Boston – Historic Boston Incorporated (HBI) and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino celebrated a major rehabilitation and restoration of the Golden Building in Dorchester, a $320,000 project focused on a 116-year-old commercial building and designed to spur economic investment in the wider Fields Corner neighborhood.
The two-story, 8,500sf Golden Building, a centerpiece of the commercial area with a history of multiple retail tenants, now features an entirely new and friendlier façade. HBI identified the project’s potential and provided building owner Stephen Golden with a $210,000 loan to complete the storefront and façade projects.
Amory Architects of Boston was hired to create a vision of what the building could like if these architectural features were restored or recreated. “Steven was very receptive to the idea,” said Jeffrey Gonyeau, HBI’s Program Director for Historic Neighborhood Centers.
K & B Contracting, Inc. of Boston began work at the end of last year and work proceeded through one of the snowiest, wettest winters in recent memory.
HBI collaborated with Fields Corner Main Street and served as owner’s representative and project manager during five months of construction. Golden received a $50,000 ReStore Grant and an additional $25,000 Partners with Non-Profits Grant from the city of Boston and Fields
Corner Main Street. Decades of partial and haphazard alterations were removed to be replaced by the handsome, consistent appearance of an earlier era in the building’s life.
The Golden Building façade rehabilitation is the first bricks-and-mortar project of HBI’s Historic Neighborhood Centers Program, which is intended to initiate real estate improvements in older Boston neighborhoods by targeting prominent and worthy historic structures and facilitating significant, highly visible improvements.
Historic Boston Incorporated is a nonprofit organization that works with local partners to identify and invest in the redevelopment of historically significant buildings and cultural resources in order to catalyze neighborhood renewal.