Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, educator, publisher, reformer, and namesake of the West End’s Elizabeth Peabody House, was one of the most important figures in Boston’s 19th-century intellectual community. Of all her achievements, perhaps her most impactful was the introduction of English-language kindergartens to the United States.
Hyman Bloom is remembered as a key figure from the Boston Expressionist movement, praised for his mystical and vibrant paintings. Bloom, in addition to being a visionary artist, offers us a window into Boston’s settlement houses in the 1920s and ‘30s. The West End Community Center, and its artist-teacher Harold Zimmerman, nurtured the creativity of a generation of future artists, from Bloom to Jack Levine.
St. Joseph’s Church was established in 1862 on Chambers Street in the West End, near the site of the first public Catholic mass in Boston. In the early 1900s, the St. Joseph’s Association, an organization of parishioners, hosted an annual party at the church which also held many notable funerals, marriages, and worship services. Decades after urban renewal, West Enders reunited at annual masses at St. Joseph’s to honor deceased fellow residents.
A lecture and tour about African American history in the West End neighborhood.
A look into the MGH archives with Lucy Ross, Archivist of the Massachusetts General Hospital.
As emancipated men, women, and children migrated north after the Civil War, the need for Black boarding houses increased greatly. In the West End a large concentration of Black, women-operated boarding houses became home for many of these newly-freed people.
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.
