Historic Boston Incorporated 1999 Preservation Revolving Fund Casebook : Property Entries Online
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Historic Boston should give priority to establishing viable business arrangements leading to the rehabilitation of the Hotel Alexandra, starting with a feasibility study.

Construction of the Hotel Alexandra in the mid-1870s was a speculative venture on the part of Caleb Walworth and Emil Hammer, president and treasurer respectively of the Walworth Manufacturing Company of South Boston. The Alexandra was a "residential hotel" with commercial space at street level, a common building type in Boston after 1870 that provided wealthier urban dwellers with sprawling, well-appointed rental flats in multi-unit buildings. The Alexandra’s imposing five-story height and richly patterned sandstone façade provided a bold contrast to the elegant symmetry of the fine brick rowhouses on Massachusetts Avenue. Its prominent corner site also created a grand approach to nearby Chester Square, an area that retained its cachet as a fashionable residential neighborhood of single-family homes through the 1870s, at a time when much of the South End had converted into boarding houses for immigrant and working-class families. By the turn of the century the fortunes of the Alexandra had changed: it too had become a boarding house, and construction of the Washington Street line of the Boston Elevated Railway in 1899 had obscured the building’s fine front façade and made Washington Street a noisy, less desirable place to live.

The upper floors of the Hotel Alexandra have been vacant for over twenty years. For the past five years, the building has been for sale, currently for an asking price of $1.5 million, and has been under agreement four times during that period. In the late 1980s, a fire almost caused the building to be condemned by the fire department. Since the fire, subsequent owners have replaced the roof, stabilized the structure, and gutted the interior down to the brick bearing walls. There is no parking on the site. The adjacent townhouse at 1767 Washington Street, which also is vacant at the upper floors and is under the same ownership as the Alexandra, is for sale for $750,000. An unrealistic asking price may inhibit development options and indicate speculative wishful thinking.

Recently the area around the Hotel Alexandra has begun to experience a come-back. One block north on Massachusetts, the rehabilitated Smith Block opened as an antiques mart two years ago. Across the street at the entrance to Worcester Square, private developers currently are rehabbing the Allen House into luxury condominiums. One block south of the Hotel Alexandra on Washington Street, the Mandela Apartments, a 1970s multi-building residential development, will undergo renovations for conversion into market rate apartments.

South End National Register Historic District nomination; HBI Preservation Revolving Fund Casebooks, 1981, 1985

Entry Completed: 05/21/1999