Era
Organizational category for historical articles
Prince Hall was a leader in Boston’s free black community on the North Slope and Copp’s Hill. He was one of the United States’ most vocal early abolitionist voices and a founder of Prince Hall Freemasonry. Hall advocated for black education and equality, running a school and making a wide array of arguments in service of bringing the fundamental promises of the Revolution to all Americans.
Primus Hall was an abolitionist, soldier, school master, and leader in Boston’s post-colonial period.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
