South End, Boston

The Boston Redevelopment Authority identifies several subdistricts covering the southeast portion of the neighborhood:[15]

• SOWA (South of Washington Area), roughly between Albany to Washington and East Berkeley to Mass Ave.
• New York Streets, between Herald, East Berkeley, Albany, and Tremont Streets
• Back Streets, roughly between I-93, Harrison, East Brookline, and East Berkeley Streets
• Medical area, roughly between the highway, Massachusetts Avenue, Franklin Square, and East Brookline Street

As the South End geographically grew from filling in the land north and west of "the Neck", the city of Boston envisioned a large inner city residential neighborhood to relieve the crowded downtown and Beacon Hill neighborhoods. The city also hoped for a large and stable tax base. Architect Charles Bulfinch laid out some of the first filled lands.[16] He designed a large residential park called Columbia Square[16] located at the present Franklin and Blackstone Squares.[17] Bulfinch's plan was to route traffic around the square, not through it. Eventually, his plan was abandoned and Washington street was allowed to once more divide the square creating today's separate squares.[16]

Many rooming houses on the Back Bay side of the South End had no bathing facilities; roomers went to public showers to bathe. Filled land in the South End was originally eight feet above sea level but is now four feet, as fill settles. The original shoreline of Boston Neck crosses in front of 40 St. George Street and tapers to the narrowest point on the Neck at Dover Street. Blackstone and Franklin Square are solid lands on the original neck, but clam and snail shells are just beneath its surface, as high seas would occasionally overrun the Neck. Massive granite blocks of the original sea wall can be seen on the Harrison Avenue side of the Joshua Bates School.

A burgeoning middle class moved to the South End including business owners, two mayors, bankers, and industrialists. Though the neighborhood's status as a wealthy neighborhood was relatively short-lived, myths of a dramatic white flight in the 1880s are not entirely true. A series of national financial panics (see e.g., Panic of 1884, Economic history of the United States), combined with the emergence of new residential housing in Back Bay and Roxbury fed a steady decline of whites of English Protestant ancestry. Whites remained in the neighborhood, but increasingly they were Irish Catholic and recent immigrants.

By the close of the nineteenth century the South End was becoming a tenement district, first attracting new immigrants and, in the 1940s, single gay men. The South End also became a center of black middle class Boston life and culture. The largest concentration of Pullman Porters in the country lived in the South End, mostly between Columbus Avenue and the railroad bed. As the decades progressed, more buildings became tenements and by the 1960s absentee landlordism was rampant and the neighborhood was one of the poorest of the city.

The first settlement houses in Boston were in the South End: the South End House, Haley House, Lincoln House, the Harriet Tubman House, and the Children's Art Centre. In 1960 these settlement houses merged to form United South End Settlements.[18]

Union Park Street and Shawmut Avenue

Columbus Avenue in the South End

The South End was one of many large-scale landfill projects in Boston to create new residential districts.[2] Construction started in 1849, it was built on tidal marshes that surrounded Boston Neck.[2] The street plan for the South End was to pattern the 18th-century English models, it would have blocks of townhouses overlook small parks in the centers of the residential streets.[2] The parks were built to make the South End more beautiful and make it feel like a community.[2] These townhouses quickly became the predominant form of housing, builders produced blocks of houses for the middle-class families.[2] From 1850 to 1880, these townhouses started to get built, with the typical townhouse having a mix of architectural styles.[2] The South End also became a popular hospital district with the first being the Boston City Hospital which attracted other hospitals to the area.[2] One of the hospitals that came into the South End was the Massachusetts Homeopathic Hospital that was built in 1875.[2] It used fresh air cures and home remedies to heal their patients but if one of the patients needed surgery they were sent to the Boston University School of Medicine.[2] The Boston University School of Medicine first came into the South End in 1874 accompanied by the New England Female College, which was the first college in the region that accepted women.[2] By the late 19th century the South End was becoming increasingly populated by African Americans who were coming from the South.[2] Even though City Hospital admitted black patients, they didn't allow them into their training programs or hire black professionals.[2] By 1908 a black physician from Alabama named Dr. Cornelius Garland opened his own hospital called Plymouth Hospital and the Nurse's Training School.[2] By 1929, Plymouth Hospital closed down because City Hospital started to accept people of color into their medical and nursing programs.[2]

