Brookline's Fisher Hill Reservoirs

Mention “the reservoir” to people in Brookline today and they will probably think of one of two bodies of water: the Chestnut Hill Reservoir or the Brookline Reservoir.

But the Chestnut Hill Reservoir is actually in the Boston part of Chestnut Hill, just over the Brookline border.  

And the much older Brookline Reservoir, while in Brookline, was built as part of Boston’s water supply, not Brookline's.

 

This presentation is not about those reservoirs, but about three other Brookline reservoirs, all on Fisher Hill. These reservoirs no longer exist as bodies of water, but they have left their mark on the landscape and the town.

The map below at left, a portion of an 1855 map of Brookline, shows Fisher Hill at center left, north of the Brookline Reservoir.  The map at right shows more or less the same location today.

 

The older map was made 11 years after the Brookline Reservoir was built as part of the system bringing water from Lake Cochituate through Brookline to Boston. 

The New York and Boston Railroad, introduced in 1845, runs through the low-lying valley in the center of the map, between Fisher Hill and Aspinwall Hill. 

That, today, is the route of the D branch of the Green Line.

Beacon Street, laid out as a narrow, unpaved country lane in the 1850s, is to the north.

A few streets have been laid out across Fisher Hill, though houses are still largely confined to the lower slopes and would remain so for another 30 years.

By 1874, when the view below (part of a larger map) was produced, Brookline was in the process of building its own reservoir on Fisher Hill to serve the town. 

A natural pond, shown in the circle in the center of this view, had been converted into an earthen basin to hold water that could flow through pipes from the high elevation of Fisher Hill to other parts of the town.

The water came from the Charles River, at the Dedham/West Roxbury border, four miles away.

“The Town of Brookline,” reported the Boston Globe, “is now actively engaged in laying down pipes, constructing reservoirs, and setting up the machinery for a supply of water from Charles River.” 

“The water is to be raised to an elevated point near the river….whence it will flow by its own gravity to the summit of Fisher's Hill…. 240 feet above tidewater.”

“From this point it is distributed through service pipes to the consumers.”

The pumping station in West Roxbury, shown below, was built on land owned by the Town of Brookline. It sent the Charles River water through through pipes up to Fisher Hill.

In 1888, the City of Boston built the Fisher Hill Reservoir, across Fisher Avenue from Brookline’s reservoir, as part of Boston’s own water supply

In 1893, Brookline added a second, smaller, covered reservoir to its own water system. It is under the dashed lines, marked “Brookline Water Works," between Fisher Avenue and the town’s older, open reservoir, on the map below.

The trade journal The Engineering Record presented sketches of the unusual covered reservoir. 

But to really get a sense what that looked like, here are underground photos from a few years ago, before a new development was built on the site of the long-unused covered reservoir.

 

By the time of the 1907 map below, the older, open reservoir of the Brookline Water Works had also been covered.

A brick house, owned by Josephine and Frederick Gay, had been built just north of the reservoirs.

This aerial view below, from 2025, shows new housing, outlined in pink, in the area once occupied by the Brookline reservoirs.

Fisher Hill Reservoir Park occupies the space of the former Boston reservoir.

The former Josephine and Frederick Gay house is now Mitton House, named for a later owner and now part of a new senior housing complex called The Newbury at Brookline.

The following views show some of the varied landscapes of today’s Fisher Hill Reservoir Park, opened in 2016…

...while some of the brickwork from the old town reservoir can be seen in the lawn of a new, town-built mixed-income housing development....

...along with an historical marker telling the history of the site.

The Pierce School the Municipal Triangle, Part 1

The map below shows the triangle formed by Harvard Street, Washington Street, and School Street in Brookline Village. It is the location of the Town Hall, the Public Library, the Health Department, and -- for 170 years -- a succession of buildings of the John Pierce School.

You might call it the Municipal Triangle.

The northern part of the triangle was, from 1974 to last year, the location of the fifth building to carry the name Pierce School. It was recently torn down and will be replaced by the sixth building in the long history of Pierce.

The oldest of those buildings, erected in 1855, still stands, along with a larger 1904 addition.

That combined 1855/1904 building--its interior completely changed--will continue to be a part of the school.

