Motor Mart Garage

The largest automobile garage in the world at the time of its completion, the Motor Mart won the Harleston Parker Prize of the Boston Society of Architects as the finest new building of 1927 in Boston. Providing for all of the needs of the driving public, the Motor Mart could clean, fuel, and service one's car; other shops ringed the ground level. A double ramp system provided circulation for two thousand cars. Ralph Harrington Doane's elegant use of stripped classicism made the Motor Mart the defining building on Park Square. The garage maintained the connection of this area with transportation, the Motor Mart substituting for the earlier railroad stations that stood on the square. West of the Motor Mart, Arthur Shurcliff designed a small formal park (1925), a circle within a pentagon plan with a statue of cupid at the center, as part of Mayor James Michael Curley's site improvements to entice E. M. Statler to build the adjacent Statler (now Park Plaza) Hotel (1925), a fourteen-story, 1,300-room project in buff brick by the New York firm of George B. Post and Sons.