S.S. Pierce Building

A former grocery store warehouse and retail building from the late 19th century. S.S. Pierce was one of Boston's most prestigious grocery chains, serving wealthy families for over 150 years before closing in 1992.

The S.S. Pierce Building rises at the heart of Coolidge Corner in Brookline, its distinctive Tudor Revival clock tower marking the intersection where Harvard Street meets Beacon Street. Built in 1898-99, this architectural landmark housed one of Boston's most exclusive grocery establishments—and according to local lore, the spirits of its gilded past have never entirely departed.

The corner where the building stands has been a center of commerce since 1857, when the Coolidge & Brother general store opened on this very site. The neighborhood takes its name not from President Calvin Coolidge but from David S. Coolidge, the 19th-century businessman whose general store served as north Brookline's only commercial establishment for decades. When S.S. Pierce acquired the location and built their grand Tudor-style emporium, they were continuing a tradition of service that stretched back forty years.

Samuel Stillman Pierce founded his grocery company in Boston in 1831, and by the late 1800s, S.S. Pierce had become synonymous with luxury. The Coolidge Corner store, designed by architects Winslow and Wetherell, featured an iconic corner tower with a clock, steep slate roofs, cross-timbering with stucco siding, and interiors as sumptuous as the imported goods they sold. Wealthy Bostonians came here for fine wines, gourmet cheeses, $100 tins of caviar, and exotic provisions from around the world—all delivered free to their homes by the company's impeccable staff.

For over sixty years, the S.S. Pierce store served Brookline's elite, its uniformed clerks attending to customers who expected nothing but the finest. The building persisted as a grocery into the 1960s before the company was eventually sold in 1972. But buildings absorb the energy of those who worked and shopped within them, and the S.S. Pierce Building seems to have retained impressions of its more prosperous era.

Staff in the businesses that now occupy the building have reported unexplained phenomena: the sound of footsteps in empty upper floors, cold drafts that seem to move with purpose through the halls, and the occasional whiff of pipe tobacco or fine perfume—scents from an era when gentlemen smoked and ladies wore French fragrances to do their shopping. The clock tower, which has watched over Coolidge Corner for over 125 years, sometimes seems to draw visitors' attention for reasons they cannot explain.

Some believe the spirits are former employees, still going about their duties with the dedication that made S.S. Pierce famous. Others suggest wealthy patrons return to browse merchandise that no longer exists, unable to accept that their elegant shopping destination has changed. Whatever the source, the building carries an atmosphere that visitors describe as "heavy" or "watchful"—the sense that the past is not quite willing to release its hold on this beloved Brookline landmark.

The S.S. Pierce Building stands as a reminder of a more gracious commercial era, when shopping was an experience rather than a transaction. And for those sensitive to such things, it remains a place where that era has never quite ended.