Description and history
The Benjamin Silverman Apartments are located at the southwest corner of Lorne and Wilson Street, two residential dead-end streets off Harvard Street south of Franklin Park. It is a three-story masonry structure, built out of red brick, with wood and stone trim. Its main elevations are crowned by a projecting cornice with modillion blocks, and windows are set in rectangular openings with stone sills and lintels. The Lorne Street facade is organized similar to a pair of attached triple decker houses, one set back slightly, with mirror-image organization. Each section has two bays, one housing the entrance for that section, and the other a projecting polygonal window bay. The Wilson Street facade functions as an extension of the rightmost section, with seven bays and an entrance at their center.[2]
The apartment house was built in 1915 to a design by William P. Hutch, with "A. Silverman" as its first owner. At the time the neighborhood in which it stood would have been built up with similar buildings; it is now the only one remaining. Its early occupants were mostly Russian Jewish immigrants, part of a second wave of Jewish migration to various Boston neighborhoods, particularly in the aftermath of the devastating Great Chelsea fire of 1908, which displaced thousands of Jews.[2]
