Marblehead, as built.
Every house standing in town today, mapped by the year it went up. A short history of how Marblehead got its character, and when it stopped.
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Part one
How the town grew
People in Marblehead talk a lot about the town's character. The narrow lanes. Houses shoulder to shoulder. Front doors that open onto the sidewalk.
So where did that character come from? Let's build the town back up, one house at a time.
The fishing town
Before 1800
Marblehead began around 1629 as a fishing village of narrow, crooked streets that climbed inland from the harbor. By 1660 it was known as the greatest town for fishing in New England.
Houses crowded close to the wharves and the "flakes" where cod was salted and dried. 313 buildings from before 1800 still stand, holding 512 homes. Six in ten of those homes share a building with a neighbor.
Sources: Town Open Space Plan, 2012; Historic Preservation Survey Plan, 2014
The shoe town
1800 to 1899
On September 19, 1846, a gale on the Grand Banks sank 11 Marblehead schooners and drowned 65 men and boys. It left 43 widows and 155 children without fathers. The fishing fleet never recovered.
Shoemaking, long done at home between voyages, moved into factories and drew new workers to town. Marblehead made room for them on new streets around Reed's Hill and the Shipyard. The railroad arrived in 1873. Fires in 1877 and 1888 destroyed most of the shoe shops.
842 buildings from this century survive, with 1,296 homes. More than half share a building.
Sources: Marblehead Museum, The Great Gale of 1846; Survey Plan, 2014
The streetcar suburb
1900 to 1944
A trolley line down Humphrey Street to Lynn opened in 1884, and trains reached Boston in about forty minutes. The farms of Clifton became house lots. One 1906 plan, Tedesco Lawn, laid out 144 lots just 25 feet wide.
In Clifton alone, a dozen subdivision plans in the 1920s added nearly 500 lots, then 300 more in the 1930s. By one local account, white-collar workers at General Electric in Lynn drove much of the demand. Builders worked from pattern books: Colonials, Dutch Colonials, four-squares, bungalows.
2,841 homes survive from these years. One in four is still in a two-family or larger building.
Sources: Survey Plan, 2014, Clifton and Clifton Heights chapters
The boom
1945 to 1967
After the war, the builders Ralph and Leo Sevinor put up close to 500 houses on ten streets in Clifton. In 1953 the town itself built 30 duplex units for veterans on Broughton Road. Ranches and split-levels filled Marblehead Cliffs and Greystone Beach.
Apartments kept coming too: 16 units on Front Street in 1964, 16 on Prospect Street in 1967.
2,299 homes in 23 years, about 100 a year still standing. The population went from 13,765 in 1950 to 21,295 in 1970.
Sources: Survey Plan, 2014; U.S. Census counts
The Big Downzone
1968 to 1975
In the 1950s and 1960s, more Greater Boston suburbs allowed apartments than banned them. Towns liked them. Apartments paid property taxes and sent few children to the schools. Framingham added more than 7,000 apartments from 1961 to 1971.
Then, in about six years, most suburbs shut the door. They banned apartments, passed moratoriums, and added layers of review. Each change took a two-thirds vote. The researcher Amy Dain calls it the Big Downzone.
Sources: Amy Dain, Exclusionary by Design, Boston Indicators, 2023, pp. 6, 11–12, 18
Why it happened
Dain finds several forces at once. The environmental movement had arrived: Earth Day and the Clean Air Act came in 1970, and Governor Sargent halted new highways. Towns that had doubled in size were tired of building schools and sitting in traffic. And as each town closed its doors, its neighbors feared they would get all the growth.
But she argues those reasons can't explain the speed and reach of the downzone. It came as Boston's Black population jumped from 63,000 to 100,000 between 1960 and 1965, as the 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed racial discrimination in housing, and as the region fought over school desegregation. She concludes that race and class exclusion were central motives, even when they were rarely said out loud.
The state answered in 1969 with Chapter 40B, the "Anti-Snob Zoning Act."
Sources: Dain, pp. 18–23; WBUR, November 2023
In Marblehead
The town's last big apartment and condo buildings went up in this window: 12 units on Prospect Court in 1970, 115 at Brackett Place in 1971, four on Hines Court in 1973. Then nothing with four or more homes for six years.
In 1968 the town also created its Old Town historic district to protect the buildings of the fishing town. Today's bylaw bans multifamily housing in every district but one.
We're still digging into Marblehead's own zoning votes from these years. Have Town Meeting records or old clippings? Send them our way.
Sources: Survey Plan, 2014; Zoning Bylaw, Chapter 200
The long pause
1976 to today
1,296 homes in 49 years. About 26 a year, and many of those replaced an older house rather than adding a new one. The town recorded more than 120 teardowns between 2001 and 2014 alone.
Marblehead had 21,295 people in 1970. In 2020 it had 20,441.
Sources: Survey Plan, 2014; U.S. Census QuickFacts
Same town. Different rules.
Postwar Marblehead added about 100 homes a year. Since 1976 it has added about 26.
Some of that is land. By 1970 the town was mostly built out. But the new rules also shut off the ways Marblehead had always grown: a second unit in a big old house, a small building near the harbor, a house on a modest lot.
Demand didn't go away. Permission did.
Part two
Houses and apartments
Marblehead's character isn't only old houses. It's a mix: single-family homes next to two-families, flats over shops, small apartment buildings on the side streets.
Two kinds of home
Most Marblehead homes are single-family houses: 6,163 of them.
But nearly a third of the town's homes, 2,716, are in buildings shared with other households. That's 686 two- and three-families, 147 apartment and condo buildings, and 51 buildings with homes over shops.
Look where they sit: packed around the harbor, where the town began.
The mix disappeared
Of homes built before 1800 that still stand, six in ten are in shared buildings. In the streetcar era, one in four. In the postwar boom, about one in seven.
From 1900 to 1944, Marblehead built 44 buildings with four or more homes. In the 49 years since 1976, it has built 12.
What the rules allow
88% of Marblehead's residential land is zoned for single-family homes. A two-family needs a special incentive permit there. Apartments are banned outright.
On another 9%, a two-family needs a special permit. Apartments are allowed only in the Unrestricted district, about 2% of residential land, and only with a special permit.
Nowhere in Marblehead can you build an apartment building by right.
Sources: Zoning Bylaw, Chapter 200, Table 1
Could they be built again?
Of 686 two- and three-family buildings in town, 3 could be built today by right.
Of 147 apartment and condo buildings, none could. 116 stand in districts where their use is banned outright.
Part three
Could your house be built today?
Now test every home in town, single-family houses included, against today's zoning bylaw: what it allows in each district, and how big a lot it requires.
Two out of three
Two out of three homes in Marblehead could not be built today without a special permit or a variance.
Most fail on lot size. More than half the single-family lots in the Single Residence district are smaller than its 10,000 square foot minimum. And 251 homes couldn't be built at all, because their use is banned where they stand.
The oldest streets fare worst
9 in 10 houses built before 1800 couldn't be built by right today.
These are the streets on the postcards. The ones people picture when they say "Marblehead character."
Every one of these homes is legal.
They're grandfathered. You can live in them, sell them, and fix them up. The bylaw just wouldn't let anyone build them again.
Marblehead's zoning doesn't protect its character. The character was built before the zoning.
Find your house
Could your home be built today? Type an address to check.
Or tap any lot on the map.