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Have you tried a pair of the famous Madison Pants yet?

Madison Pants in old Boston

The folks at the Boston City Archives wonder if you can place this scene.

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but the Mattison pants are fantastic

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1120 Washington St South End approx 1900?

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Delete

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So no modern photos to help as reference.

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I assume you're referencing this? (E.B. Lloyd reference)
http://www.pre-pro.com/City/Boston/boston_l.htm

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How else are we supposed to know?! Especially when the entire block is demo'd. Is that cheating? It still took some digging and creative googling.

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I was just curious if you had some other source you were using. Googling the names on the street signs is what I think most of us do. And then you fall down the rathole of links to old directories and such and productivity for the day is shot....

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The ad for Vin Mariani puts the time somewhere during Pope Leo XIII's papacy. (1878-1903, probably towards the late side of that from what I can tell, but I'm going off one picture I found on Google so I won't be too confident) That's a pretty obvious clue that's somewhat redundant from the general horse and buggy vibe of the photo, so I'll give the extra historical context and say what Vin Mariani is: coca wine, which is to say wine with cocaine in it. A patent medicine, but they weren't always subtle about the recreational aspects of it. Coca-Cola was first invented as a non-alcoholic form of coca wine, although of course they took the cocaine out of that relatively soon. Pope Leo XIII by all appearances did in fact drink the stuff.

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I thought Vin Mariani used to sell things that "fell off the back of a truck" with Hot Gus in Day Square....

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Pope Leo XIII has apparently awarded a gold medal to Vin Mariani, a popular patent medicine which he endorsed. Leo XIII died in 1903, and medicine-endorsements by people have since died are not good marketing, so it doesn't seem likely to be later than 1903 . Cupid Bouquet, whatever that is, advertises that it is "not made by a trust", a peculiar selling point for a consumer product unless you take into account that Teddy Roosevelt was elected in 1901 promising to bust the trusts. So I would guess 1901 or 1902.

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composing my post when Cute Username posted, so I didn't catch the information about Vin Mariani being cocaine-based, which is hilarious, especially after reading the Wikepedia article, which identifies Queen Victoria as another aficionado. Queen Victoria and the Pope, doped on coke in the 1890's. No wonder the world is the way it is.

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Anyone have a case lying around?

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Sounds like just the thing for the flu.

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D H McAlpine was a tobacco company and Cupid Bouquet one of their products (plenty of images of their boxes on the Google from E-Bay, etc). Company was independent until 1901 when the owner died, it was sold. This was the era of tobacco "trusts" like American Tobacco being formed by mergers, consolidations, etc.

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so it's like the 1901 equivalent of "artisanal cigars".

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Washington St, South End. Current site of Oishii?

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I think it’s somewhere downtown, maybe before the Great Boston Fire in 1872, so all of this could be gone. I found a listing for E.B Lloyd, typesetter in an old annual listing. The address was 104 High Street, which, of course, looks nothing like this today.

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Shirtwaists were an 1895-1915 sort of thing for women. The woman in the picture is wearing one.

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Ah, you babes talk about your Madison shoes
We got a thing we call the Madison blues

">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OLP6qtuxkA[/youtube]

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A cafe next to a place advertising IPAs...what's old is new again.

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If you download the image from the Archives Twitter feed and then enlarge it to full size, you can see a street number, 1112, above the doorway that's under the Cupid Bouquet billboard. Washington Street in the South End is the likely street, since very few streets in Boston have numbers going that high. (This series had a similar photo on the opposite, odd-numbered, side of the street just recently.) The 1898 Bromley atlas of Boston shows that address to be just north of Dover Street, which is now known as East Berkeley Street. The atlas confirms that 1110-1112 Washington (and the buildings to the right/south of that) were 2-story wooden buildings; 1090-1108 Washington was a 4-story brick building called the Madison Block; and beyond that (to the left in this photo) was a series of bowfronted 4-story brick buildings with added 1-story wooden storefronts.

This matches with the "pre-pro.com" website [listing of pre-Prohibition liquor retailers], cited above, which gives an address of 1120 Washington for the E. B. Lloyd store at far right.

The date is probably late 1890s. Like the photo a week or so ago, it was probably taken by the Boston Elevated Railway before they began construction of what later was known as the Orange Line -- which opened in 1901. There are a lot of those pre-construction photos in the Boston Archives collection, and they often seem to use them in this series of posts.

Here's a link to the Mass. State Library's collection of digitized real estate atlases from roughly 1857 to 1938:
http://www.mass.gov/anf/research-and-tech/oversight-agencies/lib/massach...

Note, the link is to the old mass.gov website. You'll get an alert saying that you should search for the info on the new website, but I was unable to find it on the new site. But the links on the old site still work. You have to download each atlas (PDF, many pages, often over 100 MB per volume) to view it.

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those buildings in the background have a chester square vibe to them so i'm going to guess mass ave, near columbus. Maybe the north side of the 600 block, where dunkins and 7-11 are

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Thanks for playing, folks!

This photo was taken on July 28, 1899, and shows Washington Street (when in doubt, guess Washington Street!) near Dover Street.

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