Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Boston's West End
    Boston's West End
    Boston's West End
    Ebook215 pages44 minutes

    Boston's West End

    By Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Within these pages, author Anthony Mitchell Sammarco
    brings to life the history of Boston s West End the
    area of the city bound by the Charles River and Storrow Drive as well as North Station, City Hall Plaza, and Myrtle Street. Once a thriving, energetic, and diverse neighborhood, the West End was slated for complete removal following World War II. In over 200 marvelous photographs, this collection recaptures fond memories for former residents and shows newcomers the history of the West End. Now the site of luxury, high-rise apartment buildings, condominiums, and stores, Boston s West End was once the site of many Bulfinch-designed townhouses owned by prominent families. In later years, the neighborhood was home to a diverse ethnic and religious community of families who arrived in Boston from all parts of the world. Today,
    three decades after the West End was virtually leveled, it is still fondly remembered by many who once called it home.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateOct 19, 1998
    ISBN9781439621622
    Boston's West End
    Author

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco is a noted historian and author of over sixty books on Boston, its neighborhoods and surrounding cities and towns. He lectures widely on the history and development of his native city.

    Read more from Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

    Related to Boston's West End

    Related ebooks

    United States History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Sounds Like A Good Flick

      Feb 3, 2022

      Sounds Like A Good Flick
      1 min read

    • Article

      Peter White—Master of the Vanity Signature

      Dec 30, 2019

      Bold oversize vanity signatures can dress up any national bank note and, like all things that can be measured and parsed, there has to be one that tops them all. We think we found it with that of Peter White, president of The First National Bank of M

      4 min read

    • Article

      Cheeky Blinder

      May 27, 2021

      Cheeky Blinder
      6 min read

    • Article

      Born to Build

      May 4, 2021

      Born to Build
      11 min read

    • Article

      Worth The Climb

      Apr 1, 2020

      Worth The Climb
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Gap-toothed City

      Jan 27, 2022

      A Gap-toothed City
      5 min read

    • Article

      Survey of London: Whitechapel, Volumes 54 and 55

      Jul 27, 2022

      Yale University Press £150 Whitechapel, part of London’s East End, outside the City but deeply, densely urban, has had a long history of immigration. The Huguenots were most ungenerously described by the parish priest in the 1690s as ‘the very offal

      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘Lord Of The Town’

      Jun 1, 2022

      ‘Lord Of The Town’
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Bookseller’s Retreat

      Nov 2, 2022

      A Bookseller’s Retreat
      6 min read

    • Article

      In Full Bloom

      Dec 1, 2021

      In Full Bloom
      4 min read

    • Article

      My Visit to the Hub City

      Aug 26, 2019

      My Visit to the Hub City
      5 min read

    • Article

      No Bones About It

      Feb 5, 2020

      No Bones About It
      3 min read

    • Article

      Baroque Delights

      Nov 18, 2020

      Baroque Delights
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Return Of The Bolt Hole

      Sep 2, 2020

      The Return Of The Bolt Hole
      4 min read

    • Article

      Fighting for Farnham

      Apr 21, 2021

      Fighting for Farnham
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Marvel Revived

      Apr 10, 2024

      A Marvel Revived
      7 min read

    • Article

      Brutal Truths

      May 22, 2020

      Brutal Truths
      5 min read

    • Article

      Studio

      Apr 28, 2022

      Studio
      4 min read

    • Article

      7 Things You (probably) Didn’t Know About The White House

      Nov 23, 2023

      Construction on the White House began in 1792 on a site in Washington DC selected by the first US president, George Washington. Over the next eight years, a mix of free African-American and white wage labourers, enslaved workers and skilled craftsmen

      5 min read

    • Article

      ENGLISH HOMES OLD & NEW

      Jul 20, 2022

      ON January 9, 1731, Thomas Watson-Wentworth (from 1746 the Marquess of Rockingham) hosted ‘a large entertainment to all my tenants in the neighbourhood and their wives and some neighbouring gentlemen’ at his seat at Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshi

      7 min read

    • Article

      Changing Faces

      Jul 9, 2021

      Changing Faces
      5 min read

    • Article

      What Lies Beneath

      Nov 10, 2021

      What Lies Beneath
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Mile Of Shopping

      Apr 1, 2020

      A Mile Of Shopping
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Boston's West End

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Boston's West End - Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

      Station).

