Downtown Chelsea Residential Historic District

Downtown Chelsea's residential district covers about twenty acres near Bellingham Square and contains 166 contributing buildings. It is split by the line of the Great Fire of 1908, which destroyed more than half of the earlier buildings. Areas the fire missed keep houses from about 1825 onward, including Federal-influenced houses, temple-front Greek Revival dwellings on Marginal Street from a former row known as Sea Captain's Row, brick rowhouses and mansard-roofed Italianate cottages. The burned portion was rebuilt between 1908 and the early 1930s with brick apartment blocks, bowfront rowhouses, wood-frame triple-deckers and corner-store buildings, mostly in Georgian and Classical Revival detail. The Shurtleff School, completed in 1909, was the first building erected in the Bellingham Square area after the fire and encouraged rebuilding nearby. Real estate speculation, rather than a citywide plan, drove much of the reconstruction. The district is regarded as visually cohesive and retains its integrity of location, design, setting, materials and workmanship.