Shopping Coolidge Corner

Take a walk down Harvard Street in the upscale, trendy retail district of Brookline's Coolidge Corner — past the retro fashion boutiques, doggy daycares, and trendy cafes — and it's a little hard to imagine that the neighborhood could have ever been called a "meat and potatoes” shopping district catering to the “low-priced consumer.” But as a Brookline Chronicle-Citizen cover story from 1981 clearly documents, Coolidge Corner headed into the “Decade of Decadence” as a collection of small shops largely appealing to the discount crowd.

It had not always been that way. In its magnificently sumptuous building at the corner of Harvard and Beacon, S.S. Pierce was once an exclusive specialty grocer known for fine wine, gourmet cheeses, and $100 tins of caviar. And it set the trend for the neighborhood. In the first half of the 20th century, Coolidge Corner consisted largely of small, elite clothing boutiques, fashionable jewelry shops, and prestigious importers.

But by the 1960s and ‘70s, urban retail centers across the nation were rapidly losing clientele to new suburban malls. Post-war families with a little extra in their bank accounts and a car in the garage preferred the new sleek malls with their acres of parking. When the Chestnut Hill Mall opened just four miles down Route 9 in 1974, it lured away many of those with deeper pockets.

And it wasn't just a lack of parking downgrading the Coolidge Corner retail scene, apparently it was also the neighbors. The 1981 Chronicle piece described the area around Coolidge Corner as the fourth poorest of the town’s planning areas and cited a median income of just $12,834. A large chunk of the population was also of retirement age. Up popped a “profusion of discount drug stores, opticians, and bargain clothing shops” catering to local bargain hunters. One merchant told the Chronicle-Citizen that he was after “the neighborhood’s value-conscious middle class and the elderly on fixed income” — two groups that do not spend extended time in the Coolidge Corner of 2025. 

Still, even in 1981, there were those who could see the future. For instance, Ira Rashap, who had just opened “Edibles” in a former Friendly’s on Harvard Street and was selling quiche, soups, and espresso to the area’s newer, upscale residents. He was right on the money when he predicted that “condominium conversion will be forcing out the elderly and replacing them with young working people. It should be noticeable in five years.” 

Sure enough, a 1986 Brookline Citizen story on the Coolidge Corner retail scene shows just how far things had come in those five years. Reporter Bill Tool was now calling Coolidge Corner, “one of Brookline’s most prosperous retail communities” while noting a “recent trend towards upscale specialization.”  And while the paper had called the neighborhood residents lower-middle class just five years earlier, Tool now characterized Coolidge Corner as “blessed demographically” with a “densely concentrated, affluent, and sophisticated population.” Indeed, the old corner had become a destination again as vogueish stores competed with one another to nab the latest open space. That’s a trend that has only increased, right through the 1990s and into the online shopping age of the 21st Century.

Today, even the local pizza joint in Coolidge Corner is called “The Upper Crust” — and if the specialty boutiques are back, and wine and cheese is being sold at local grocers, then it’s only because things have come full circle in the old home of S.S. Pierce.