History
A bit of history…
In 1915, landowner and investor Thomas McCormick hired architect Harry Dustin Joll to draft designs for the three-story brick building at 2-4 Lexington Street that still stands today. Joll was among Boston’s top architects of the time, and is best known for designing the Walnut Street Synagogue in Chelsea in 1908 – a building that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1993.
Joll designed the blended commercial and residential building to house six rental apartments and one ground-level commercial space. For the next 24 years, the three-story brick building housed a diverse range of East Boston residents; including recent immigrants from Europe, railway workers, laborers and shopkeepers.
In 1939, the building at 2-4 Lexington Street was converted from residential apartments to commercial use for the Wesco Paint Company. Eight years later, in 1947, a group of East Boston residents – including the parents and grandparents of the current owners – bought the building from Wesco Paint and founded the East Boston Times in it. This is the same local newspaper that still serves East Boston today!
A variety of printing presses, metals and inks filled the rooms of 2-4 Lexington Street for much of the 20th century. The machines used over the years included a Miehle V36 Vertical Letter Press, a Multilith 1250, a Chandler and Price Letterpress, and an original Heidelberg.
Central to the printing process at that time was the linotype machine. This building housed six of these veritable workhorses of the printing industry. In fact, Thomas Edison considered the linotype machine "the eighth wonder of the world”. This “wonder” reduced the number of individual type pieces needed to produce a completed story, and allowed journalists to create full strands of text that were then cast into a mold.
By 1954, as publication services shifted increasingly towards contract work, the current owners also founded the Neighborhood Publishing Corp to support the printing of other local papers. In addition to housing the East Boston Times, the building at 2-4 Lexington Street went on to serve as the printing press for many other Boston area newspapers such as the South Boston Times, Everett Leader Herald, Cambridge Chronicle, Charlestown Patriot and Wentworth Institute student newspaper.
Over 100 years later, the building was completely renovated and restored to housing six condominiums and one storefront – in keeping with it's original 1915 design.
