Terrace Place

This post is part of a series about the process of nominating my neighborhood for the National Register of Historic Places. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.

Although not usually considered part of the Jeffries Point neighborhood, Maverick Square, located a five minute walk to the west, is the closest major business district. If you take a Blue Line train from downtown Boston, Maverick Square is the first subway stop you’ll reach in East Boston, so it’s often the first part of East Boston that new visitors to the neighborhood experience. It’s the oldest section of East Boston, and, historically, it’s served as the economic and civic heart of the neighborhood. Let’s take a look at how Maverick Square has changed over the past century or so in a series of three Then and Now photos. Use the slider in the center of each image to compare past and present.

See here and here for more Then and Now photos of Jeffries Point.

Maverick Square

Left: 2017  |  Right: 1890s

Located just to the west of Jeffries Point, Maverick Square was the site of the earliest development in East Boston starting in 1833. By the mid-19th century, Maverick had become a busy shopping district. An oval-shaped, landscaped green space at the center of the square was surrounded by clothing stores, pharmacies, groceries, cigar shops, and a furniture store. The Boston Sugar Refinery, constructed in 1836 and famous for its invention of granulated sugar, towered over the southern end of the Square. (It’s the large, gable-roofed building at the back left of the 1890s photo.)

But Maverick Square was more than a commercial district, it was also the civic heart of the neighborhood, home to a Congregational Church, the offices of the local newspaper, Lyceum Hall – a public venue that hosted lectures, debates, and entertainment events – and the East Boston Savings Bank – a locally-owned bank that provided capital to local businesses (and which still exists today). The Square was also a transportation hub. The original ferry landing that connected the island neighborhood to mainland Boston was located at the southern end of Maverick Square. European immigrants and visitors arrived at the Cunard Steamship Terminal along the waterfront just to the east of the Square, and travelers from as far away as Albany, NY arrived at the Eastern Railway Terminal at the northern end of the Square. The five-story tall Sturtevant House Hotel, commonly called the Maverick House (the name of two hotels that previously occupied the same site between 1833 and 1856) dominated the western side of the Square and provided lodging for the thousands of travelers that passed through the area. At the time, it was the largest building on the Square, visible on the right side of the 1890s photo.

All of this changed during the 20th century as East Boston entered a period of population decline. One by one, Maverick Square’s grand, 19th century buildings came down. The Sturtevant House Hotel: demolished, 1927. Lyceum Hall: lost to fire in the 1940s. The upper floors of the Winthrop Commercial Block: demolished by the middle of the 20th century, leaving behind a squat, one-story structure. The Boston Sugar Refinery, Maverick Congregational Church, the original East Boston Savings Bank building, all were lost by the end of the 20th century. The grand, urban square of the 19th century had largely disappeared, replaced by a hollowed out, gap-toothed streetscape.

Interestingly, as buildings disappeared from Maverick Square, new skyscrapers popped up across the harbor, a sign of Boston’s economic retreat from its inner neighborhoods and reinvestment in the downtown financial district during the 20th century. The downtown skyline, visible today across the harbor behind Maverick Square, did not exist at the turn of the last century.

Today, some of the gaps in Maverick Square’s streetscape are beginning to be filled in. A new neighborhood health center building, approximately the same size and shape as the old Sturtevant House Hotel that once occupied the site, was completed a few years ago.

East Side of Maverick Square

Left: 2017  |  Right: ca. 1900

The photo above shows the southeastern side of Maverick Square around 1900 and again today. This side of the Square features the highest concentration of surviving 19th century buildings in the immediate area. Most of the buildings seen here were built at the tail end of the 19th century, although many of them have been significantly altered over the years. You can just make out tree branches at the top of the ca. 1900 photo, hinting at the landscaped green space that once occupied the center of the square. This central green space was destroyed in 1904 during the construction of a subway tunnel running from Maverick Square under the harbor to downtown Boston. When it was built, it was the longest underwater tunnel in the world, and it’s still in use today, carrying Blue Line trains to and from downtown. Today, the center of Maverick Square has been given over to pavement and parking spaces.

