This neighborhood drawing features Tenoch, a small Mexican restaurant in a sea of Italian ones! Located on Lewis Street, Tenoch serves up classic Mexican street food and is well-known for its tortas. The owners, brothers Alvaro and Andrés Sandoval, opened their first location in Medford in 2012 and the North End eatery in 2014.
Drawing by Sandro Carella, North End resident, architect, and co-founder of Crosstown Foundation for the Arts, Inc.
Carella has started a collection of neighborhood vignettes featuring local businesses and landmarks. See more by searching the tag: Neighborhood Drawings.
My brother and I own this building at 3 Lewis Street. My grandfather bought it in the 1920’s and had a tavern there called Nick’s Tavern where my father worked as a bartender. My uncle Arthur did some research into the history of the building and discovered there was a tavern in that location from around 1811 when the area was developed. It was a rough neighborhood of fishermen and longshoremen. My grandfather rented out rooms upstairs on a daily or weekly basis to mariners.
Before Commercial Street and Atlantic Avenue were filled in the corner of what is now Lewis and Commercial Streets was called Lewis’s Short Wharf which was most likely a tidal wharf. Local lore has it that Paul Revere had a workshop on Lewis Wharf and I always thought it was probably on Lewis’s Short Wharf where space was much less expensive than on regular Lewis Wharf and only a short walk from his home on North Square. When I was a boy in the 1950’s the Marino and Polci families were living upstairs. They were fishermen and Connie Polci told me her father and grandfather would hang their nets over the side of the building to dry. It was a different neighborhood back then.