      INTRODUCTION

      The West End of Boston exists today only in the memory of Bostonians of middle age or older and in the hearts of the former residents who once lived there—the perennial West Enders. A once thriving neighborhood that was bound by Beacon Hill, the Charles River, and the present city hall plaza, this unique and special place was obliterated between 1958 and 1960 in the quest of urban renewal.

      Once a place of fashion in the early 19th century, the old West End was the site of Bulfinch-designed mansions of the Boodt, Apthorp, Coolidge, and Otis families. The Harrison Gray Otis House, now the headquarters of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, still remains at 141 Cambridge Street adjacent to the Old West Church. An elegant neoclassical brick mansion, it stands forlorn along a street that was once a major thoroughfare connecting downtown Boston to the West Boston Bridge, spanning the Charles River. Along this road was once a thriving neighborhood that had accessibility to town, and was often referred to as an elegant oasis with trees and green space bound by the Charles River. Though the West End was no longer a fashionable neighborhood after the mid-19th century, its maze of streets became home to successive waves of immigrant groups and native Americans whose cultures and traditions enhanced the definition of a West Ender. Without wealth, nor obvious material advantages, the West End community became the epitome of a mixed neighborhood—with African-American, Jewish, Polish, Italian, and Irish residents living and worshipping side by side. According to Chief Justice Elijah Adlow, the West End was a busy community, seething with the hum of voices and housing a multitude of lately arrived Americans.

      However, following World War II, Boston began a project of urban renewal that was designed to rid the city of unwanted slums, replacing these areas with modern housing. The areas of Boston’s South End and West End were targeted as slums and saw large-scale demolition of extant housing stock. During this period of time John B. Hynes, mayor of Boston from 1950 to 1959, instituted a series of development projects throughout the city that, it was hoped, would spur on the dormant economy. Cutting a wide swath through the area of the waterfront, the Central Artery divided the North End, but was to provide convenience for those who once drove through the maze of century-old streets. In the neighborhoods, the urban renewal of Boston was partly financed through the Housing Act of 1949; the funding, administered by the Boston Housing Authority, was to finance new housing projects such as Fidelis Way in Brighton (1950), the Cathedral Project in the South End (1951), Bromley Heath in Roxbury (1954), Franklin Field in Dorchester (1954), and Columbia Point in Dorchester (1954). These new housing projects, primarily built for returning servicemen after WW II, added to the woefully inadequate housing stock, but large tracts of extant housing were demolished in such places as the South End and South Boston. The inevitability of urban renewal in the West End seemed certain, looking at the situation in retrospect, but though the area had been referred to as a slum by the city, it was still home to about seven thousand residents.

      The devastating destruction of the West End was described by Abbott Lowell Cummings, former director of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, as two large-scale land clearance projects in Boston’s early West End during 1960 and 1961 [that] have created a devastation here unmatched since that of the fire of 1872 in the downtown area. In actuality, the area was simply swept away with only a few buildings, two churches, and the buildings of the Massachusetts General Hospital surviving to provide a shocking contrast to the once-thriving neighborhood.

      By the mid-1960s, under the term of mayor John F. Collins, the West End began to rise again—as in the prophecy of the phoenix arising from the ashes. The old West End was replaced by a new one that consisted of high-rise, luxury apartment buildings with panoramic views of Boston, the Charles River, and Cambridge. The new West End had no room for those who once called this acre of earth home. Charles River Park, composed of high-rise, luxury apartment buildings, was developed to create an urbane and livable space, with underground parking and accessibility to downtown offices. It was a far cry from the once lively, ethnically charged neighborhood that was described by Herbert Gans, the noted sociologist and author of The Urban Villagers, as a good place to live.

      One

      THE EARLY WEST END

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1