144-146 Maverick Street

Left: 2017  |  Right: ca. 1900

The pair of brick townhouses seen here at the center of the photo are some of the last 19th century buildings remaining at the northeast corner of Maverick Square. These handsome houses were built in 1870 by a local mason who lived at the opposite end of the Square. At the time, East Boston’s wooden shipbuilding industry was failing, and the neighborhood was entering a period of economic stagnation and slowed growth as shipyard workers moved away. Given this uncertain economic climate, the construction of these stylish, upper-middle class homes was an act of wild optimism. The local builder was doubling down on his neighborhood, risking his own money in defiance of a disintegrating local economy. It was almost as if he believed that constructing substantial and beautiful housing in Maverick Square would somehow usher in a return to the prosperity and growth that had defined East Boston’s early years.

Unsurprisingly, the townhouses were not as successful as the builder must have hoped. As upper-middle class, single family homes, they  were failures almost as soon as they were built. Within a decade the townhouses were converted to boarding houses, providing immigrant newcomers and working people with a stylish, affordable place to live. In the 1940s, the ground floors of the townhouses were converted to retail space. Even though they may have never been used for their intended purpose as single family homes, the townhouses at 144-146 Maverick have somehow survived intact, against all odds, for nearly 150 years, serving the needs of a changing community, providing adaptable residential, retail, and office space.

Until now. These townhouses were purchased by developer Linear Retail last year and are slated for demolition to make way for a generic, two-story retail building. The destruction of these buildings, some of the oldest and best preserved buildings remaining in Maverick Square, would be a terrible loss for the community. An informal group of East Boston residents, myself included, have banded together in a last ditch effort to save the townhouses. Through our efforts, the Boston Landmarks Commission has listed the townhouses as pending Boston Landmarks, but the future of these buildings remains uncertain.

This post is part of a series about the process of nominating my neighborhood for the National Register of Historic Places. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.

Old photos might be the closest thing we have to a time machine. They offer a glimpse of the past, but they don’t provide any context. As I’ve worked to nominate part of the Jeffries Point neighborhood for the National Register of Historic Places over the past few months, I’ve turned to old photos over and over again to try to understand how the neighborhood has changed over time. But each photo is like a single puzzle piece, often creating more questions than it answers. As I’ve talked to longtime residents and sifted through other sources – books, maps, newspapers – I’ve gradually come to understand the stories behind some of these old neighborhood photos. I’ve put together a series of Then-and-Now pictures of the neighborhood, comparing old photos with present-day versions taken from the same location, along with the story each photo tells about the neighborhood’s past. Today, let’s take a look at how the Samuel Hall House and Marginal Street have changed over the years. Use the slider in the center of each picture to compare past and present. Stay tuned for more then-and-now photos of the neighborhood in a later post.

The Samuel Hall House

Left: 2017  |  Right: before 1895

Samuel Hall was the first shipbuilder to move to East Boston. A self-made man, he started his career as a shipwright with only “a broad-axe and twenty-five cents” to his name. He went on to become a world renowned shipbuilder, an alderman on the Boston City Council, and one of Boston’s most prominent citizens.

Hall opened a shipyard along East Boston’s western waterfront in 1839, at the age of 40. At the time, the neighborhood of East Boston was just six years old. With a population of about 1000, it more closely resembled the sleepy harbor island it had been for the past 200 years than the bustling urban neighborhood it would soon become. During the 1840s, Hall built a reputation as a master-builder of fast, reliable sailing ships for New England merchants. His success attracted other shipbuilders to the young neighborhood, most famously Donald McKay, who moved to East Boston in 1845. In 1850, Hall launched the Surprise, Massachusetts’s first clipper ship. The Surprise brought Hall international fame – it went on to work in the China trade, and was one of the most profitable and fastest ships to ever sail that route, making eleven consecutive passages from China to New York – over 14,000 miles – each in less than 89 days.

Over the next decade, heavy demand for clipper ships kept Hall and the rest of East Boston’s shipbuilders busy. During this time more clipper ships were launched from East Boston than from all the shipyards in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or London. Thousands of sail makers, carpenters, caulkers and other artisans moved to the neighborhood to work in the booming shipbuilding industry – between 1840 and 1865, East Boston’s population grew from 1,455 to 20,572. Hundreds of new houses were built to accommodate this population explosion, and in just a few short years, the neighborhood was transformed. By 1870, East Boston had become a place that many present-day residents would recognize – a busy urban center and transportation hub. And it was all thanks to the shipbuilding industry that Hall had founded.