I've put together Part 1 of an online history of the municipal triangle. It tells the story of the school, three Town Halls, and other town buildings up to 1970 and the decision to build a new Pierce School, the recently demolished 1974 building.

Part 2, still to come, will cover the 1974 school and bring the story of the Pierce School and the municipal triangle up to the present.

You can watch the illustrated and narrated 30-minute presentation at https://bit.ly/pierceschoolpart1

Spring Walking Tours of Brookline History

This spring's series of Brookline history walking tours kicks off this Sunday at 9 am with 165 Years of Shopping in Coolidge Corner.

Coolidge & Brother Store, 1887

Coolidge Corner was home to just one store—Coolidge & Brother—from the 1850s to the 1890s. Following the widening of Beacon Street in 1887-88 and the arrival of the S.S. Pierce store a few years later, a major new shopping district took root. Almost all of the existing buildings in this still thriving commercial area were built between 1890 and 1930. 

Join me for a journey back to the initial development of the Coolidge Corner business district and get a glimpse of local shopping in the early decades of the 20th Century. The tour is free, but registration is required. Register at https://bit.ly/coolidgecorner04132025 . 

The tour will begin at the Coolidge Corner inbound T-stop on Beacon Street. For a full list of spring tours, see the Brookline Historical Society website at https://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org/

Brookline's Oldest Restaurant (Or Is It?)

Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about Brookline's oldest restaurant, the Busy Bee, which opened on Beacon Street just east of Carlton Street in April 1955.

Ad announcing the grand opening of Busy Bee. Brookline Citizen, April 14, 1955, p7.

Busy Bee has now closed, as reported in Brookline News. So which restaurant gets to wear the crown as Brookline's oldest?

Well, it depends.

By one measure, Martin's Coffee, which replaced Muldoon's Luncheonette at 35 Harvard Street in Brookline Village in November 1955, gets boasting rights. 

Ad in Brookline Citizen, November 24, 1955

But wait. The Martin's website says "Local Fresh Food Since 1918."

And a mural on the inside of the restaurant also says 1918.

Could it be that Muldoon's, the luncheonette that, according to that 1955 ad, was replaced by Martin's, was a restaurant in that space as far back as 1918?

No. Muldoon's opened at 35 Harvard Street in 1948, moving from the nearby building at the corner of Harvard and Linden Street where it had started in 1946, not 1918. 

Brookline Citizen, December 2, 1948. (Click image for larger view)

In fact, there was no retail space at all at 35 Harvard Street in 1918. The three-story building was constructed as an apartment building in the 1890s and the first floor wasn't converted to retail space until 1926. It was then occupied by a series of drugstores -- no restaurants -- until after World War II.

So where does that 1918 date come from? Nobody at Martin's seems to know. (Every time I've asked, I've been told the owner is in his native Albania and is unavailable for comment.)

Still, though Martin's dates to 1955, not 1918, it is -- with the closing of Busy Bee -- now Brookline's oldest restaurant.

Sort of.

As I noted in that 2022 blog post, there is one Brookline storefront that has been a restaurant  -- but not the same restaurant -- longer than Martin's. It's the space at 1016 Commonwealth Avenue at the corner of Babcock Street, now occupied by T. Anthony's.

That storefront, which -- like the Martin's space -- was added to the front of an existing apartment building in the 1920s, was occupied by the Hawthorne Lunch restaurant from 1923 to 1933. Later restaurants include a branch of the Walnut Lunch chain and the Babcock Luncheonette. T. Anthony's took over the space in 1964. 

Adding to the confusion, the T. Anthony's website says "Established in 1976," not 1964! (Turns out that when the current owner took over the then-12-year-old restaurant.)

The Brookline News story on the closing of Busy Bee noted that the Christakis family, which operated the restaurant and still owns the building, is negotiating with a prospective new restaurant tenant. "We’re looking for somebody to keep it the way it is, keep it similar,” Chris Christakis told the paper. A future tenant, he added, might not even change the name.

If that turns out to be the case, if the restaurant that opened in April 1955 comes back, with a new owner in the same location, but with the same name and kept "the way it is," will Busy Bee reclaim the title of Brookline's oldest restaurant.

As always, it depends on how you look at it.