[1] The Ritchie Building is located on the east side of Cypress Street, north of Massachusetts Route 9 and south of the MBTA Green Line D branch, just east of the Brookline Hills station.

The second level is finished in stone, resembling a raised basement level, while the upper floors retain their original modest Panel Brick features, including segmented-arch window openings and a corbelled cornice.

[2] Edward Samuel Ritchie founded his navigational instruments company in the 1850s, and had, by the 1880s, established a main office in Boston and a manufacturing facility near Harvard Square in Cambridge.

He built the present facility in 1883, not far from his home on Lincoln Street, when he was unable to expand the Cambridge space.

The business, whose customers notably included the United States Navy, was operated by Ritchie and his successors at this site until the 1950s.