On a Saturday morning on Mount Auburn Street, the doors of three Armenian markets open within a block and a half of one another, and the air goes warm with the smell of cumin, cured olives, and bread still hot from the oven. A woman reaches over the deli case at Arax for a wedge of braided string cheese. Two doors down at Massis, someone carries out a stack of lahmajun wrapped in paper. At Sevan, the olive bar glistens under the lights. This is Coolidge Square, and for more than a century it has been the kitchen and the crossroads of one of the oldest Armenian communities in America.
The Armenians in Watertown did not drift here by accident. They came for a factory, stayed for each other, and built a town within a town that outlived the factory by more than half a century.
Watertown: The Place
Watertown sits just west of Boston along the Charles River, a dense square of about four square miles bordered by Cambridge, Belmont, and Newton. The Coolidge Square district anchors its east side, where Mount Auburn Street and Arsenal Street carry traffic and the green line trolley feeds commuters toward the city. The housing is classic inner-suburb New England: two- and three-family wood frame houses, brick apartment blocks, and tidy single-family homes on short streets, much of it built to shelter the workers who once filled the rubber plant down the road.
How Watertown Became Little Armenia
Before the Armenians
Watertown is one of the oldest towns in Massachusetts, settled by English Puritans in 1630 along a fishable bend of the Charles. For its first two and a half centuries it was a New England mill and farm town, then an industrial one, drawing power from the river and labor from a steady churn of immigrants.
By the 1890s the riverfront was a working landscape of factories and the federal Watertown Arsenal. The decisive change came in 1896, when two brothers, Frederic and Arthur Hood, opened a rubber footwear plant on the east side of town. It would reshape who lived here.
The Armenians Arrive
The first Armenians in greater Boston had come decades earlier, many from the Kharpert Plain in the eastern Ottoman Empire, where American missionary schools and a failing rural economy pushed young men toward the United States. They landed first in Boston’s South Cove, took factory and domestic work, and sent word home. That word turned into a pipeline.
The Hood Rubber Company turned the pipeline into a flood. The plant hired Armenians out of Boston’s Chinatown almost from the start, paid relatively well, ran a medical clinic, and sponsored English classes at the Abraham Lincoln House, a settlement house it helped establish in East Watertown in 1912. For refugees who had crossed an ocean with nothing, a steady wage and a teacher of English a few blocks from home was close to salvation. By 1920 some 500 Armenians worked at Hood alongside Italians, Greeks, and Syrians.
Then came catastrophe. The massacres of 1895 and 1896 under Sultan Abdul Hamid had already driven thousands out. The genocide of 1915 destroyed Armenian life across Anatolia, and the survivors who reached America looked for places where there were already Armenians, already work, already a church taking shape. Watertown was exactly that. They arrived as orphans, widows, and the sole survivors of large families, and they came because cousins and townsmen were here to meet them.
Watertown at Its Peak
By 1930 more than 3,500 Armenians lived in Watertown, close to a tenth of the town. They were no longer just factory hands. They opened groceries, bakeries, repair shops, and markets, and they built the institutions that turn a population into a community.
In 1916 a young immigrant from Kharpert named Stephen Mugar and his father Sarkis paid eight hundred dollars for a small grocery at 28 Mount Auburn Street called the Star Market. After Sarkis died in the early 1920s, Stephen and his cousin took it over and turned a corner store into a New England supermarket empire, pioneering pre-packaged meat and produce along the way. The church came next. A door-to-door fundraising drive begun in 1926 bought land on Mount Auburn Street, the first liturgy was held outdoors in 1930, and St. James Armenian Apostolic Church was consecrated on October 31, 1937, in the depths of the Depression.
The genocide was not a distant memory for these families. It was the reason most of them existed in Watertown at all, and it shaped everything from the names of their churches to the stories told over dinner.
The Change
The factory that started it all did not last. Hood Rubber was absorbed by B.F. Goodrich in 1929, and the Watertown plant finally closed in 1969. The site where 9,000 people once made tens of thousands of shoes a day is now the Watertown Mall.
The community, though, kept arriving and kept building. A second Apostolic parish, St. Stephen’s, bought land on Elton Avenue and consecrated its church on October 20, 1957. The Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 1980s sent a new wave of Armenians from Beirut, and the collapse of the Soviet Union brought immigrants directly from the Republic of Armenia. The town that the rubber plant had made did not empty out when the plant went dark. It changed shape and held on.
The Landmarks of Little Armenia
St. James Armenian Apostolic Church, 465 Mount Auburn Street. Begun with a Depression-era door-to-door campaign and consecrated in 1937, St. James is the elder of Watertown’s Armenian churches. In its front yard stands a granite khachkar, an Armenian cross-stone carved by an artist from Armenia and raised in the 1980s in memory of the genocide dead. Each April 24 it becomes a gathering point.
The Armenian Museum of America, 65 Main Street. What began in 1971 as a rescue mission for Armenian books and objects discarded by aging immigrants is now the largest Armenian museum in the diaspora. In 1988 the founders bought and remodeled the former Coolidge Bank building on Main Street, and today its four floors hold more than 20,000 artifacts, from medieval coins to inscribed rugs to a Gospel manuscript dated 1207.
