Living in Greendale, Worcester, MA

About Greendale

Where it is

Greendale is in North Worcester, strung along West Boylston Street. Its civic buildings stand together on the east side of West Boylston Street at Kendrick Avenue, the article on the Thomas Giguere Three-Decker, on Fairhaven Road east of West Boylston Street, places it in 'Worcester's northern Greendale neighborhood', and the old Greendale YMCA stood beside Indian Lake where I-190 now runs.

Greendale grew up around a factory. In 1886 the partners of the Norton Company, an abrasives maker, built a new plant on the outskirts of Worcester near two rail lines, in what Wikipedia describes as the Greendale neighborhood, and by 1900 the company employed more than 200 people. Transit followed: the street railway's North End line was extended north to Greendale in the early 1890s. The Greendale Improvement Society, founded in 1895 and rechartered in 1897 as the Greendale Village Improvement Society, built, maintained and plowed roads, lobbied the city for fire protection and arranged trash removal; the Kendrick family gave it land for a meeting house, which was put up between 1897 and 1900 at 480 West Boylston Street.

The city's own buildings came next to it. In 1895 the library set up a book delivery point at a Greendale shop, and in 1913 it opened a branch at 470 West Boylston Street, a single-story brick building with limestone trim, a tile hipped roof and Corinthian pilasters designed by Lucius W. Briggs; renamed for Frances Perkins in 1994, it is still a branch of the Worcester Public Library. The Greendale fire station stands nearby at 438 West Boylston Street. On Fairhaven Road stands a National Register-listed Colonial Revival three-decker of about 1926.

Norton shaped the neighborhood well into the 20th century. Its Greendale YMCA branch, founded in 1929, ran programs at a Norton fieldhouse and had its own building on Stores Street by 1950, on land the company gave; in 1970 discussions began about building Route 52, now I-190, and tearing it down. Norton was bought by Saint-Gobain of France in 1990, and its Worcester site is now part of the Saint-Gobain complex. Indian Lake, once North Pond and dammed in 1828 to feed the Blackstone Canal, lies close by, with a renovated beach and bathhouse at Shore Park on its north end.

Homes in Greendale

No published count of housing types or ownership for Greendale alone was found. The National Register lists the Thomas Giguere Three-Decker at 18 Fairhaven Road, a Colonial Revival three-decker of about 1926 with a full-width colonnaded first-floor porch, half-width porches above and a three-car garage. The city notes that the land around Indian Lake has remained primarily residential.