City Makes Available Original Property Records from Old West End

According to City property records, the building at 13 Leverett St. in the old West End was owned by the Fisher family when the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) acquired it by eminent domain in 1959. Records now available for public review detail the history of the property dating back to 1837. This one piece of information is among millions of others contained in some 40 boxes of original acquisition records recently catalogued by the Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA), the newly named BRA.

“I identified these boxes of records, recognized their significance and brought them to the attention of BPDA Executive Secretary Teresa Polhemus and Director Brian Golden” said Nate Smith, records manager for the BPDA. “Director Golden and Secretary Polhemus were both in favor of completing a full inventory of the files, sharing our findings with The West End Museum and making the records available to researchers.”

“We were thrilled when we got the email from the BDPA informing us that these records had been found and catalogued–and that the City wanted to share them with the Museum, said West End Museum Executive Director Susan Hanson. “We want to help share these records with old West Enders and their families as well as with historians and students of history.”

According to Smith, the files contain original and copied records of property purchases, deeds, appraisals, court actions and photos associated with a majority of the buildings in the old West End that were acquired by the BRA during urban renewal. Most of the documents are well over half a century old–many were photocopied in the 1950s–others are in their original form and have suffered decay. The neighborhood was razed as part of a federally-funded urban renewal program which replaced tenement apartments and neighborhood businesses with “a new neighborhood” of high-rise apartments and more affluent citizens.

The BPDA has developed a spreadsheet listing the addresses and names sorted according to the parcels as they were identified at the time of acquisition. Some of the records were created and originally organized by the Boston Housing Authority. The BRA inherited the records when it was created in 1957. Smith says files related to some parcels are missing, but the files they do have are arranged in boxes where newly found parcel information can easily be inserted.

In the weeks since the Museum first learned of the existence of the records, the City has moved them from City Hall to its archives building at 201 Rivermoor Street in West Roxbury. The 40 boxes of files are now being stored in a climate-controlled vault. But that doesn’t mean they are out of reach for anyone who wants to review them.

“If anyone makes a public records request with us to see one or more of these files, we will schedule an appointment for the person to come to the BPDA archives and we will make them available for review and to be photographed,” said Smith.

“The West End Museum is very interested in having these records digitized and made available to people online and through the Museum,” said Hanson. “That will be a very costly, and time-consuming process, but we want to explore all options to make this treasure trove of history easily accessible.”

Hanson says the Museum will explore whether federal, state or private grants are available to fund the digitization project. Smith estimates it could easily cost over $10,000, in part because the documents are of different sizes, materials and levels of stability, meaning everything has to be manually loaded–one at a time– onto a scanner.

Another option to fund the project would be a crowd-funding campaign, which Hanson says will be discussed by the West End Museum Board of Directors. In the meantime, anyone interested in viewing the files at the BPDA archives is welcome to submit a public records request via the link above.