Will Urban Renewal Ever End?

Jim Campano was 18 when Boston tore his neighborhood down. The Jewish and Italian bakeries, the Polish church and the synagogues, the tenements and rowhouses — gone. Street corners bustling with teenagers, the Campano family’s sunny sixth-floor apartment on Poplar Street — erased by a government that called the West End a slum.

“Nobody believed they would do it, that they would take a whole neighborhood,” Campano recalls. “Then the cranes came in, and the bulldozers.” The first demolition hit like an earthquake: “The whole block was swinging back and forth.”

In 1958, in one of the most infamous acts of America’s urban renewal era, the Boston Redevelopment Authority seized nearly all of the working-class West End, evicted its last 7,500 residents, and razed it all to make way for new middle-class apartments. “It felt like they took part of you when they took your neighborhood,” says Campano, who co-founded the West End Museum to commemorate his lost piece of Boston.