Union Street Historic District

Union Street Historic District is a compact commercial area in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, organized around the commuter railroad station. Before improved rail service, Newton Centre had little development, with fewer than ten buildings near the common. After the Boston & Albany Railroad upgraded the line, the station was completed in 1890 by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge following H.H. Richardson's death. It has granite and brownstone walls and a large overhanging slate roof. New commercial buildings followed. Mellen Bray, an inventor and investor, built Bray's Block in 1893, a buff brick Classical Revival building that once held an assembly hall, a bowling alley, offices and shops. The Union Building of 1896 is Georgian Revival. Bray also built Bradford Court in 1913, the village's first apartment building. The district is considered the city's best surviving cluster of nineteenth-century commercial buildings and shows how a small business center developed around a suburban depot.