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    South Boston
    South Boston
    South Boston
    Ebook127 pages29 minutes

    South Boston

    By Anthony Mitchell Sammarco and Charlie Rosenberg

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    About this ebook

    South Boston, once a part of Dorchester, was annexed to the city of Boston in 1804. Previously known as a tight-knit community of Polish, Lithuanian, and Irish Americans, South Boston has seen tremendous growth and unprecedented change in the last decade.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateOct 9, 2006
    ISBN9781439632765
    South Boston
    Author

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

    Anthony Mitchell Sammarco is a noted historian and author of over sixty books on Boston, its neighborhoods and surrounding cities and towns. He lectures widely on the history and development of his native city.

    Read more from Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

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      Book preview

      South Boston - Anthony Mitchell Sammarco

      Wysong.

      INTRODUCTION

      As the popular vaudeville song by local composer Benjamin V. (Benny) Drohan goes, Southie Is My Home Town, and remarkably in the last decade, South Boston has evolved from a primarily tight-knit Irish American neighborhood to a far more diverse neighborhood of the city of Boston; people of all walks of life are moving to this neighborhood due to the convenience to downtown Boston, the wide spectrum of housing available, and the rapid conversion of multiple-family dwellings to condominiums and the infilling of vacant lots with new condominium construction.

      Once a 579-acre area known successively as Mattapannock, Great Neck, and Dorchester Neck, South Boston was once a large, remote peninsula that projected into Boston Harbor with close proximity to the harbor islands, among them Castle Island, which since 1892 has been connected to the mainland by a bridge. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, South Boston was used primarily for the grazing and pasturing of cattle, with a gate at the area of what became known as Washington Village, now known as Andrew Square. There were only a few families that lived here before the American Revolution, among them the Bird, Blake, Farrington, Foster, Harrington, Hawes, and Wiswell families, and they were associated with Dorchester and belonged to the meetinghouse located there. During the Revolution, the fortification of Dorchester Heights (now marked by a striking and prominent white marble monument) by patriots and headed by Gen. George Washington, forced the evacuation of Boston by the British, and the Loyalists, on March 17, 1776, which became known as Evacuation Day and is a holiday still celebrated throughout the city, and with great éclat a parade in South Boston. However, by the early 19th century, the proximity and convenience of the peninsula to the rapidly expanding town of Boston attracted developers and speculators who saw great advantages to seeing it annexed to Boston. After months of bitter litigation, the town of Dorchester lost its neck in 1804, and henceforth it was to be known as South Boston.

      Envisioned as the new fashionable residential district, streets were laid out in a grid pattern of numbered and lettered streets with the two major streets being Broadway and Dorchester Street, which intersected Broadway at the center (now Perkins Square). In 1805, the Federal Street (now Broadway) Bridge connected the peninsula to Boston, which began a steady flow of traffic. The building of the Mount Washington Hotel gave rise to the credence that the area would attract new development, especially as it was served by an hourly horse-drawn omnibus from downtown. With the opening of the Hawes School on West Broadway and the fashionable Mount Washington Female Institute on East Broadway, the population quickly multiplied, and with the proximity to the ocean, panoramic views of the harbor islands, and other amenities, the population of South Boston became a substantial and diverse group of residents. The development literally boomed following the Civil War, with the neighborhood having large tracts of land developed for fashionable housing, among them Thomas Park, which circled around the former reservoir that was eventually to be developed as a park with an elegant white marble monument to the Battle of Dorchester Heights. So

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