A Profound Lack of Ellis
Emily Hiestand

First published in Bostonia magazine, 2001; revised slightly 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance

Introduction from the editors of Bostonia magazine: This is the first of a new series of regular contributions from the essayist, poet, and visual artist Emily Hiestand (GRS ’88), whose writing we have long admired. Hiestand’s many honors include the 1999 National Magazine Award for “Hymn,” a touching chronicle of her experience as a White woman attending a Black church, and a Pushcart Prize for “Neon Effects,” a delightfully quirky essay that, like the one you’re about to read, involves Ellis the Rim Man. Both pieces appear in her recent book, Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998).

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I have long felt that the outer edge of Boston University’s western pulse along Commonwealth Avenue is marked by the Ellis The Rim Man store — the legendary palace of automotive accessories and aftermarket products located on the corner of Comm Ave and Babcock Street. One warm afternoon last summer, I saw a chance to test this geographical notion. Beginning at the bookstore in Kenmore Square, and festooning west along Comm Ave as far as the eye could see, was a parade of bright red banners, in shape reminiscent of medieval tournament flags, each bearing the University’s name, and demarcing its footprint.   

Following the banners, I passed the BU bridge, the Commonwealth Armory, and many other pedestrians, including one older man in an elegant gray and white seersucker suit, and soon the friendly, gargantuan Ellis sign loomed into view. Sure enough, the line of Boston University’s pennants ended on the lamppost at Babcock Street, in front of the great glass windows of Ellis’s automotive store. The pennants mark the edge of BU’s West Campus very colorfully, but it is the Ellis sign and shop that give aura and oomph to this spot along the Avenue. Since 1961, when Morris Ellis moved his operation to this site from a nearby address, countless citizens have oriented by his shop. Something — or several somethings — about the place combined to make The Rim Man a navigational landmark in our city. There is the slightly comic name, which sounds like a vaudeville act, or an urban Superhero; the trove of guilty-pleasure products (mud flaps! alloy wheels!); the location close by Packard’s Corner; and not least, the gigantic see-it-for-blocks rooftop sign.

Ellis had the the massive sign installed the same year he moved in: Home of Ellis The Rim Man Automotive Accessories it reads in faded shadow block letters, painted on three wings of a great delta-shaped billboard. (Note that lovely “Home of” — a proud signage phrase most often seen on a sign for a whole small town that is home to a famous author, president, or a natural wonder.) Together, the Ellis sign and its steel superstructure are almost as tall as the three-story building on which they rest. Built in 1919, the building was designed as one of the glamorous new automotive showrooms emerging along the Kenmore-to-Packard stretch of Commonwealth. The first inhabitant was the Puritain Motor Car Company, an enterprise that vanished almost immediately, a casualty of the tumultuous shakeout years in the early American auto industry. By 1921, the building was the local home of the Lincoln Motor Car Co., an independent company that was soon swallowed the Ford Motor Car Co./ Lincoln Division. Ford occupied the building for 26 years, then sold it to Max Feldberg, who used it to warehouse ladies apparel until March of 1961, when ladies dresses were replaced by Ellis’s automotive products. Spiritually and practically, 1001 Comm Ave was an ideal location for an automotive accessories store: it was embedded in Boston’s car district, surrounded by showrooms whose Deco-era provenance is still evident (see the ornamental façade of the old Oste Chevrolet, now Star Market), along with dozens of ancillary auto-oriented operations like Ellis. 

Now, as I reached the entrance to the this famous after-market world, a new and wholly unexpected fact revealed itself. Inside the Ellis showroom was — nothing of Ellis. Peering inside the windows, I saw no metal shelves laden with wheel bearings and chrome plated parts. No custom wheels, radar detectors, bike racks, or fog lamps. No fuzzy dice. No grilles. Only a vast shell of a room, a voluminous, empty room, with walls of white pegboard panels on which nothing was displayed. The interior was a set for a Beckett play. Three men wearing leather back-support belts were steering ponderous buffing machines over the fine, old herringbone-pattern tile floor. The only vestige of Ellis and his enterprise was the massive sign still installed on the building’s roof.

The mind reeled. Ellis’s automotive accessories palace had seemed if not entirely eternal, certainly a permanent fixture, something so hardwired into the life of our city, and Commonwealth Avenue, and so emblematic of America’s obsession with automobiles, that one might dare to count on it being there for decades to come. 

Moe Ellis was a boy entrepreneur long before the dot.com revolution made teen tycoons a common phenomenon. He founded Ellis, Inc on his seventeenth birthday, and by middle age was a director of New England Sinai Hospital, and founder of Greater Boston Automotive Wholesalers Hospital Equipment Fund, which provided all manner of gear to area hospitals. After Morris Ellis died in 1983, his son, Edward, carried on the business, adding wireless communications gear to the roster of glittering stuff.

And now, what great disturbance in the force had brought about this profound lack of Ellis?  Had the operation merely moved, or was I observing the end of an era, some watershed moment in time?

