Union Square Painters — Bow Street, Union Square and Boynton Yards

The square went by Sand Pit Square and then Liberty Pole Square before it took the name Union Square in 1861. In 1874, fill hauled down from Prospect Hill turned nearby swampy ground into Boynton Yards, which became a meatpacking and manufacturing district. The Green Line's Union Square station opened in March 2022.

The block with the deepest paper trail is Bow Street. It bends because the original road skirted marshland, and when a straighter route took over the through traffic between 1830 and 1850, the curve was left with few modern intrusions. Seventeen of its buildings, on roughly three acres, entered the National Register in 1976 as the Bow Street Historic District. The nomination describes brick buildings with granite trim standing beside clapboard buildings with brackets and other late-19th-century detail. It points to the 1879 Lambert House, one of six survivors of what was called Doctors' Row, for its stickwork, front and back second-floor porches, deep bracketed eaves, scrollwork, and board-and-batten in the gables and dormers.

Bow Street also happens to be a Census tract boundary. East of it, in Tract 3513, 64.0% of 2,229 units date from 1939 or earlier and 89.0% from before 1980; the units are split among two-unit buildings (24.9%), three- and four-unit buildings (21.8%) and buildings of 50 or more (14.2%). West of it, in Tract 3512.04, 61.3% of 2,092 units predate 1940 and 37.8% are in three- or four-unit buildings. Owners occupy 24.2% and 29.5% of the occupied homes in those two tracts. Tract lines do not follow neighborhood edges, so read these as a picture of the square's surroundings rather than an exact count.

Masonry fronts with wood trim to paint

On the brick buildings the nomination lists, from the churches to the crescent-shaped Faulkner Apartment Block, the paintable surfaces are usually the sash, doors, cornices and trim rather than the walls. Paint applied to bare brick or granite is hard to strip later, so it pays to confirm which surfaces were painted originally before anyone opens a can. See our exterior painting page for how prep is planned on mixed-material facades.

Stick-style detail sets the labor

A front like the Lambert House carries brackets under deep eaves, scrollwork, stick framing and board-and-batten gables. Every one of those pieces has edges, end grain and joints that need scraping, priming and caulking, so a decorated Victorian takes much longer per square foot than a plain clapboard wall of the same size.

National Register is not a permit gate

The National Park Service states that Register listing puts no restrictions on what a private owner does unless federal money is involved. Separate city review applies to Local Historic District properties: the Historic Preservation Commission looks at visible changes in design, materials or appearance, and says it does not review routine maintenance done with the same design and materials. If you plan to change siding, trim profiles or porch parts, ask the city whether your address sits in a local district.

Rentals, condos and lead rules

With more than 70% of occupied homes rented in both tracts, interior work often has to fit around tenants or lease turnovers, and hallways in condo buildings belong to the association. Since 89.0% of units in Tract 3513 predate 1980, the EPA rule requiring certified lead-safe practices for paid paint disturbance in pre-1978 housing will cover a large share of jobs here. Our lead-safe painting page explains the steps, and the condo painting page covers association work.