Scollay Square

It was named for William Scollay, a prominent local developer and militia officer who bought a landmark four-story merchant building at the intersection of the Cambridge and Court Streets in the year 1795.

Early on, the area was a busy center of commerce, including daguerreotypist (photographer) Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808–1901) and Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, the first dentist to use ether as an anaesthetic.

"[1] Among the most famous (and infamous) of Scollay Square landmarks was the Old Howard Theatre, a grand theater which began life as the headquarters of a Millerite Adventist Christian sect which believed the world would end in October 1844.

The venue also showcased boxing matches with boxers including Rocky Marciano,[3] and continued to feature slapstick vaudeville acts, from likes of The Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello.

As early as the 1950s, city officials had been mulling plans to completely tear down and redevelop the Scollay Square area, in order to remove lower-income residents and troubled businesses from the aging and seedy district.

Attempts to reopen the sullied Old Howard by its old performers had been one of the last efforts against redevelopment; but with the theater gutted by fire, a city wrecking ball began the project of demolishing more than 1,000 buildings in the area; 20,000 residents were displaced.