The Hairenik Building, 80 Bigelow Avenue. The Hairenik newspaper was founded in 1899 and is among the oldest continuously published Armenian papers in the world. Its association moved its offices from downtown Boston to this Watertown building in 1986, and the building still houses the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s regional headquarters, the ARF archives, and the English-language Armenian Weekly, founded in 1932.
Arax, Massis, and Sevan, on Mount Auburn Street. The three markets that perfume Coolidge Square have each been here for decades. Sevan Bakery has served the neighborhood since 1971, run by a family that came to Watertown from Istanbul, bringing recipes handed down for generations. Massis is the takeout heart of the block, the place for a fresh lahmajun, while Arax spreads out with produce, an olive bar, and trays of baklava. Together they keep the square fragrant.
Star Market, 28 Mount Auburn Street. The original store is long gone as an Armenian grocery, but its address marks where Stephen Mugar’s family bought a corner shop in 1916 and grew it into one of New England’s defining supermarket chains. Mugar’s later philanthropy underwrote the Armenian Museum and buildings at Boston University, Tufts, and Northeastern.
The Armenian Memorial Church, 32 Bigelow Avenue. Watertown’s Armenians were not all Apostolic. This Protestant congregation traces its roots to 1897 and once carried the name Cilician Armenian Memorial Church, the word “memorial” chosen in the years around 1915 in memory of family killed in the massacres. Its services are still partly in Armenian.
Where the Watertown Armenians Came From
The earliest and largest stream came from the Kharpert Plain, also called Harput, a region of villages and market towns in eastern Anatolia where American missionaries had built schools and where artisan and farming livelihoods were failing by the late 1800s. Young men trained in those mission schools were among the first to leave for Massachusetts, and the letters and money they sent home pulled relatives and neighbors after them, town by town.
The genocide of 1915 scattered survivors from Kharpert and from Marash, Dikranagerd, Van, and dozens of other places, and many funneled toward the Armenian community already established around Boston. Later arrivals widened the map. Families came from Istanbul, from Beirut and Aleppo after the Lebanese and Syrian conflicts, and from Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia, so that the Armenian spoken in Coolidge Square today carries accents from across the homeland and the wider Armenian world.
Watertown Today
The Armenians in Watertown number somewhere around 7,000 to 8,000, a substantial share of a town of roughly 35,000, and the community now runs three and four generations deep. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Hood Rubber workers send their kids to St. Stephen’s elementary school, march to the khachkar on April 24, and still drive in on Saturdays for string cheese and lahmajun even after they have moved to Belmont or Lexington.
The town around them is changing fast. Arsenal Yards has filled the old industrial riverfront with shops and labs, biotech money has moved in, and median home prices have climbed well past three quarters of a million dollars, pressuring the kind of working family that first made this neighborhood. Yet Coolidge Square has not been hollowed out. The markets are busy, the churches are full on feast days, and the Armenian Museum keeps its lights on across from the bank Stephen Mugar’s fortune helped buy.
New arrivals keep the story open-ended. When Azerbaijan forced the entire Armenian population out of Artsakh in 2023, Watertown’s relief societies ran appeals from the Hairenik building, and the high school’s Armenian Club held bake sales for the refugees. More than a century after the first survivors stepped off the train for a job at the rubber plant, Watertown is still the place where displaced Armenians know there are people waiting to meet them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Armenians settle in Watertown, Massachusetts?
The Armenians in Watertown came for work at the Hood Rubber Company, which opened in 1896 and actively hired Armenian immigrants, paying steady wages and offering English classes. After the 1915 genocide, survivors followed relatives and townsmen who were already established there, and the community grew around churches, markets, and the factory.
Is Watertown still an Armenian neighborhood today?
Yes. Roughly 7,000 to 8,000 Armenians live in Watertown, the largest Armenian community on the East Coast, sustained by churches, the Armenian Museum of America, and the markets of Coolidge Square. Housing costs are rising and many families have moved to nearby suburbs, but they still return, and new immigrants from Armenia and Artsakh continue to arrive.
What are the most famous Armenian landmarks in Watertown?
The best known are the Armenian Museum of America on Main Street, the largest Armenian museum in the diaspora, and St. James Armenian Apostolic Church on Mount Auburn Street, consecrated in 1937. The Hairenik building on Bigelow Avenue and the Coolidge Square markets, Arax, Massis, and Sevan, are also landmarks of the community.
Where did the Watertown Armenians come from?
The earliest and largest group came from the Kharpert, or Harput, region of the eastern Ottoman Empire, drawn by mission-school ties and a failing rural economy. Genocide survivors arrived from Kharpert, Marash, and many other towns, and later waves came from Istanbul, Beirut, Aleppo, and Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia.
When did Armenians first arrive in Watertown?
Armenians began arriving in Watertown in significant numbers after the Hood Rubber Company opened in 1896 and started hiring them out of Boston. The community grew rapidly after the 1895 to 1896 massacres and the 1915 genocide, reaching more than 3,500 people, nearly a tenth of the town, by 1930.
If your family’s story passed through the markets of Coolidge Square, the pews of St. James, or the factory floor at Hood Rubber, the names and places that carried them there are worth holding onto. You may also enjoy our portraits of the Armenian community in Glendale, California, the Italians of Boston’s North End, and the Cambodians of Lowell, Massachusetts.