Topic: Business
Businesses, corporations, executives, those commonly identified with a business
John P. Coburn, an African-American clothier, participated in and financially supported the abolitionist movement in Boston. He later ran a gambling house out of his home on Phillips Street, one of the sites of the Black Heritage Trail.
The West End’s dry goods stores provide valuable insights into the economic activity of the neighborhood. With data sourced from Boston Business Directories and Barry Oshry – the son of one of the West End’s most well-known dry goods business owners – providing insights on his family business, this report explores how one of the most essential industries in industrial America fared in the West End.
The Hotel Waterston, built in 1874 through a remodeling and expansion of the Charles Bulfinch House on 8 Bulfinch Place in the West End, maintained Bulfinch’s facade while adding additional stories. The Waterston had many prominent guests, including Walt Whitman, during the late nineteenth century, and the hotel stayed in business until it was demolished by urban renewal in 1961.
A digital reframing of “Ropewalks of the West End and Beyond”, an 2012 exhibit designed and written by Duane Lucia and Tom Burgess.
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.
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.
The Early Settlers of the West End (1630 – 1645): Robert Fairbanks, Public House Keeper
Mapping Amateur Radio Stations in the 1920s West End Overlaying historic maps of the West End over a map of present-day Boston can contextualize the locations of amateur radio stations in the West End during the 1920s. Leon W. Bishop, an early pioneer of amateur radio broadcasting, moved to 18 Irving Street in the West…
