Gilman Square

Gilman Square developed in the late nineteenth century, along with Union Square, as Somerville’s two competing commercial centers. Located along the former Boston and Lowell, later Boston and Maine, Railroad at the nexus of Medford, Marshall, and Pearl Streets, it became a vibrant center of activity through a mixture of industrial, commercial, and social functions. Multi-story brick commercial buildings around the square were constructed between approximately 1887 and 1930. Among them was the Malta Temple/Signet Commandry No. 188, a Classical Revival-style building built in 1896 that later housed the Winter Hill Business College and Fisher College during the early twentieth century, and survived as an unusual example of a commercial building with a meeting hall for social and charitable organizations, common in the nineteenth century. The Litchfield Block, built in 1891 at the corner of Marshall and Pearl Streets, was designed with commercial space at ground level and three floors of apartments above, and remains a representation of late nineteenth-century commercial architecture in Somerville. Until 2018, the Gilman Square Station site was occupied by a grocery warehouse owned by Reid Murdoch and Company of Chicago, a three-story Art Deco-style brick building built in 1929 and expanded circa 1935, with loading bays for railroad cars along the tracks and for trucks at one end.

Somerville, Massachusetts · United States