Boston’s last tenement an island awash in modernity

Once it was part of an unbroken chain, a row of 30 brick walk-ups along the east side of Lowell Street from Causeway to Minot, a matching row behind it, another across the street. There were hundreds like it back then, crammed into the immigrant neighborhood known as Boston’s West End.

Now it stands alone, slender and exposed, like a single key left on a battered piano. It is four stories high and three windows wide, unadorned except for its lintels. In place of lost neighbors, billboards have hung on its sides for years, like an orphan in sandwich boards.

It is ringed by Big Dig ramps and surface roads, dwarfed by the TD Garden, the O’Neill federal building, and the high-rises of Charles River Park nearby. And now, closer still, a 38-story luxury tower rises in its backyard, the renderings showing a “sky lounge” and a first-floor arcade with a wine bar. Another tower, at 46 stories, has been proposed across the street.