Era
Organizational category for historical articles
Sarah Josepha Hale was one of the most successful women in writing and publishing in nineteenth-century America, and her letters and editorials were instrumental to the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Hale is connected to the old West End because one of her poems, “Mary’s Lamb,” was set to music by Lowell Mason at the Bowdoin School.
Read article
Victor Gruen was the Austrian-born architect whom Jerome Rappaport, Sr. hired to design Charles River Park, the development that replaced the demolished West End in the 1960s. But Gruen’s work also had national significance as “the father of the shopping mall.”
Read article
Herbert Gans lived in the West End for eight months prior to the start of its demolition, conducting sociological research on the culture and lifestyles of the Italian-American residents of the neighborhood. His findings in “The Urban Villagers” presented a significant criticism of Boston’s urban renewal process as inhumane, and Gans notably concluded that planners were incorrect to define the West End, a vibrant community despite widespread poverty, as a slum.
Read article
Don Pedro Gilbert, a nineteenth-century Spanish pirate who raided merchant ships in the Atlantic, was executed by hanging, in 1835, at the Leverett Street Jail in the West End. The West End Museum resides approximately where the Jail stood.
Read article
William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most prominent white abolitionists before the Civil War, published The Liberator and shaped the debates that guided the anti-slavery movement. Garrison was held at Leverett Street Jail in the old West End for his own safety during one harrowing case of mob violence.
Read article
Manny Brown is a pre-urban renewal West Ender and World War II veteran.
Read article
John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, intended to spark a violent uprising by enslaved people against their oppressors, was preceded by Brown’s efforts to acquire recruits and financial support. He received some assistance from abolitionist Lewis Hayden, who lived on the north slope of Beacon Hill with his wife, abolitionist Harriet Hayden.
Read article
Veda Borg was born in the old West End, and became “Boston’s own” as an actor in many movies from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Read article