Have you tried a pair of the famous Madison Pants yet?

The ad for Vin Mariani puts the time somewhere during Pope Leo XIII's papacy. (1878-1903, probably towards the late side of that from what I can tell, but I'm going off one picture I found on Google so I won't be too confident) That's a pretty obvious clue that's somewhat redundant from the general horse and buggy vibe of the photo, so I'll give the extra historical context and say what Vin Mariani is: coca wine, which is to say wine with cocaine in it. A patent medicine, but they weren't always subtle about the recreational aspects of it. Coca-Cola was first invented as a non-alcoholic form of coca wine, although of course they took the cocaine out of that relatively soon. Pope Leo XIII by all appearances did in fact drink the stuff.

Washington St, South End. Current site of Oishii?

I think it’s somewhere downtown, maybe before the Great Boston Fire in 1872, so all of this could be gone. I found a listing for E.B Lloyd, typesetter in an old annual listing. The address was 104 High Street, which, of course, looks nothing like this today.

If you download the image from the Archives Twitter feed and then enlarge it to full size, you can see a street number, 1112, above the doorway that's under the Cupid Bouquet billboard. Washington Street in the South End is the likely street, since very few streets in Boston have numbers going that high. (This series had a similar photo on the opposite, odd-numbered, side of the street just recently.) The 1898 Bromley atlas of Boston shows that address to be just north of Dover Street, which is now known as East Berkeley Street. The atlas confirms that 1110-1112 Washington (and the buildings to the right/south of that) were 2-story wooden buildings; 1090-1108 Washington was a 4-story brick building called the Madison Block; and beyond that (to the left in this photo) was a series of bowfronted 4-story brick buildings with added 1-story wooden storefronts.

This matches with the "pre-pro.com" website [listing of pre-Prohibition liquor retailers], cited above, which gives an address of 1120 Washington for the E. B. Lloyd store at far right.

The date is probably late 1890s. Like the photo a week or so ago, it was probably taken by the Boston Elevated Railway before they began construction of what later was known as the Orange Line -- which opened in 1901. There are a lot of those pre-construction photos in the Boston Archives collection, and they often seem to use them in this series of posts.

Here's a link to the Mass. State Library's collection of digitized real estate atlases from roughly 1857 to 1938:
http://www.mass.gov/anf/research-and-tech/oversight-agencies/lib/massach...

Note, the link is to the old mass.gov website. You'll get an alert saying that you should search for the info on the new website, but I was unable to find it on the new site. But the links on the old site still work. You have to download each atlas (PDF, many pages, often over 100 MB per volume) to view it.

Thanks for playing, folks!

This photo was taken on July 28, 1899, and shows Washington Street (when in doubt, guess Washington Street!) near Dover Street.