The connection of Boston and Albany, New York by railroad (by some of the various companies that would later merge into the Boston and Albany Railroad) was celebrated in 1841 as a way to keep Boston competitive with New York City as an Atlantic port. Just south of the Boston and Worcester Railroad (where the Massachusetts Turnpike is now) in the next decade arose the New York Streets district, a residential area of the South End where the streets were named after cities on the route to Albany. Albany Street still exists (though it now ends at the Turnpike rather than Kneeland); connecting Albany Street with Harrison Street from north to south were Seneca, Oneida, Oswego, Genesee, Rochester and Troy Streets (Troy became the modern Traveler Street).[19][20][21]

Starting in 1955, nearly all of the buildings in the New York Streets district were bulldozed as part of an urban renewal project to clear "slums" and make room for industrial activity in a period marked by urban decline. The resulting superblock was redeveloped into the headquarters for one of the city's newspapers.[19] The Herald-Traveler Corporation spanned from the then newly minted Herald Street to Traveler Street until 2012, when it moved to the Seaport District in South Boston.[22] Redevelopment as mixed-use area known as Ink Block, featuring apartments, a grocery store, restaurants, and other retail.[19] Other populated sites in the South End received similar treatment, particularly the early high-rise, high density Cathedral Housing Projects adjacent to Holy Cross Cathedral and the high- and low-rise redevelopments like Castle Square from 1964-1966.[23]

The South End is not only residential, it is also commercial. Since it is located where there was access to railroads and port facilities it attracted a lot of manufacturers.[2] Albany Street, which is along the Roxbury Canal, became occupied by warehouses and factories.[2] By the 19th century, it became the center of Boston's furniture and piano-making industry.[2] Today, the South End has many new developments that will add not only residential space, but also commercial space. According to the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) there is a new project being constructed that will be built on Albany Street. According to the Expanded Project Notification Form this new development will "include two hotels: a 16-story select service hotel, which will have a restaurant on its first floor; and a 9-story extended-stay hotel. The hotels together will have approximately 408 rooms. While the split between the two types of hotels has not been finally determined, current plans anticipate approximately 210 rooms in the select service hotel and approximately 198 rooms in the extended-stay hotel. The select-service hotel will include an approximately 4,000 square-foot (approximately 267-seat) restaurant on its first floor. A 3-level, above-ground parking garage with approximately 137 parking spaces will serve both hotels."[24] By creating this new project it will provide about 200 new jobs for construction workers once they start building, it will also "employ approximately 200 employees (full-time equivalents) in management, operations, customer service, retail, and food service functions."[24]

Braddock Park, in the South End

Until the 1950s, the South End and bordering Roxbury was a jazz mecca, with clubs such as the Royal Palms, Eddie Levine's, the Pioneer Club, Handy's Grille, Tic-Toc, Connolly's, Estelle's, the Hi-Hat, The Savoy, The Cave, Basin Street, Louie's Lounge, and Wally's Paradise. Wally's is the only venue to have survived to the present day.

From 1915 to 1970 the American Federation of Musicians Local 535 was the top black musicians' union in the country, with local and national musicians such as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Chick Webb, Earl Hines, and Jimmie Lunceford. Its offices were originally above Charlie's Sandwich Shoppe (whose walls are lined with photographs of the jazz stars who ate there), but moved to 409 Massachusetts Avenue circa 1930. In 1970, it and the white union (Local 9) were ordered to merge by the courts (Boston Musicians Association Local 9-535) and most of the black musicians left.[25]

Boston University Medical Campus

The South End has five primary and secondary schools, providing education from kindergarten through grade 12. The McKinley South End Academy is four schools in one. It is a special education school that focuses on behavioral, emotional and learning needs.[26] Also in the South End there is the Josiah Quincy Upper School that holds grades 6 to 12. It balances the requirements for core subjects with the requirements of world languages, the arts and physical education.[27] There is also the Blackstone Elementary School that holds over 500 students from diverse backgrounds.[28] The Blackstone holds pre-kindergarten to grade 5, these schools that are found in the neighborhood of the South End belong to the Boston School systems.[28] Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology is a four-year school for students who want to get a degree in the technical field. It is also conveniently located in the South End. It is also home to Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology; established in 1908, BFIT is one of New England's oldest colleges of technology, started with a bequest from Benjamin Franklin and a gift from Andrew Carnegie.