Here I will confess to a paradox: although I’m an ardent advocate of mass transit, I have nevertheless spent happy hours at Ellis the Rim Man shopping for fine, hardy sisal floor mats, replacement mirrors, and most recently a neon undercarriage lighting kit. For this last purchase, I was tutored by two young Hispanic sales guys who, upon learning the gear was for my own car, not for a son or husband, generously took me into their neon tribe, showed me the right neon tubes for my car, as well as a related stash of gear — a neon shift knob! — and clued me in about a fiesta for neon customizers and low riders.

The sweetness of those boys still wafted over the empty Ellis room as now, in a spirit of elegiac investigation, I ventured through the open doors of the loading dock. Inside, past the enormous Otis freight elevator (a 4500 lb. number with 12,000 pound steel counterweights, capable of hoisting Puritains and Lincolns three flights up to the top floor repair shop), and past neo-Egyptian columns with flaring crowns, and a sweeping gilded staircase that must have made the plutocrats feel plush as they selected options for their Lincolns, I found a young man in purple shorts and white tee- shirt directing the crew. 

“Yes,” he said in response to my question, “Ellis the Rim Man has gone out of business.” A man working nearby called out, “Ellis the Rim Man has been replaced by Joe the Mattress Man!”

“That’s me,” said Joe Doyle, President of New England Mattress and Futon (SED, ’77). Leading me on a spontaneous tour of his new space, Doyle said, “We’re only here temporarily so we’re not doing a big renovation, just getting the space clean and bright. We’ll be in before the kids come back to college.” 

Doyle explains that in another year or so, the former Lincoln showroom, dress warehouse, and home to auto accessories will house the Media and Technology Charter High School (the MATCH School), an innovative school that offers a college prep curriculum focusing on media and technology. One of the school trustees told me later that Ed Ellis — long may he wave — simply wanted to retire.

Still digesting this startling news, I wandered back to the building’s loading dock. There, tacked to a wall were several curling bills of lading. Also something curious and beautiful: several roughly cut, wooden forms nailed to the wall;  two circles, a square, the color of cognac. Like something from a 19th century mill, perhaps a pattern or a template for making something. The wall here was also covered with brown and white swooshes, barely legible handwritten notes, reminders, instructions, years of evocative marks made by shipping and receiving clerks, a wall in the spirit of Jackson Pollack meets Marcel Duchamp — found art!

Doyle thinks there may be a plan afoot to keep the Ellis sign. Oh, gosh, I hope so — think of it: with the existing, animated Citgo sign at Kenmore Square, and a preserved Ellis sign at Packard Corner, Boston’s once great Auto Row would then be marked at both its eastern and western ends with magnificent historic signs that define an era of mobile, petroleum man.

A fellow mass transit enthusiast, who rides the B trolley along Commonwealth Avenue, muses that in the 1920s, riders like him would have stared out the windows of a crowded trolley directly into the windows of the auto showrooms, in which sat the first full wave of American dream machines. Like the transistor radio, the pocket calculator, the Web browser, these early cars were high-tech items, heralding fundamental change and the dream of mobility. 

That era and ethos is in transition, of course, despite current rear-guard actions. We’ll soon be driving vehicles engineered to sip, not guzzle, or electric vehicles that run on batteries rather than fossil fuel. If we are very wise we will also invest in elegant, efficient trains the equal of those already plying Europe and Japan that reduce the need for automotive traffic. We will lace our cities with bicycle paths like those in Stockholm. We’ll make walking tempting along pedestrian ways graced with shade trees, fountains, and the alluvia of time. 

As we enter a new fuel and transportation era, the two automotive signs along Comm Ave will recall a dynamic, if often disastrous age, a way of living that Jane Holtz Kay called the “asphalt nation.” Unburdened of utilitarian function, the Ellis sign would be free to join the Citgo sign as a pure signifier of a place over time; just as the illuminated Citgo tubes now shine over the city, making cameo appearances on televised Red Sox games — hanging over the green wall like a triangular moon whenever Ichiro or Manny homers to left. 

Some days after my visit to the empty Ellis building, I traveled to the fifth floor of a renovated warehouse in our city’s Roxbury neighborhood. There, in the Documents Room of the Boston Building Inspection Services, I gave a clerk an address, and was handed the document jacket for 1001 Commonwealth Avenue. Inside the manila wallet was a thick stack of folded pieces of paper: all manner of permits, notices, requests (one on early Ford stationary), and elevator violations that recorded eighty-two years of bureaucratic oversight of one city building. Some of the pieces of paper were worn to a nearly translucent thinness. I handled them tenderly, sitting at a little desk. Near the middle of the stack, I found the oldest piece of paper in the jacket.

August 15, 1919 is the date on the “Application for Permit to Build” that brought the Ellis building into existence. The application is on a piece of Kraft brown paper, filled out in the flowing elegant script of an era when penmanship was a necessary and common skill. This piece of paper says the building will be 45 feet tall, that its original owner was Samuel Altman, that the architect was F.A. Norcross. The permit is covered with a trail of officialdom: a motley of numbers, dates, and notations in blue, black, purple, and aqua inks; inspection stamps (“Foundation Approved”), and six different signatures including that of W.H. Smith, Supervisor of Plans. It’s an auspicious piece of paper, smooth to the touch — the beginning of something.

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents At-A-Glance