pets and families. It has been described as both among the worst records of all time and a work of 'accidental genius'."

Let's listen together to my personal favorite of theirs:

In addition to The Shaggs, Fleetwood recorded local rock bands, school marching bands, glee clubs and other music.

Fleetwood appears to be closed, which is a shame. Directly across Revere Street from the studio there is a private residence with some cool monuments lining its perimeter.

(Leaning Tower of Pisa.)

(Mount Rushmore.)

At the corner of Revere Street and American Legion Highway, I spied the back of an extremely narrow building.

I also made a photo from the front.

But the best way to see how oddly shaped and sized this building is, is via Google Maps.

I've only found a few details. Known as Picardy Corner, it was built in 1936. Sometime between 2013 and 2016, this little slice of architecture was converted to two condos. The last commercial tenant was a psychic.

I'm not the only one curious for about the history of this place. At this web site, somebody posed the question, "[H]ow is there room for anything inside?" this building. One commenter indicated that his uncle, who grew up in Revere, "told me that when they built the highway the state took part of the building by eminent domain. They tore down most of the building then built the exterior wall you see today that faces the highway."

If anybody knows anything else about this place, I'd love to hear it.

Cater-cornered from Picardy Corner is an outlet of Blanchards Liquors, which features a great sign.

Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for a few more short pieces on Revere. Below are links to the previous posts.

August 3, 2024, "The Backside is Coming! The Backside is Coming - to Revere (Part III)"

July 31, 2024, "The Backside is Coming! The Backside is Coming - to Revere (Part II)"

July 27, 2024, "The Backside is Coming! The Backside is Coming - to Revere (Part I)"

Bombing Around a Former Norwood Mill

From Dave Brigham:

How's that for a welcome sign!

The Winsmith Mill Market in Norwood, Mass., is quite a shopping/business/entertainment complex. Spread across 14 buildings, the market has six vintage shops featuring 150 vendors; tenants including photographers, designers, painters, seamstresses and more; and a live music venue/video recording studio called The Fallout Shelter.

(The entrance to The Fallout Shelter is located just beyond the fire escape.)

Winsmith is located in the former Winslow Brothers and Smith Tannery. The buildlings date to the mid-19th century, and were used to manufacture bomber jackets during World War II, according to the market's web site. Perhaps that history is what inspired the mural shown below.

(Mural by Alvin "Acoma," who can be found at AcomaArt.com.)

Acoma also painted the Uncle Sam mural shown above, as well as the one featured below.

Below, a view of the mill from the pond that's on site.

There's no shortage of cool angles from which to shoot the mill and its details.

(Entrance to Remarkable Estate Cleanouts.)

(Entrance for Hanging Horse Studio, which I believe is out of business.)

(I believe I see the word SALVAGE across these windows.)

(One last mural.)

Make sure to check back in the near future for my write-up about downtown Norwood.

If the Bakery Is A'rocking...

From Rock N. Roller:

I've shot this building before, but only recently did I see it from the right angle to pick out the "C.F. Hathaway" ghost sign. I mean, look at that sunlight just knocking me upside the head and telling me to take a picture.

The first time I took pictures of this building on Elm Street in Waltham, Mass., was in early January 2013, I was strolling around this 'hood , which is just a stone's throw from the old Elm Street Music Hall, which I featured in the first post of a three-part series about Waltham (see November 9, 2016, "Brigham in Waltham, Part I"). On that jaunt five years ago, I noticed this ragged, hand-made sign:

I don't know if the powers-that-be at Woolly Mammoth Sound have put up a better sign since I snapped this picture. They probably don't need to. The recording studio is run by Dave Minehan, a Greater Boston rock legend.

Minehan founded the Neighborhoods, a mainstay of the Boston rock scene from the late '70s through the early '90s. The band toured with the Ramones and Cheap Trick, among others, before breaking up in 1992. The band re-formed a decade later and still plays today. In 2013, Minehan joined the Replacements for several gigs that the Band Formerly Known As the Most Drunk Band Ever played over the next two years. Minehan had big shoes to fill in the minds of Replacements fans: Slim Dunlap's (1987-1991), who played lead guitar on the band's last two studio albums, Don't Tell a Soul and All Shook Down, and who suffered a stroke in 2012; and Bob Stinson's (1979-1985), the band's founder and most colorful, yet ultimately tragic, member. Replacements singer Paul Westerberg booted Stinson from the band in 1986 due to his alcohol and drug problems. Stinson died in 1995 at age 35.

(Did some petulant rock star throw this TV out of a Woolly Mammoth studio window five years ago?)

Here's a Neighborhoods video:

And here's the Replacements featuring Dave Minehan:

Let's get back to the building itself, and C.F. Hathaway.

In addition to Woolly Mammoth, the building at 180 Elm Street is home to a bindery service, a furniture repair company, a woodworking business and an upholstery shop. Built in 1900, according to real estate web site LoopNet, the building is a converted mill.

As I do with just about everything I photograph and write about on this blog, I headed to Google for more information on "C.F. Hathaway." The first results got me very excited. "C. F. Hathaway Company was a private manufacturer of shirts for men and boys, located in Waterville, Maine," said the Wikipedia entry I found. "It was founded in 1837 and made uniform shirts for Union soldiers during the American Civil War."

"Wow!" I thought. "What a cool connection to this nation's history!" I dug deeper and found a 2002 New York Times article about how the company closed its factory in Maine, "the last major U.S. shirt plant." I read the article and realized that at no point did C.F. Hathaway make shirts in Waltham.

Damn.

But all was not lost. Just a little further into my online research, I found links at the Cambridge Public Library web site to Cambridge Chronicle articles that discussed C.F. Hathaway & Son, a North Cambridge bakery with a factory in, you guessed it, Waltham. Established in 1875, C.F. Hathaway & Son by 1910 had moved into the company's third location on Richdale Avenue in Cambridge, having outgrown the two prior bakeries in the city. The company is no longer in business; its North Cambridge location is now home to Hathaway Lofts.

According to this 1899 Chronicle article, Charles F. Hathaway set up shop in Cambridge as University City Bakery after working in bakeries in the area, as well as in Maine (hmm...Maine. Maybe there's a connection here?). In 1897 he bought a Waltham bakery (unnamed in the article), which employed 20. It's possible that the Elm Street building is older than 1900, but it's conceivable that the Waltham operation was run elsewhere and moved into that building later.

I'm not sure when the name of the company was changed to C.F. Hathaway.

Accompanying this Chronicle article from 1911 is a graphic that, if you enlarge it, shows the Waltham bakery. The article indicates that the Waltham bakery had the capacity to turn out 20,000 loaves of bread a day, and that its specialty "as in Cambridge is ice cream bread." I've never heard of ice cream bread, but I bet it's damn good, and that the rockers who hang out at Woolly Mammoth would enjoy it as well.

OK, might as well finish up on a rock 'n' roll note: