I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream!

I'm always going down rabbit holes, never knowing where any one thread of Brookline history is going to take me. 

My latest expedition began with a recent article by Celeste Alcalay in Brookline News about Jamie's Ice Cream Co., a small business that was added to the Brothers & Sisters café on Station Street in 2022. 

Brookline News photo by Molly Potter.

I'd done some digging into Brookline's ice cream history before, after the 2013 closing of Sealey's Lunch, which began as Sealey's Ice Cream on Cypress Street in 1936. You can read about that in my original post and a later follow up.

But little did I know how long, rich, and flavorful was the history of ice cream in town.

Ice Cream of All Sorts and Flavors

As early as 1870, ice cream was for sale in the "new dining rooms" at J. Anson Guild's Guild Block at the intersection of Washington and Boylston Streets. (The building was later replaced by the Brookline Bank building, now the NETA marijuana dispensary.)

The Guild Block, left in an 1872 photo, and an 1870 Brookline Transcript advertisement featuring ice cream at one of the businesses in the block. (Click image for larger view.)

Five years later, George Perkins advertised his "dining & ice cream rooms" with "ice cream constantly on hand" in the new Colonnade Block between Station Street and Andem Place.

The first two buildings of the Colonnade Block, still standing today, are shown in the 1874 photograph at left. The third building, where the Brookline Village Post Office is today, was built in 1875, the year the advertisement at right appeared in the Brookline Chronicle. (Click image for larger view.)

The bill of fare at the café, wrote the Boston Globe in October 1875, "is served in a manner that would put some of our first-class cafés all in the shade."

"Mr. Perkins," said the paper, "will continue to cater for private parties as usual, and the parties can be supplied with ice cream of all sorts and flavors, in large and small quantities, at short notice."

Other Brookline businesses -- including restaurants and retail food shops -- also included ice cream in their offerings in subsequent decades. 

(Click image for larger view.)

The "Quick-Freeze" and A New Ice Cream Era

But the real boom in ice cream -- not just in Brookline, but everywhere -- came in the 1930s, spurred by a new, faster, cheaper, more consistent ice cream making process.  (Clarence Vogt's patent for "An Apparatus for Manufacturing Ice Cream and the Like" was awarded in October 1929.)

In May 1931, the H.P Hood & Sons creamery announced that their first store using Vogt's new "quick-freeze" process would be opened in Coolidge Corner. "Quick-freezing," reported the Brookline Chronicle

"has wrought marvels in preserving the natural flavor and texture of several staple food products and applied to the manufacture of ice cream it has brought astonishing results in the improvement of quality by giving greater smoothness and richness."

 

The H.P Hood store at 1300 Beacon Street is shown here in 1936, four years after it opened. The space is now occupied by Coolidge Coolidge Corner Wines & Liquors

In the spring of 1932, another new business, "presenting for the first time [according to the Chronicle] a new idea in the field of merchandising ice cream," opened at 326 Harvard Street.

Named simply the Ice Cream Shop, it was the first in Brookline to sell only ice cream. (Hood's sold all kinds of dairy products.)  "As nothing else is handled," reported the paper, "a remarkable product is made and this is sold at an unusual price."

Brookline Chronicle, September 1932. The Ice Cream Shop occupied the space that is now Cold Brew.

Also opening in the spring of 1932 was a branch of Brigham's ice cream and confectionary store on Beacon Street at the corner of Williston Road. (The space is now occupied by the Sanela hair salon, next door to the Barcelona wine bar and tapas restaurant.)

Brookline Chronicle, January 26, 1933

Sealey's Ice Cream began its long run in Brookline in June of 1936. Six months later and two miles west on Boylston Street, Brookline's first Howard Johnson's restaurant -- as noted for its 28 flavors of ice cream as for its food -- opened  in Chestnut Hill near the border with Newton. (A second Brookline HoJo's opened in Coolidge Corner in the 1950s.)

Brookline Chronicle, December 12, 1936. The Chestnut Hill building, greatly modified, is now occupied by the Charles Schwab investment firm.

The Modern Pied Piper: The Good Humor Truck

Children lining up at the Good Humor truck, as seen in a 1932 advertisement

Howard Johnson and Sealey's were not the only ice cream newcomers in 1936 Brookline. That year also saw the introduction of Good Humor ice cream trucks to New England. Their base of operation? A large garage on Dummer Street just south of Commonwealth Avenue. 

Good Humor ice cream had started in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1923. Thirteen years later, its Massachusetts operation began with a fleet of refrigerated trucks that left the Brookline garage each day to sell the ice cream on a stick treat all over the streets of the Boston area.

"Each morning," reported the Brookline Chronicle, "the 40 little trucks are ammonia-ized and ice cream-ized, & off they go all over Metropolitan Boston to put people into good humor, but more important, to put Good Humor into people."

 

76 Dummer Street today

Good Humor trucks no longer operate, though the ice cream brand is still distributed through stores. And ice cream, introduced to Brookline more than 150 years ago, is as popular as ever in town today.