Samuel Hall bought the stately townhouse pictured here in 1853 at the height of his success. Although most of East Boston’s shipbuilders chose to live as close to their shipyards as possible, Hall’s house was almost a mile from his shipyard. The house’s prime location at the top of the hill in Jeffries Point presumably made up for the extended commute. The rear of the house faces the waterfront, with expansive views of the harbor and downtown Boston beyond, while the front of the house overlooks Belmont Square. In 1853, the same year that Hall bought the house, the city added an iron fence and landscaping to the square. This may not have been a coincidence. Hall was well connected – he had been an alderman on the Boston City Council just a few years earlier.

Little has changed in the 120-plus years since the first picture of the Hall House was taken. The house’s shutters have disappeared, and the chimneys have shrunk, but the bow-front facade, side-gabled roof, and attic-level window dormers have all survived unchanged. Original Greek Revival details, including the brownstone trim and monumental front door surround, are intact as well. Even the parlor-level cast iron balcony has been preserved. Although most of the front garden was replaced with a curb cut and driveway, the garden’s Egyptian Revival granite fence posts and portions of the original iron fence remain.

Samuel Hall died at home in 1870, just as the East Boston shipbuilding industry that he helped create was collapsing. For nearly two decades, demand for clipper ships had remained high, thanks to a series of global developments that required fast transportation of people and goods over vast distances – first the discovery of gold in California and then in Australia and New Zealand, and, later, the Crimean War. But by 1870 sailing ships were fast disappearing, replaced by increasingly reliable iron steamships and newly constructed railroads. Hall’s death marked the end of an era. As East Boston’s shipyards closed, growth slowed, and the neighborhood entered a new and uncertain period in its history.

Marginal Street

Left: 2017  |  Right: 1909

After a brief slow-down following the collapse of the shipbuilding industry, the arrival of immigrants in East Boston – first Irish and Canadians and later Italians – led to unprecedented population growth at the end of the 19th century. Early in this period, many immigrants arrived in East Boston on ships built by Samuel Hall and other East Boston shipbuilders. In 1885 the population of East Boston was 29,280. By 1915, that number had more than doubled to 62,377. Today, just over 40,000 people live in East Boston, nearly 22,000 fewer than in 1915, which begs the question, where did all these people live 100 years ago? And how did the neighborhood accommodate a population 50% larger than today’s?

Part of the answer is that early 20th century East Boston was a very crowded place. Many of the neighborhood’s formerly single family homes were converted to cramped boarding houses – city directories from the time show as many as twelve unrelated adults living together in a single, two-and-a-half-story row house. But an equally important part of the answer is that there was simply more housing in East Boston in the early 20th century than there is today.

The picture above shows a stretch of Marginal Street in 1909. Tightly spaced three-story buildings line the street.  Across the street, where the photographer was standing, was the industrial waterfront, lined with shipping terminals, warehouses, a grain elevator, and ship repair businesses.

Today, many of the buildings along Marginal Street have vanished, and the waterfront industry on the opposite side of the street has been replaced with a waterfront park. The two buildings in the foreground of the 1909 photograph still exist today, but five additional buildings visible in the background have disappeared. At the left edge of the 1909 photograph you can just make out another house behind the Marginal Street houses. This was 1 Pearl Place, one of five row houses built between 1851 and 1874 with generous front yards facing Marginal Street. By 1909, skyrocketing demand for housing had led the owner of Pearl Place to construct the buildings seen here in the row houses’ front yards. Today, the Pearl Place row houses are gone. All that remains of Pearl Place is a narrow alleyway and stairs along with an original gas fired street lamp still in operation today (it’s visible along the side of the first building).

As East Boston’s population declined following World War II, much of the neighborhoods historic housing was lost to neglect, demolition, and fire. As buildings gradually disappeared, they weren’t replaced. Today, East Boston is growing again, and the neighborhood is struggling to keep pace with housing demand. Although no one wants to return to the crowded boarding houses of the past, we would do well to remember that the buildings constructed over a century ago during East Boston’s last housing crunch are often more dense than newly-constructed apartment buildings. If our goal is to keep housing affordable and welcome newcomers to the neighborhood, demolishing and replacing the neighborhood’s historic housing stock is, in many cases, counterproductive.

