West Roxbury is a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts that was originally part of the town of Roxbury, founded in 1630 the same year as Boston. Then, most of the area was used as farmland.

One of the oldest schools in the city (not to be confused with the decade older Boston Latin School) West Roxbury’s boys’ school, Roxbury Latin School was founded in 1645. The school’s endowment is said to make it the biggest of any boys’ school in the United States.

In the 1840s New England transcendentalism literally took root in West Roxbury at the utopian community Brook Farm where all balanced work and leisure and shared in the work and profits equally. The community believed in the oneness of individual souls with nature and God. Brook Farm residents included novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. His novel A Blithedale Romance, is drawn from his stay there.

West Roxbury ceded from Roxbury in 1851 only to be annexed by Boston in 1874. Then West Roxbury also included the neighborhoods known today as Jamaica Plain and Roslindale.

West Roxbury’s development grew with the building of a branch of the Boston and Providence Rail Road. Electric streetcars followed. Today West Roxbury has a population of 29,000 people in an area of 7 square miles bordered by Roslindale to the north, Dedham to the east and south, Brookline and Newton to the west.

West Roxbury’s main street is Centre Street, lined with restaurants shops and sites of historic note.

The Theodore Parker Church of the Unitarian Universalist denomination is at Centre and Corey Streets. The church features seven stained glass windows made by the Tiffany Studios between 1894 and 1927 five of which have recently been restored. The church was named after Theodore Parker who was minister of this congregation from 1837 to 1846. He was extraordinarily ahead of his time fighting for woman’s suffrage and against slavery while preaching very progressive religious ideas

The Westerly Burial Ground  at Centre and Lagrange Streets was established in 1683. The site has three centuries of funerary art showcasing the skills of local stone carvers.  Headstones date from 1691-1980 and include war veterans from the Revolutionary and Civil War on.  

The median household income in West Roxbury is $65,428, just a bit more than the state as a whole.

Most of the houses in West Roxbury are single family homes on tree lined streets, many of which are available for rent although most are owner occupied. The median rent paid in West Roxbury is $1156. Most renters pay between $1000 and $1250 a month for rent. Most apartments have 4-5 rooms. Most of the housing stock in the community was built before 1950, with most of that built before 1939. More than half of the renters moved to West Roxbury before 1994.

The median age for males is 38, for females 43. Two out of three West Roxbury residents were born in Massachusetts. The population is 78 % White,   7% Black,  5% Latino   3% Asian. Much of the population is Irish Catholic.

Roslindale is a mostly residential neighborhood within the city of Boston six miles south west of downtown between Jamaica Plain, Hyde Park, West Roxbury and Mattapan.

 It was originally part of the town of Roxbury. In the 1860s the area was called South Street Crossing because the railroad intersected South Street at the heart of the community. In 1873 it was annexed by the city of Boston.

When the community applied to the US Post Office for a separate community designation, the feds didn’t like South Street Crossing so the quest began for a distinctive name. One member of the community told neighbors that the area reminded him of Roslyn, Scotland, outside Edinburgh. Due to the surrounding hills he described the settlement as being in a dale. By combining the words into Roslindale, the post office had a name that could be used and the appellation stuck.

Like many Boston neighborhoods that were ultimately annexed by the city of Boston, Roslindale grew as a bedroom community after the civil war becoming a streetcar suburb around what is now the Needham line of the MBTA.

In 1887 a railroad bridge through what is now the Arnold Arboretum collapsed killing 23 injuring more than 100 a disaster which prompted train bridge inspections across the US, a practice that continues to this day.

 By the 1920s Roslindale had adopted the layout it has today with Adams Park at its center. The Roslindale business district used to be called Roslindale Square and was a major shopping district prior to competition from suburban shopping malls. It’s still struggling to reinvent itself although it has improved in recent years. Key to the effort is a group calling itself Roslindale Village Main Street. This  is a community driven locally governed all volunteer organization of Roslindale residents, business and property owners dedicated to promoting and supporting a vibrant and healthy neighborhood business district

 The median age in Roslindale is 35. The median household income is $65,000. 12% of the population is below the poverty level.

Roslindale has a population of 33,000 people. Roslindale is 56% White, 20% Latino, 16% Black and 4% Asian. The most common ancestries are Irish and Italian.

Most of the housing stock was built before 1939. 51% of the residents rent. West Roslindale has one and two family residences on tree lined streets. North Roslindale is more densely built with two and three family structures near light industry.  Within the community, the mean apartment size is 4.5 rooms. The most common rent paid in Roslindale is between $1000 and $1250 a month. There is no rent control.

Hyde Park began as the settlement Readville in the 1660s. When the railroad reached the area in 1850, it started to grow as an industrial center more than a farming community where it manufactured paper and cotton goods. Westinghouse was one of the area’s major employers for more than 130 years. The neighborhood still has a large inventory of warehouses and factories from its industrial past.

The neighborhood as we now know it was carved out of parts of the towns of  Dorchester, Milton, Dedham and what was then Hazelhurst, by Alpheus Perley Blake and 20 associates. They incorporated the city as Hyde Park in 1868. In 1912 it became the last suburb to be annexed to the city of Boston. It is to the Southwest of the rest of the city and in many areas retains a small town feel.

In the 1960s, Hyde Park threatened to secede from Boston when the planned Southwest Expressway would have torn the neighborhood apart. That road building project was resisted by locals and ultimately defeated. The gap in Interstate 95 was solved by renamed Massachusetts Route 128, I-95 which now does not enter the city of Boston although it’s the major  north south link connecting Florida to Maine.

