Topic: Immigration
Immigration to the United States, first generation immigrant experiences
During the mid-20th century, Boston targeted the South End for urban renewal, alongside the West End and other low-income communities across the city. Responding to impending displacement, the South End’s Puerto Rican residents organized to take control of their community’s destiny, forming the Emergency Tenants’ Council (ETC) and successfully negotiating the right to redevelop the land themselves. The result was Villa Victoria—a community-planned and operated housing development that would become the center of Latino life and culture in the South End. Unlike top-down redevelopment schemes that displaced residents, as happened in the West End, Villa Victoria emerged from the community’s own vision and struggle.
Founded in 1894, the Frances E. Willard Settlement House was located on the West End’s Chambers Street for nearly five decades. The Settlement House aimed to serve the neighborhood’s immigrant population and factory workers by offering social services, community clubs, and housing to young women and children.
The settlement movement was an attempt by scholars and social reformers on both sides of the Atlantic to address the problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, and, in America’s case, the mass immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Settlement Houses were important institutions in Boston’s West End, assisting families with a wide range of educational and social services.
The 1830s was a transformative decade for Boston’s Black community, characterized by the intersecting forces of burgeoning abolitionist activism and escalating urban segregation. This resulted in the growth and consolidation of the Black population in the West End on the North Slope of Beacon Hill.
Michael Powars carefully planned the murder of his cousin, Timothy Kennedy, but his fatal mistake was thinking that the law required an eyewitness to convict someone of a crime.
Boarding Houses played an important role in the housing system during the age of industrialization and immigration in Boston and the West End. Along with lodging and rooming houses, they were the only alternative for those in need of affordable and transitional living space in the neighborhood until the arrival of tenements and apartment buildings. Boarding houses also offered women of the period one of the few ways to earn a decent income.
The Temporary Home for Women and Children located on New Chardon Street in Boston’s West End was one of the first family shelters in the country. From its start as a small home on Charles Street, it has cared for women and children in need for over 150 years.
The convergence of Puritan values, attitudes toward immigration, and the prevalence of one university surrounding almost every aspect of the event, made the Parkman-Webster murder case a distinctively Boston story.
