History
Organizational category for all historical articles
Abbott Lowell Cummings, once the leading expert on early New England architecture, spoke out and took action in response to the indiscriminate clearance of the West End during the urban renewal period.
A digital reframing of “Ropewalks of the West End and Beyond”, an 2012 exhibit designed and written by Duane Lucia and Tom Burgess.
At New York’s 1939-40 World’s Fair, a young man from the West End presented the Chemical Man, a working model of the human digestive system.
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.
Dr. Joseph Stevens (J.S.) Jones, who lived most of his life in the West End, was a successful actor, playwright, theater manager, and physician in the nineteenth century. Jones graduated from Harvard Medical School and wrote between 150 and 200 plays in his lifetime. In 1924, the City of Boston tore down Dr. Jones’s home on Bowdoin Street, and other historic West End sites, in order to widen Court and Cambridge Streets.
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.
