The West End Mothers’ League
The West End Mothers’ League organized mass meetings and boycotts to address the high cost of food in 1917, just before the United States entered World War I.
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Topic: Women
Women’s issues, suffrage, girls, anyone using she/her pronouns
Rose Berger Kubitsky
Rose Berger Kubitsky immigrated to the West End from Poland in the early twentieth century. In the 1930s she founded “Berger’s Deli.” On Leverett Street, the deli was known by West Enders as “Berger’s Bar” because it evolved into a tavern, where Kubitsky simultaneously worked as owner and bouncer.
Fanny Goldstein
Fanny Goldstein, as head librarian of the West End Branch library from 1919 to 1957, bridged the West End’s diverse communities through literary exhibits and events such as “Jewish Book Week.” Goldstein, who immigrated from Russia as a young child and resided on Joy Street, was a true West End community leader.
Hotel Waterston
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.
The West End Land League
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.
Chloe Russell
Chloe Russell, a Black woman who owned property on Belknap Street in the West End during the nineteenth century, was the attributed author of The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book in an era when fortune telling and dream interpretation was popular and entertaining.
Adelaide Cromwell: Mapping Community in the Black West End
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.
Sarah C. Roberts
At the age of five, Sarah Roberts was at the center of a lawsuit against racially segregated public schools in Boston in 1847. Roberts, a Black girl, was denied the equal right to attend the public school of her choice, forced instead to walk past five public schools to the Black-only Abiel Smith School in the old West End.