Holy Cross Cathedral

The South End's population has been diverse since the 1880s when Irish, Lebanese, Jewish, African-American, and Greek populations began to settle in the neighborhood. In the 1930s a substantial immigration from Canada's maritime provinces found economic opportunity in Boston, and homes in the South End neighborhood.

Beginning in the 1940s, particularly after the end of WWII the South End's rooming houses became home to growing numbers of gays and lesbians. The environment of single sex rooming houses provided homes and social cover for unmarried LGBT people. In the late 1940s a growing population of Hispanic people began settlement. At first much of this settlement was centered around the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

Today the neighborhood remains diverse, integrating people of nearly every race, religion, and sexual orientation.[31]

Income levels are anecdotally reported as stratified: a concentration of the wealthy and the poor. However, neither the U.S. Census or City of Boston reports on income of this specific neighborhood. Though gentrification is sometimes cited as a reason for flight of poorer and non-white residents, the neighborhood has maintained racial and income diversity due to a large number of subsidized, publicly owned, or otherwise low-income housing units and a homeless shelter. Subsidized below market rate housing developments such as Methunion Manor, Cathedral Housing (public housing project), Villa Victoria, Tent City, Lenox St Apartments, Camden, Camfield Gardens, 1850 Washington St, and Mandela Homes vary considerably and represent evolving attitudes in public housing design and governance.

Although all neighborhoods in Boston suffer from crime, the city has a comparatively low incidence of street crime. The South End is large enough that some parts can be known for street crime while others are family friendly. Those parts include the Villa Victoria Affordable Housing, the Cathedral Housing Projects, and some areas west of Mass. Ave. The South End has more public playgrounds per square foot than other Boston neighborhoods. The South End is known as an increasingly upper middle class neighborhood, although is still home to many lower income residents. Some long-time residents are being pushed out by rising rents and property taxes. Because of a strong low-income agenda from the city, its recent (until the 1970s) history of impoverishment, and the presence of several low income housing projects, the South End will likely remain economically and racially diverse.

The South End used to be known as a gay, artistic, and cultural neighborhood, although rising costs in the neighborhood threaten this character. Unlike in cities such as New York City, there are no city policies to help artists keep their long-term studios. Art galleries, however, are flourishing even though there are not many. GardenMoms, now one of Boston's most popular online parent groups with over 2500 members citywide, was started by several South End moms in 2002, and helped confirm the role of families as a growing and important facet of this community. (It is named after the South End cafe it started in, The Garden of Eden.)[32]

• 
  Boston Herald Traveler Building circa 1952–1956
• 
  Southwesterly from the railroad bridge on Harrison Avenue Showing frontage on Motte Street with the building at 1000 Washington in the background, June 24, 1952
• 
  Rear of houses on Harrision Avenue and Johnny Court from Pine Street, c. 1952–1958
• 
  Tot lot on Troy Street c. 1952–1958
• 
  Shawmut Avenue, southerly from the corner of Tremont Street, December 4, 1956
• 
  Don Bosco Technical High School, Warrenton Street December 4, 1956
• 
  Northeasterly from roof of 100 Arlington Street December 4, 1956

• 
  Columbus Avenue and Dartmouth Street, leading into the South End
• 
  Walking down Lawrence Street
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  Walking down Dartmouth Place
• 
  Side streets in the South End
• 
  Union Park Street homes
• 
  Union Park Street
• 
  Worcester Square
• 
  Union Park and Tremont Streets
• 
  Tremont Street
• 
  Clarendon Street with John Hancock Tower in background