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I’m standing somewhere between the Green Line and Paris when the stranger on the ladder greets me. He descends, hammer in hand, and introduces himself. Steven J. Beaucher is wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and a smile that bridges the gap between the hanging Green Line sign and the antique map of Paris. He owns WardMaps, a family-run store that deals in maps, gifts, official MBTA memorabilia, and through it all, our relationships with our surroundings and our past.
“We started as antique map dealers ten years ago,” says Beaucher, who eagerly recounts the origins of the company he built with his wife, Julie Richmond, and his brother, Brian Beaucher. “At the time we started our business my wife and I collected antique maps both of where we lived at the time, which was the South End of Boston, but also when we traveled—and our collection got out of hand.”
The logical next step for these map enthusiasts? Go all in. “So we all sat around and had a beer one night,” Beaucher remembers fondly, “and we were like, ‘Well how are we going to buy and sell more maps?’ And we came up with the idea of making reproductions of our antique maps, that could then fund the acquisition of more.”
The map collection and reproduction plan has clearly succeeded, as the store’s rows of maps cross temporal boundaries, seemingly self-multiplying. Their sheer quantity demands attention. Shuffling through them, and listening to the store’s soft acoustic soundtrack, I wonder why “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs isn’t playing on repeat.
Beaucher happily continues describing his store’s history. The store didn’t begin with its current location at 1735 Mass. Ave., but rather as a stall in what was then a new kind of marketplace in Boston. “Our first business venture was a card table at the very first South End open markets, now the SoWa Open Market,” explains Beaucher, “and we were right there in the whole sort of open market thing in Boston from day one, which was great.”
A clear sense of nostalgia permeates his memories of the business’s early days. “But that’s how we grew our business; we had our own nine-to-five jobs, and then every weekend we’d set up our card table, or get a van and go to a show, and eventually enough people asked us ‘Where’s your store? Where’s your store?’ so we opened the store.”
The store opened in Harvard Square, but the business quickly exceeded its confines. “We opened this shop here because we outgrew that one fast,” says Beaucher. The company has now expanded into gift products through its “Boston Coasters” brand, and is the official merchandiser of the MBTA with its “MBTAgifts” brand.
Boston Coasters features the work of independent artists, with whom Beaucher loves work in order to help advance their careers and to expand the store’s eclectic repertoire of products. “New artists walk in all the time,” he says, while hammering atop a ladder, “Like the signs I’m hanging —there’s an artist who lives in New Hampshire, and he was making these T signs. He had them on eBay, and I’m like, ‘Hey man, those look good.’ We got together and now he makes them for us in our T gift program. And he never would have gotten this big of a contract had he just stayed on eBay. So that’s the kind of thing: independent, local, and unique. Locally made if possible.”
It’s obvious that WardMaps’s emphasis on independent, local, and unique products has bonded the store to its community. Beaucher greets many of the customers coming in by name, and waves hello to new faces.
“Our challenge and our motivation everyday is being indie, and staying that way.” To meet this challenge, Beaucher says that he consciously engages customers so that he can integrate their feedback and opinions into the store’s practices.
Being “local” does not limit the store’s map collection, however. While WardMaps started with maps of Boston’s South End, it gradually came to offer a wide-ranging body of products. “That expanded to maps of Cambridge and we now have these maps like this,” says Beaucher as he motions to a sampling of plans of Brooklyn, Manhattan, Philadelphia, and Paris. “Though we would love to go to street fairs in Paris, we’re still pretty local,” he concedes.
In the Boston area in particular, WardMaps seeks to connect its customers to the past. “We came at it from [the standpoint of] collectors,” says Beaucher, “but we sort of evolved into these custodians of the past, for lack of a better description.”
Early on, Beaucher realized that cataloguing the past would allow him to form enlighteningly personal relationships with his customers. “What was cool was we’d go to a show,” he explains, “someone would want to see a map of their neighborhood, and we’d bring it out and we’d engage them about where their house is, how long they’ve been there. And then we could look at the map and see what it looked like before, and that connection; it wasn’t just about the maps, it was about the history captured in it of the place that we were actually selling them in.”
Beaucher loves to enhance those individual connections through product personalization, which he believes is at the core of WardMaps. “Our focus is something that is unique, and not available elsewhere,” he emphasizes. “So it can be an antique map of Cambridge published in 1916 that I know offhand there’s no other shop that can get that.”
Beaucher’s confidence stems from the fact that most other map stores in Boston have either transitioned into different focuses or gone completely online. Beaucher says that this makes WardMaps an especially rare occurrence: “An actual brick-and-mortar, where you can walk in and find a map of your neighborhood 100 years ago.”
His face lights up when talking about the college students that he has met. “We’re also selling prints of these maps to college kids who are coming here from, it could be Pennsylvania, it could be Tokyo,” he says, “and they want a map of Boston as it was 100 years ago, but they may also want a map of Tokyo as it was 100 years ago. And we love working with them, and giving them both.”
