O NCE UPON A TIME, more than 100 auto dealerships, car repair shops, and retailers selling parts and accessories lined a mile-long stretch of road that slices through what is now BU’s Charles River Campus. Downtown Boston had its “Piano Row” and its “Newspaper Row.” And for the first half of the 20th century, Comm Ave from Kenmore Square to Packard’s Corner was the city’s “Automobile Row.”

Look carefully, and you can still see vestiges of the area’s former life, many of them ensconced in buildings now owned by BU. The scallop shell, which looks suspiciously like the Shell Oil logo, sculpted into the facade of the BU Academy. The miniature mechanics and motorists that gaze down at student artwork from pillars in the College of Fine Arts. On almost every block of the Charles River Campus, an astute observer can find traces of its automotive past.

The Prince of Packard’s Corner

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Vestige of a former lifeGargoyles in mechanics’ garb peer down at visitors to CFA’s Stone Gallery. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

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Trendsetter Alvan T. Fuller opened the first of many car dealerships on Comm Ave. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

It began with Alvan T. Fuller. Born in 1878, Fuller was a champion bicycle racer who at age 17 opened a bike shop in his hometown of Malden, Mass. After the turn of the century, he decided to bank on a more expensive form of transportation: automobiles. Fuller persuaded the Detroit-based Packard Motor Car Company to name him its exclusive dealer in the Boston area.

By 1908, Fuller anticipated that the motorcar business would soon outgrow the confines of central city locations such as his stall in the Motor Mart in Boston’s Park Square. The young entrepreneur thought the business might move westward. After decades that saw luxury homes rise in the Back Bay and Brookline’s Cottage Farm district, development had stalled on Comm Ave west of Kenmore Square. Fuller cast his eye on large unbuilt tracts that were close to downtown and accessible by trolley.

The site he chose for his grand new Packard dealership was a section of Brighton coincidentally named Packard’s Corner—after the nearby horse stable and riding school run by one John D. Packard. “Fuller may have been tempted to the neighborhood because of the name,” says William P. Marchione, a member of the Brighton-Allston Historical Society and author of four books about Boston.

Designed by architect Albert Kahn, the building Fuller erected at 1079–1089 Commonwealth Avenue—now home to condominiums as well as Supercuts and other businesses at street level—was New England’s first combined auto salesroom and service station. It included assembly, storage, and repair facilities, as well as offices.

The building’s showpiece, however, was its showroom, designed to appeal to the kind of high-end customers who could afford the $5,000 for a new Packard. “Fuller’s handsomely furnished showroom had high ceilings and fluted columns, and was lit by a combination of elaborate hanging fixtures and a barrel-vaulted skylight,” writes Marchione in Allston-Brighton in Transition: From Cattle Town to Streetcar Suburb.

At that time, any automobile was a luxury few could afford. Often called a touring car, the Packard was something to be taken out for Sunday spins on “pleasure roads” in the country, not driven to Buffalo to see one’s aunt (that’s what the train was for) or to work (trolley lines connected most suburbs to the city). Fuller’s typical buyer was either wealthy, a committed gearhead hobbyist (considerable assembly was required after purchase), or some combination thereof.

As the number of potential customers grew in the second decade of the century, other dealers followed Fuller to Packard’s Corner and the vicinity, where big open spaces afforded spacious showrooms that were ornate by today’s standards. “These buildings required large expanses of well-lighted garage space and display areas, and floors capable of supporting heavy loads,” writes Nancy Salzman in Buildings & Builders: An Architectural History of Boston University. “Their facades were often embellished with vigorous and distinctive designs.”

From 1910 to 1920, at least a dozen dealerships opened on Commonwealth and Brighton Avenues, selling models of Auburn, Rolls-Royce, Hupmobile, Pierce-Arrow, Clark-Crowley, and other brands.

As it turns out, Alvan Fuller did more than open the first of many car dealerships; he sparked an enduring and nationwide promotional trend. Because people didn’t drive in the winter, Fuller figured that by late February motorists were ready to check out the year’s new Packards. By 1917, the car salesman had begun hosting an annual “open house” on George Washington’s birthday, February 22. Other dealers followed suit, offering their own sales and hiring bands and serving cherry pies. “It was a carnival atmosphere on Comm Ave,” says Edward Ellis, whose family owned an auto accessories store on Comm Ave for decades (see below).

