OWNERSHIP
CONDITIONS
HISTORY
TESTIMONIES
LINKS

Click here for map and orthophoto

OWNERSHIP:
Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation (JPNDC)

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CONDITIONS:
The Brewery Small Business Center is a collection of 16 multi-story commercial factory buildings on a five-acre site that house more than 40 businesses and employs approximately 200 people. The Brewery has been recognized as a national model for successful inner-city development.

The Center as a whole includes the corporate offices of the Boston Brewing Company, Greenleaf Composting, a furniture-making business, a tortilla maker, a tofu-maker, a chocolate producer, and a consortium of design firms. Other small businesses include a landscape design firm, a landscaping company, a software group, a photo shop, an international nonprofit organization, an art studio, a bamboo fence business, and a locksmith. The major business in the brewery complex is the Boston Brewing Company, which brews Samuel Adams beer. A popular Sam Adams tour is offered here, and outside the facility are enormous brewing barrels and a blown up historic photograph Charles Jerome -- great grandfather of Jim Koch, founder and owner of Samuel Adams beer -- at work at Union Brewing Company in 1906.

In the winter of 2006, Mike's Fitness, a gym that fled from the South End's gentrification, reopened in a new location in Jamaica Plain - in the main room of the old Haffenreffer Brewery's main building - adding to the redeveloped business complex. The gym has a relatively low membership fee, a good local following, ample parking, and is close to the neighboring Orange Line. Because of this development other businesses followed suit. The School of Dance studio moved in, figuring that parents could go to the gym while their children danced. There are plans for 10 new businesses, including a cafe to be operating in the building in the near future. (Ron DePasquale, "Working Out In Old Brewery; New Gym A Good Fit For Developers Of Deteriorating Complex," The Boston Globe, April 16, 2006.)

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HISTORY:
The buildings of the Brewery Small Business Center lie along the industrial corridor between Washington Street and Stony Brook. These 16 buildings comprised the Haffenreffer Brewery, the largest of a string of breweries, tanneries and other small industries that lined the Stony Brook in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In its heyday, over 100 trucks loaded up and headed out of the Haffenreffer brewery each day.

Rudolf Haffenreffer was an immigrant entrepreneur who began setting up breweries along the Stony Brook in 1871. The bulk of the Haffenreffer complex was built between 1877 and 1884. At this time people brewed beer by hoisting the hops to the rooftops of a tall factory and then lowering them through multiple levels. Haffenreffer built his house on Brookside Avenue adjacent to his breweries and boarded his workers in nearby homes.

The Haffenreffer complex was closed in 1965. The Stony Brook corridor experienced serious disinvestment in the 1970s and early 1980s, much of which was associated with a proposed highway through the area. The buildings of the brewery complex began to crumble and the grounds became overgrown with weeds and trees. For five years the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation worked to negotiate and finance a purchase of the buildings, and in 1983 it was finally successful. This was in part due to the interest of Jim Koch, whose great grandfather had worked in the brewery. The JPNDC subsequently developed the small business center, beginning with the Boston Brewing Company, which provides much of the yearly budget of the JPNDC (Boston History).

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TESTIMONIES:
"We had to have the gym. Without it I don't think this would've gone forward. As a local nonprofit, finding someone who grew up in the neighborhood with a startup exactly meets our mission. We needed each other, and we're thrilled it worked out." (Jen Faigel, Jamaica Plain Development Corporation's Community Development Director, from "Working Out In Old Brewery; New Gym A Good Fit For Developers Of Deteriorating Complex," The Boston Globe.)

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LINKS:
Click here for historic photos of the Haffenreffer Brewery from the Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

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