This post is part of a series about the process of nominating my neighborhood for the National Register of Historic Places. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.

The Greek Revival style dominated American buildings for nearly 40 years. In the 1840s and 50s, hundreds of Greek Revival houses were built across the Jeffries Point neighborhood to accommodate East Boston’s growing population. But after the Civil War, the style fell out of fashion. The national mood had shifted. Greek Revival architecture, once considered a stately expression of civic pride, suddenly seemed stuffy, overly serious, and old-fashioned, a painful reminder of the country’s antebellum past.

After the trauma of the Civil War, Americans were ready for something new. They began choosing more and more elaborate and fanciful styles for their homes. Gone were the austere details and rigid symmetry of the Greek Revival era, and in their place builders added fancy carved details, asymmetrical rooflines, cupolas, and towers. It was a form of architectural escapism. Instead of a Greek temple, suddenly everyone wanted to live in an Italian villa or a Renaissance castle. It was the start of what we now think of as Victorian architecture.

In Jeffries Point, the pace of new construction slowed in the years after the Civil War as the population of East Boston began to level off. Even so, a few dozen Victorian houses were built in the neighborhood during this time. The easiest way to identify these houses is to look at the roof. While most of Jeffries Point’s earlier Greek Revival houses have side-gabled roofs, pitched from front to back with the roof ridge running parallel to the front of the house, the neighborhood’s Victorian houses are turned 90 degrees, so that the narrow end of the house faces forward. This change looked something like this:

This reorientation, called an end house, actually originated during the Greek Revival era. Architects and builders began designing houses with the gable end facing forward because the triangular shape formed by the end of the roof allowed them to introduce decorative trim to form a pediment, the triangular roof shape found at the front of ancient Greek temples. Gable roofed end houses weren’t very popular in Jeffries Point during the Greek Revival era. There’s only one in the neighborhood, a well-preserved Greek Revival cottage dating to the 1840s.

Even after the Greek Revival style went out of fashion, end houses, with the narrow end of the house facing forward, stuck around. They were especially convenient in urban neighborhoods like Jeffries Point because they allowed builders to build long, narrow houses that fit on tightly spaced lots. Restricted by these small lots, builders in Jeffries Point in the 1870s and 80s continued building the same basic, narrow, box-shaped houses they had built during the Greek Revival era. They simply traded classically-inspired Greek Revival details for new decorative elements inspired by Italian villas and other European architecture.

In some cases, homeowners literally swapped out old, Greek Revival details for new, Victorian ones while renovating their houses. William Shattuck, a prosperous cabinetmaker, built a modest, Greek Revival house near the top of the hill in Jeffries Point sometime in the late 1840s. His house had a side-gabled roof and a flat front, and would’ve been pretty typical of middle-class Greek Revival houses built in the neighborhood at the time. But today, his house looks very different.

Shattuck’s house is the red one on the right. The gray house next door was built at about the same time, possibly by the same builder. Originally, the two houses would’ve looked almost identical. The restored facade of the house next door still features Greek Revival details, but Shattuck’s house was Victorian-ized at some point after his death in 1875. The house’s new owners undertook a major renovation to update the house, adding stylish new details.

The biggest change was the addition of a two-story, angled window bay. New house framing techniques popularized after the Civil War made it quicker and easier for builders to add angled window bays to new houses. Window bays, which flood interior rooms with light and give the illusion of extra space, became wildly popular, so much so that they’re now often considered defining features of urban, Victorian houses. Window bays even came to be seen as a mark of status – no upscale house was complete without one.

During the renovation, Shattuck’s house also lost the straight lines and hard angles of its original Greek Revival details. Instead, the new owners chose whimsical Victorian flourishes – an elaborate front porch, brackets with curlicue designs along the roofline, and curvy trim with scrolls at the base around the attic-level dormers. The end result was a fashionable home that approximated the look of the new houses that were being built in the neighborhood at the time. Today, only the house’s square footprint and side-gabled roof give away its Greek Revival past.

