Preserving Boston's Jazz Legacy: The Buckminster Hotel
Photo by Pat Greenhouse, Boston Globe.
Written by Elizabeth Kostina, 2023 Summer Intern.
On July 25, 2023, Boston City officials temporarily stopped the process of Landmarking the Buckminster Hotel in Kenmore Square. The Buckminster is currently owned by IQHQ, a lab developer which filed a Letter of Intent in January of this year to redevelop the site to make way for a 215-foot-tall lab building. This development would massively undermine Kenmore Square’s fading historic character.
Photo from Sara Brown, Boston Preservation Alliance.
Built in 1897, the Buckminster is located at the triangular intersection of Beacon Street and Brookline Avenue. It is one of two hotels within a block of Fenway Park, designed by architects Winslow and Wetherell. It was originally built for occupancy as a luxury family/apartment hotel. Its red Roman brick and limestone Renaissance Revival style with its rounded corner has long defined Kenmore Square. The hotel has a lengthy history, but through the many uses of Buckminster’s long history, only one is emblematic of the once-thriving music scene and legacy within Boston.
Hotel Buckminster in 1911, photo from Dirty Old Boston.
From 1951-1953 the Buckminster hosted Storyville on its ground floor, a Boston jazz club founded and operated by Jewish-American Jazz Promoter George Wein. Remembered as an impresario who almost single-handedly turned the jazz festival into a worldwide phenomenon, Wein died in 2021. His accomplishments included the Newport Folk Festival (which played a crucial role in the career of Bob Dylan, among others) as well as the Newport Jazz Festival. He was considered one of the most important figures in Boston jazz in the 1950s who “set the standard as to how a club should be run and jazz should be presented” at Storyville, so named after the red-light district of New Orleans, the alleged birthplace of jazz. Storyville was a beacon of nightlife in Boston with legendary jazz performers like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday taking the stage. After its 1953 run at Buckminster, Storyville moved locations, ending in 1960 under different ownership at Hotel Bradford on Tremont Street in Boston, though Wein opened a club in New York under the same name in 1967. An attempt to revive the club in 1982 by the Boston Kenmore Realty Corporation was unsuccessful.
Jazz’s roots, as a musical genre, emerged following the Civil War in 1865, when musicians from African-American and Black communities of New Orleans combined classical music with traditional (West) African songs and slave folk songs, from which developed ragtime, jazz’s precursor. Having this as a context, Wein featured Dixieland Jazz or ‘traditional jazz,’ during the first season at Storyville, mixing old-school players (Wild Bill Davison, Sidney Bechet), with modernists (Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, Ella Fitzgerald) that blurred the line between jazz and pop music. Many recordings from Storyville still exist — such as this 1956 album from the Gerry Mulligan quartet!
Between the 1890s and 1910s, ragtime melded with blues music, spiritual and work songs, and West African ‘call and response’ styles to eventually become jazz. Throughout the early 20th century, up to the 1920s, jazz and other traditionally Black musical genres came to the attention of White audiences: The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a group of white musicians made the first jazz recordings in 1917. Storyville, in the words of Jazz Historian Richard Vacca, was “a listening room, it wasn’t a bar that had music.” What made Storyville successful was the “level of talent”. Everybody who was in jazz passed through the doors of Storyville, some of them many times, and Wein was instrumental in the club’s promotion. “He was a dynamo. He was on the radio, he was in the newspapers, he was a spokesman for jazz, he was doing amazing things.” What made Storyville particularly special, in Wein’s words, was its reputation for being:
…one of the very few jazz clubs in the country to give the musicians a fair shake. Before Storyville, there were mostly joints. We tried to do right by the musicians as well as the music—little things, like having the piano in tune and having good acoustics. We set some decent standards in what was then a pretty crummy business, and we also booked a lot of good talent, which nearly ruined me.
Storyville was not the only club that Buckminster hosted — though it was its most famous. According to the Boston Landmarks Commission report about the hotel, other jazz clubs included the Candlelight Room (1952 — 1962), Jazz Village (1958-1960), Sonny’s, Camelot, Mother’s Lounge, and Smokey Joe’s (1960s). Storyville — and its hotel successors — are only one piece of Boston’s now dwindled jazz scene. The South End was once Boston’s mecca of Jazz, with the Massachusetts Ave. and Columbus Ave. intersection the focal point, once home to clubs such as the Hi-Hat, the Savoy Ballroom, Chicken Lane, the WigWam, Big M, and Wally’s Paradise, (now Wally’s Cafe Jazz Club).
The Hi-Hat Jazz Club opened in 1937 and closed in 1955 after a fire in Boston’s South End at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Columbus Avenue. A white-owned club in a Black neighborhood, the Hi-Hat played primarily ‘dine-and-dance’ type music to an almost exclusively white audience. When neighboring places like the Savoy and Wally’s began attracting crowds with jazz and Dixieland bands, the Hi-Hat opened the club to both white and Black patrons, featuring headliners like Jazz legends Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and BB King. A 1954 recording of Sonny Stitt at the Hi-Hat can be played here.
Photo from Drinking Boston, Hi-Hat Barbeque Club, year unknown.
A fire closed the club for good in 1955. The Harriet Tubman House, a community center founded by six Black women from Boston in the early 1900s as an homage to the famous abolitionist, was later built on the Hi-Hat site in 1976. The house was demolished in 2020 and redeveloped into 66 condos, the organization moving to 48 Rutland St. One of the last sites of Boston’s Jazz scene that connects Storyville to the Hi-Hat and the other now-closed and forgotten sites is Wally’s. Opened in 1947, it was located at 428 Massachusetts Avenue until 1978 when it moved across the street to 427 Massachusetts Avenue, where it still operates today. Wally’s was founded by Joseph L. Walcott (Wally), a Barbadian who immigrated to America in 1910. Wally was the first African American to own a nightclub in New England and Wally’s remains one of the oldest, continuously running jazz clubs in Boston.
As the city grapples with the possible loss of historic landmarks like the Buckminster Hotel, it’s essential to reflect on the rich tapestry of Boston’s jazz scene and its significance in shaping the city’s cultural identity. The story of Buckminster’s transformation over time mirrors the evolution of Boston’s jazz culture, from the pioneering days of Storyville to the vibrant traces of the Hi-Hat and Wally’s, today. These venues not only hosted legendary musicians but also served as places that fostered connections across racial and social boundaries. As the city’s landscape continues to evolve, let us remember that every demolition holds not only bricks and mortar but also stories and echoes of a vibrant past that should be safeguarded for generations to come.
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