Living in Webster Square, Worcester, MA

About Webster Square

Where it is

Webster Square once referred to the intersection of Main, Webster and Cambridge Streets, a junction Mill Street has also met since it was pushed across Main Street to Webster Street in the 1980s; the name has long since spread to the neighborhood west of that junction along Main Street, past the intersection of Main Street, Park Avenue and Stafford Street. Wikipedia's list of Worcester neighborhoods places Webster Square in South Worcester.

Webster Square began as a mill village on Kettle Brook. The Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey of Worcester records the first water-powered spinning of cotton yarn in the town at Trowbridgeville, or New Worcester, at Joshua Hale's mill on Kettle Brook, and a federal report of 1832 listed two satinet mills on Curtis Pond near Webster Square. Roads met here early: the Holland, Worcester and Stafford Turnpike (Stafford Street), which gave a direct route to the southwest after 1810, began at Main Street at New Worcester, and by 1830 a small residential cluster stood at Webster Square on Main Street. Caleb Wall's Reminiscences of Worcester (1877) says Charles Stearns built and first kept a tavern at New Worcester in 1812, and the Stearns Tavern building, dated to about 1812, survives, though it has been moved twice. Phineas Ball's 1860 city map labels the area New Worcester, and Samuel Triscott's 1878 map uses the name Webster Square.

Industry and the street railway built the square out. Loring Coes, born at New Worcester in 1812, patented a screw wrench in 1841, and with his brother Aury and Levi Hardy bought Moses Clement's shop at the corner of Main and Mill Streets in 1853. In 1865 the Coes brothers and Hardy bought 100 acres of the Lyon Farm, now the site of Coes Pond, and built a dam and a knife shop there, followed by a lower dam at Coes Square in 1867 and, in 1871, Loring's four-story wrench factory at Coes Square. Worcester's first horsecar line, opened in 1863, ran from Webster Square through downtown to Bell Hill, and the 1916 streetcar route list still included lines from Webster Square to Barber's Crossing, Union Station and Lincoln Square. A walking history of the road notes that most of the lots along Main Street west of the square were developed with three-deckers.

The square is now a busy crossroads. Route 12 crosses it on Mill Street before joining Route 9 on Park Avenue, and Webster Square Plaza, a late-twentieth-century shopping plaza, fills the large lot between Main Street and Stafford Street. The Worcester Housing Authority runs Webster Square Towers East and West at 1050 and 1060 Main Street and, in 2002, bought the former Webster Square Cinemas building at 24 Mill Street; after selling it in 2004, it bought it back for maintenance facilities and property management offices. Up Mill Street, the city's Coes Pond parks cover about 21 acres around Coes Reservoir, including Coes Park on the former Coes Knife factory site, where the Stearns Tavern building was moved in October 2016.

Homes in Webster Square

A walking history of the Main Street corridor notes that most of the lots west of the square were developed with three-deckers, alongside substantial two-family houses such as the six at 1286 to 1296 Main Street, and that the footprint of Webster Square Plaza hides how residential the area was first built. Webster Square Towers East and West, at 1050 and 1060 Main Street, are run by the Worcester Housing Authority. No published count of housing types or ownership for Webster Square alone was found.