The Last Tenement

“The Last Tenement” exhibition, originally set up in 1992 at the Old State House by the Bostonian Society through a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities and relocated to the West End Museum in 2006, was permanently housed in its own dedicated 1100 square foot space until it was destroyed in a flood in 2022.

The exhibit documented the history of the West End during the immigrant era from 1850 to 1958 – its topographical history, its architecture, its nineteenth-century blooming as a desirable residential area, its evolution into a densely populated urban district of working-class immigrants and a small community of middle-class professionals and students over twenty different ethnic backgrounds. The West End is known nationally to generations of students of urban planning and sociology as a textbook example of negative results from the 1950s federal urban renewal program. The lesson learned from the razing of Boston’s West End has instructed city planners and spurred neighborhood activists to cope more successfully with urban problems.