Brickbottom Building

Tucked behind Somerville’s elevated McGrath Highway, this concrete five-story complex looks like just another relic of New England’s industrial past—until the door buzzes open and visitors step into a hidden wonderland of 155 lofts where almost every hallway, freight elevator, and even the mailroom doubles as ad-hoc gallery space.

Built between 1920 and 1923 as the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company’s cannery and bakery, the red-brick monolith once churned out canned goods and bread for A&P supermarkets across the Northeast. Today, its cavernous loading docks shelter welding rigs and 3d printing machines, while a surprise central courtyard garden replaces the rumble of delivery trucks with climbing vines and sculptures.

In 1984 a coalition of artists fed up with rising Boston rents, pooled loans, favors, and a rumored seven-figure mountain of sweat equity to buy two semi-abandoned buildings. By 1987 the Brickbottom Artists Association (BAA) had formed, making the site one of the earliest and largest artist-run live-work experiments in the United States. 

Every November, Brickbottom flings its studio doors wide for the weekend-long Open Studios, when more than 80 painters, metalworkers, animators, and ceramicists invite the public to poke around their creative lairs, often while the artists’ cats supervise. Expect everything from tiny hand-cast bronzes to wall-sized abstract art. If timing a visit outside that window, the BAA’s ground-floor Gallery mounts rotating exhibitions year-round and is free to the public Thrusday through Saturday.

Despite decades of citywide development, Brickbottom still feels like a world apart. The building’s sheer height casts long afternoon shadows over tracks that first lured industry here in the 19th century. Clay pits that supplied bricks for Gilded-Age Boston inspired the neighborhood’s name, and a faint aroma of yeast is said to linger in the stairwells on humid days: a ghostly hint of the bread line that came before the paint lines.