Era: Immigrant Neighborhood (~1880-1960)
Immigration, first, second, and third-generation Americans, Settlement Houses, Irish politics, etc.
Chinese immigrants owned and operated laundries in the West End during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an under-emphasized aspect of the historic neighborhood’s multi-racial and multi-ethnic diversity.
The West End branch of the Land League made political and financial contributions to the original Land League in Ireland, an organization of tenant farmers and Irish nationalists that resisted high rents and evictions in the 1880s.
Senda Berenson, the “Mother of Women’s Basketball” in the United States, grew up in the West End after her Lithuanian family moved to the neighborhood in 1875.
Alonzo Meserve, principal of the Bowdoin School on Myrtle St. from 1886 to 1914, made significant contributions to Bowdoin’s student body and Boston’s ongoing struggle against racism.
In the early twentieth century, the West End House hosted debates between high school literary societies on controversial and important issues. The debates were judged by lawyers and educators in Boston and adopted the format of competitions at the collegiate level.
Far from their country of origin, Ukrainian immigrants and their descendants in the West End maintained connections and advocated for justice in their mother country.
Executive Director Sebastian Belfanti explains the many answers to a common question: where, geographically, is the West End?
Adelaide Cromwell, the late sociologist who taught at Boston University and founded BU’s African American Studies program in 1969, documented and visualized the West End’s historic Black community in the 1800s.