Hyde Park’s Fairmount Hill is a district of historic architectural note with many homes built in the Colonial Revival, Queen Anne and Victorian styles among others. Hyde Park’s central business district is at Cleary and Logan Squares and displays a variety of historic buildings, including the public library from 1899, the English Gothic Church of the Most Precious Blood was built in 1885 and the district’s administrative center built by Boston after annexation.  Hyde Park’s Riverside Theatre Works was originally built as an opera house in 1897.

 The area is connected to downtown Boston via MBTA Commuter Rail as well as several bus routes that run to Forest Hills station in Jamaica Plain and Mattapan station in Mattapan.

Hyde Park has 28,000 residents in an area of 5 square miles. Historically, Hyde Park’s residents were mostly Irish, Italian and Polish. Today the neighborhood is more diverse, 45% White, 40% Black, , 13% Latino, and 2% Asian. The median age is 36. The median household income is $57,000. It’s a family friendly area with a lot of children and parks.

 47% of the residents rent. The median number of rooms in apartments is 4. The most common rentals available are two bedroom apartments, many in two family homes, followed by one bedroom apartments. Most of the housing stock was built before 1939. Most rent runs between $900 and $1250 a month. There is no rent control.

East Boston is a neighborhood of 6 1/3 square miles with 38,000 people built on landfill that connected several islands in Boston Harbor. It was annexed by the city in 1836. The world’s finest clipper ships were built in East Boston at by Donald McKay in the mid 19th century, regularly flying around the Americas to San Francisco to feed the California gold rush frenzy. The first underwater subway tunnel in the United States connected East Boston to the rest of the city in 1904. Today East Boston’s most distinctive geographic feature is Logan International Airport which still keeps East Boston flying.

East Boston is set off from the rest of the city by the harbor although it is connected by the Sumner and Callahan tunnels. The area is bounded by Winthrop, Revere, and Chelsea Creek. Traditionally East Boston has been a center of immigrant culture. By 1925 the population peaked at 64,000. Successive waves of Irish, Jews, and Italians have now been supplanted by South American Latinos. Orient Heights remains the heart of East Boston’s Italian community. For years the annual Thanksgiving football contest between South Boston and East Boston, the Southie Eastie came down to the city’s Irish vs. the Italians. Some toughs would claim that if they didn’t win the game that day it didn’t matter, because they’d win the fight afterards.

The Kennedy family’s first stop in America was in East Boston on Meridian Street in a home that still exists. P. J. Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy’s great grandfather, worked in East Boston as a cooper.

Suffolk Downs is Boston’s major thoroughbred horse racing venue. It opened in 1935 and hosted a Beatles concert in the infield before 24,000 music fans in 1966. In 1973 while working as a lifeguard, I saw, who else – the Beach Boys perform there.

East Boston is home to half a dozen community gardens.

In addition to the automobile tunnels, East Boston is connected to the rest of the city by the blue line subway. The Tobin Bridge is an alternative auto route through Chelsea.

In recent years the East Boston Municipal Harbor Plan has come into play to connect the area with its waterfront by developing condominiums, restaurants and shops.

 Much of East Boston offers superb views of the downtown skyline, and the area  does have a beach, (on maps labeled Constitution Beach but known to locals as Shay’s Beach.) Rents, nowever,  remain relatively low compared to the rest of the city. This is due to Eastie’s  isolation, and the neighborhood’s proximity to Logan airport. The median rent in East Boston is $780 a month. There is no rent control.

 Fully two thirds of the housing stock was built before 1939. The apartments are generally large though, with the most common size for a rental apartment being 4 rooms.

The median age of residents is 32 years old. The population is about half White, 40% Latino, 3% Black and 2% Asian.

 The median household income in East Boston is $37,000 a year. 20% of the population lives below the poverty level. One out of four people don’t speak English well because 42% of the residents are foreign born. Only a third of the residents ever attended college.

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Boston’s South End is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The city considers it an official Boston Landmark District. The area is filled with distinctive red brick, bow front architecture, built during the Victorian area. Eleven elliptical residential parks grace the South End  Still, it’s a neighborhood with a diverse population where 76% of its residents rent.

The South End is not directly south of downtown. It is built on a landfill of a former tidal marsh south of the Back Bay, northwest of South Boston, northeast of Roxbury, north of Dorchester, and southwest of Bay Village.  It’s barely over a square mile, with 22, 000 residents.

As the South End grew geographically, the middle class moved in. In 1863 Boston College opened its doors in the South end. With the growth of ready rail transportation to further off street car suburbs like Dorchester, the white protestant population declined, replaced by Catholics. Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross opened in 1875. Boston College outgrew its quarters and left for then rural Chestnut Hill. By the end of the 19^th century, the area was becoming a crowded tenement district.

Relatively well paid Black Pullman Porters moved in attracted by the area’s proximity to the railroad. The area became a center of Boston’s Jazz scene frequented by touring musicians like Duke Ellington and Cab Callaway who would perform at clubs including the Royal Palms, and the Savoy.

Beginning in the 1940’s gays and lesbians started moving in. Public housing projects were built attracting low income residents. By the 1960s the decline had become so pronounced that the area was one of the poorest in the city.

The South end has revived in recent years due to its closeness to downtown and distinctive historic architecture. Today it’s the home to the Boston Ballet, the Boston Center for the Arts and the Boston Medical Center.

Most of the businesses in the South End are along Washington and Tremont streets. Many good restaurants line these blocks, although long time residents have been heard to complain that they don’t want to pay $45 for a supper.

The median age is 29, with a median household income of $61,000 a year. 17% of the residents live in poverty. The South End is 45% White, 23% Black, 17% Latino, and 12% Asian.

Most of the housing was built before 1950, with most of this stock built before 1939. The median number of rooms in an apartment rental is 3.5. Most renters pay between $1250 and $2000 a month. There is no rent control.