THROWBACK: FIGHTING FOR THE WEST END
A walk through Boston’s demolished but not forgotten neighborhood
RESEARCH BY PETE ROBERGE
As older Boston natives, history buffs, and gentrification activists will all explain in terrific detail to any willing audience, the stretch of high rises between Government Center (formerly Scollay Square) and the Longfellow Bridge, from Beacon Hill to North Station, was known as West Boston once upon a time, and more recently as the West End. To quote historians from the West End Museum on Staniford Street:
The term ‘urban renewal’ has become synonymous with Boston’s West End. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, more than 50-acres of tenement housing was demolished under so-called “slum clearance” to make way for luxury high-rise buildings. More than 10,000 low-to-middle income residents were displaced from the neighborhood they called home and the community they loved.
We expect to be visiting the West End innumerable times in BINJ Throwback installments. But since newspapers cheered on said displacement to appease development-happy advertisers half-a-century ago, we figured that as…
