History of Hoosac Stores 1 & 2

Hoosac Stores 1 & 2, a hulking, brick building on Constitution Road, belonged to a complex of warehouses, docks and wharves built in the late 19th century by the Fitchburg Railroad.

The railroad company used the building for storage until selling it to the W. F. Schrafft & Son Company in 1964. Schrafft used the building for cold storage until 1967, when it sold the warehouse to Constitution Tower Realty Trust, which then leased it to the Deran Confectionary Company.

In 1981, The National Park Service bought the building with the intention of preserving the historic surroundings and brought it within the boundaries of the Boston National Historical Park.

At first the park service considered using the warehouse for curatorial storage. Later it considered creating a visitor center for the Navy Yard and a nautical or marine history museum in the ground floor and turning the upper floors over to private developers. Requests for proposals went out and there were public hearings involving prospective developers, but the building remains vacant and unused.

• Where is it? Constitution Road, Navy Yard.

• When was it built? 1895.

• Who built it? Fitchburg Railroad.

• What was it built for? At the turn of the 20th century Boston was the major center for wool import in America and most of it arrived via the Hoosac Docks. Warehouses were needed.

• How was it built? The six story trapezoidal warehouse is red brick, 65 feet high and without a basement. It was built on a land fill with a foundation of wooden piles and granite. The outside walls are about 24 inches thick on the ground floor and become thinner on the upper floors. Inside construction is heavy timber, with main beams of steel supported on posts of cast iron on the first and second floors and of timber on the third through sixth floors. The interior of the building is divided into two equal parts by a brick fire wall. Each of the six floors is approximately 10,000 square feet. The floor of the first story is concrete, and the upper floors are wood.

• What are the plans for the structure? In 2004, the National Park Service requested proposals for the reuse of the warehouse. Some proposals seemed promising, said Marty Blatt, a historian at the Boston National History Park. But Blatt said he didn't believe there were any concrete plans to develop the building.

Information for this article was compiled through research supplied by Carl Zellner; Marty Blatt and Steve Carlson of the National Park Service and the 2007 Waterfront Activation Network Plan.