There’s change afoot along Boston’s historic Freedom Trail. Activists have launched a campaign on Change.org to convert the Old Corner Bookstore (OCB) into a museum reflecting the city’s literary history.
Constructed in 1718 on the site of Puritan dissident Anne Hutchinson’s cottage at the corner of Washington and School Streets, Boston’s oldest commercial building was saved from demolition in 1960 by its current owner, Historic Boston, Inc.,which has leased out the space since 2011 to raise money for the organization’s various preservation endeavors such as the Everett Square Theater and the Malcolm X house. The OCB’s current tenant is a Chipotle Mexican Grill–not quite a bastion of literature and the impetus behind this current petition.
Sstarting in the 1840s, the OCB was the home of Ticknor & Fields, an American publisher perhaps best known for publishing H.D. Thoreau’s Walden and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, as well as work by Julia Ward Howe and Henry Longfellow. Read more over at the Fine Books Blog.