Such innovative marketing helped make Fuller one of the richest men in America, and in 1924, after serving eight years in the state legislature, he won the race for governor, defeating the legendary James Michael Curley.

Hallmarks of the Halcyon Days

On the eve of the Roaring Twenties, the Noyes Buick building was built at 855 Commonwealth Avenue, today home of the College of Fine Arts. The building featured enormous arched windows (now filled in) looking into a showroom with a vaulted, Romanesque ceiling and Corinthian columns. This showroom is now CFA’s Stone Gallery, and visitors who look up at the top of the columns will notice gargoyle-like mechanics with wrenches and motorists in caps and goggles.

Automobile Row continued its expansion over the next decade, and by 1929, there were 117 car dealerships, garages, and other auto-related businesses on both sides of Commonwealth Avenue and spilling onto Brighton Avenue. And Fuller was still at it. More than 20 years after he opened his Packard complex, he built an imposing Cadillac-Oldsmobile dealership at 808 Commonwealth Avenue—today CFA’s 808 Gallery—across from the BU Bridge (then the Cottage Farm Bridge).

The opulent space, also designed by Albert Kahn, was initially derided as Fuller’s Folly, but combining sales of the luxury Cadillac brand and the workingman’s Oldsmobile turned out to be good for business. Mark Lande, a salesman at Herb Chambers BMW, one of Comm Ave’s few remaining dealerships, remembers Fuller’s business in its later decades: “The shiny red Cadillac Eldorado, rotating on a turntable, caught everyone’s attention,” he recalls. “But most people purchased the affordable Oldsmobile.”

In the second half of the 20th century, BU bought and repurposed many of the old dealerships. The College of Communication took over 640 Commonwealth Avenue, where Nash vehicles had been sold for three decades.

Today, the vault at 808 Comm Ave that held Fuller’s Caddy and Olds revenues is the office of Daniel LeClair, a Metropolitan College professor, and the grand street-level showroom displays the artwork of students and faculty. A concrete ramp inside the building still makes it possible to drive all the way up to the fifth floor.

An auto showroom owned by a former crony of pyramid-scheme swindler Charles Ponzi occupied the building at 830–844 Commonwealth Avenue, which now houses BU’s Photographic Resource Center and Sicilia’s Pizzeria. Up the street at 860 Comm Ave was a Pontiac dealership, now the East Coast Alpine block.

Diagonally across Comm Ave from 808 is the BU Academy, nestled in the 785 Comm Ave building that was once the New England headquarters of the Shell Oil Company. In addition to the seashells and other aquatic symbols carved into the building’s facade, there used to be a 68-foot-tall neon Shell logo looming from its roof. The sign now lives across the river in Cambridge, at a Shell station on Memorial Drive. The Shell building served for a time as a General Tire outlet, before housing BU’s College of General Education, Sargent College, and finally, the BU Academy.

End of the Road

The Depression was hard on the auto industry. On Boston’s Automobile Row, it closed a third of the 117 auto-related businesses, but the district survived, with at least 54 dealerships and many related businesses soldiering on.

In the postwar 1950s, the federally built interstate highway system boosted auto sales, and Auto Row enjoyed another peak. But, thanks to the G.I. Bill, something else was skyrocketing in this period: college enrollment. Boston University, scattered across several buildings downtown, had secured the tract of land west of Granby Street and north of Comm Ave three decades earlier. After World War II, BU began to consolidate on the Charles River Campus.

Meanwhile, as families moved to the suburbs, car dealers followed—setting up shop in places like Norwood’s Route 1 Auto Mile. By 1975, there were only 21 dealerships on Comm Ave, and by 1981, just 11. Today there are but three in the neighborhood, all Herb Chambers stores, and all beyond Packard’s Corner.

Change has been a constant for the transportation landscape on this stretch of Comm Ave. Horse-drawn buggies gave way to electrified trolleys, which had to share the road with automobiles. In recent years, a joint beautification initiative of BU and the city of Boston widened the sidewalks and planted trees, and the addition of a bike lane and Hubway bike-share program is encouraging cyclists to think of the road as theirs as well. Alvan T. Fuller might appreciate the outcome: after all, he got his start selling bicycles. ■

Additional research by Robin Berghaus.