At 75 years old, Ed Biggins remembers when Moody Street was the crowded, bustling hub of the city.
From movie theaters and dance halls to Christmas parades and lines of customers spilling out of Grover Cronin’s department store, the stretch once attracted thousands of people on any given weekend, he recalls.
"Moody Street in those days in the ‘40s or ‘50s, it was like Broadway itself," he said. "You think Moody Street is busy now, in those days there was all kinds of retail stores. Not to mention Grover Cronin’s. It truly was the center of Waltham."
The first Moody Street bridge was erected across the Charles River in 1846. A boat house was erected in 1868 and the street eventually saw the use of electric trolleys in the late 1800s, according to www.waltham-community.org.
The book "Waltham Rediscovered" by Kristen A. Petersen states the Cronin family started the Hub Tea company on Moody Street in 1893 and the family later went into the retail clothing business in the 1920s.
Thousands swarmed to the street for Cronin’s Christmas and Easter parades from surrounding communities in the mid-1900s.
"Waltham Rediscovered" also describes the rise of department stores in the early 1900s with the first national chain store, F. W. Woolworth’s 5 & 10, arriving on Moody Street in 1905.
"Not only was Grover Cronin’s popular in Waltham, it was popular in eastern Massachusetts. They were the first one to use escalators and the first one to use air conditioning," said Waltham Museum Director Al Arena. "When you think of the Roaring Twenties ... during that period Grover Cronin’s was expanding dramatically. There was also Adam’s department store at that time, which later became the Parke Snow department store. Adams was the second strongest store in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s next to Grover Cronin’s. After (World War II) the servicemen came home and everything really boomed."
As a teenager, Biggins was an usher for the Embassy Theater, one of three theaters on the street in the late ‘40s.
"Just in from Main Street on the right-hand side was a theater called the Central Square Theater," he said.
"A lot of us teenagers watched a cowboy guy named Tom Mix in the old serial movies they’d show. They had all kinds of serials. We would go there every week."
With customers came some minor crimes. Waltham Police would spend the mid-1900s patrolling Moody Street, breaking up bar fights and making sure businesses had locked doors at night.
John Benson, former Waltham Police officer, started his career patrolling Moody Street in the 1950s.
"We had a total of seven routes that we called foot routes back in the 1950s," he said. "A section of Moody Street was considered one route and that went from what was called Central Square to the Newton line."
Benson said during the Christmas season, Waltham Police would station officers to work traffic details.
"Christmas time was a great time on Moody Street. The crowd was so bad and the traffic was so bad on Christmas," he said. "There was a total of nine policemen doing traffic on Moody Street. That’s almost one at every intersection."
Turning from the Watch City to a center for technology, the mid-1950s to late 1960s brought many changes to Waltham.
According to Waltham Museum staff, a major change of direction in the growth pattern of Waltham occurred in 1952 when the city rezoned a large tract of land along Rte. 128 from residential to commercial. It brought a great deal of employment to the city, mostly in the electronics field. In 1954 the nearby Waltham Watch Company stopped manufacturing watches.
A landmark was lost on 1961 when Nuttings Dance Hall on Prospect Street burned, according to Waltham Museum staff.
A year later, Bob Marcou of Marcou Jewelers set up shop on Moody Street in the old Mercantile Building on the corner of Main and Moody streets.
"When we first started our business, it was the end part of Moody Street and it was in the end of it’s ‘heyday’," he said. "When I was a kid and I would come down here with my mother, they had every name brand store that you could think of."
Marcou, who moved into his current store at 318 Moody St. in 1979, said the rise of shopping malls and the fact more families began owning cars eventually led to Moody Street’s decline.
"When Grover Cronin’s went out of business, it was a really kind of a dive down here," Marcou said. "We survived, but we already had a clientele down here. If you were just coming in, it was hard to start."
The Waltham Museum said Cronin’s closed in 1989 after celebrating its 100th anniversary in 1985.
Louise Butler of the Waltham Museum said Grover Cronin’s was Moody Street’s anchor store for nearly a century.
"There’s just so many stories associated with Cronin’s," she said. "Once Cronin’s left, Moody Street had a 10-year period where it practically died and it took a 10-year period for the restaurants to bring it back."
Jeff Gilbride can be reached at 781-398-8005 or at jgilbrid@cnc.com