Very few end houses with pitched, or gable, roofs were built in Jeffries Point. Instead, in the 1870s, builders adopted a new type of roof for the neighborhood’s end houses. The mansard roof, sometimes called a French roof at the time, provided a way to create a full third floor living space while still keeping the same basic proportions of the two-story-plus-attic gable end house.

Dozens of mansard end houses were built in Jeffries Point in the 1870s and 80s. Some were single, freestanding homes, but many were semi-detached double houses, two side-by-side houses that share a central wall.

Victorian architecture is actually made up of a variety of different styles. Mansard roofed houses are associated with a style that originated in France called Second Empire. Unlike some of the other Victorian styles, which were throw backs to old, Renaissance and Medieval architecture, Second Empire buildings were considered very modern at the time. The fact that the style originated in France only made it more fashionable. Aside from mansard roofs, which were usually clad in decoratively arranged slate tiles, Second Empire houses in Jeffries Point also feature paneled window bays, decorative brackets under the eaves, and small porches or entry hoods supported by scrolled brackets over the front door.

Toward the end of the 19th century, factories began mass producing house parts. Builders and homeowners could simply look through a catalog and choose from a wide variety of affordable decorative bits to add to the front of a house. With all sorts of decorative house parts readily available, builders started adding more and more elaborate details to Jeffries Point’s houses.

This trend culminated in the fanciful architecture of the neighborhood’s triple deckers. Triple deckers are a type of three-story apartment house, with one apartment per floor, that were built in New England cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With three apartments in a single building, triple deckers were more dense than any of the houses built before them in Jeffries Point. They were designed and built to house the neighborhood’s rapidly expanding European immigrant population. Triple deckers kept the same narrow, boxy shape and bay windows of earlier Victorian houses, but did away with pitched or mansard roofs and simply squared off the top floor and capped it with a flat roof to allow for a full, third-floor apartment.

Earlier Victorian efforts to provide housing for poor and working people were often philanthropic ventures – rich people designing and building low income housing. At the time, these rich philanthropists thought that adding decorative elements to low income housing was morally wrong, even unhealthy for the people who lived there. As a result, many of these early low income houses were incredibly plain, completely devoid of decoration. But by the time triple deckers were being built in Jeffries Point for working class immigrant families, many of the neighborhood’s builders were recent immigrants themselves. Unlike the wealthy philanthropists who proceeded them, these immigrant builders paid attention to what their customers wanted – and, unsurprisingly, it turned out that poor and working people liked living in fashionable houses just as much as rich people.

With inexpensive, factory-produced house parts readily available, these builders added a wide range of decorative elements to their triple deckers – elaborately paneled window bays, scrolled brackets under the eaves, carved garland and wreath decorations, fluted pillars to support the front porch, palladian windows. So many of these decorated triple deckers were built across Boston that people began to think of them as commonplace. But recently there’s been a revival of interest in these buildings. They’ve stood the test of time, providing affordable housing and multigenerational living arrangements to Bostonians for over a century. And with their elaborate decorative details, they deliver character in spades, making up an important part of the charm of many of Boston’s historic neighborhoods, including Jeffries Point. The city of Boston has even officially recognized their value, introducing the 3D program to provide grants, loans, and subsidies to triple decker owners to help them maintain and preserve their houses. What’s more, preserving and reusing Boston’s triple deckers is an important way to help alleviate the city’s housing shortage – in many cases, triple deckers are more dense than modern, mid-rise apartment buildings on a per-square-foot basis, offering more units of housing in the same amount of space.

At the beginning of the 20th century, as the Victorian period came to a close, Jeffries Point continued to evolve. As the neighborhood’s population continued to expand, most of the formerly single family townhouses were divided into apartments with one apartment per floor, following the triple decker model. Many of the pitched roofs on the neighborhood’s earliest Greek Revival buildings were squared off to make room for a top floor apartment. Oversized, pressed metal cornices were added along the roofline, mimicking the style of the brick tenements that were being built across Boston at the time.

By 1925, very few open lots remained in Jeffries Point. The neighborhood had taken on its present-day character, a vibrant mixture of Greek Revival and Victorian style houses, built from different materials, and modified over time to suit the needs of a changing population.

Old maps provide a unique window to the past. They give us an immediate sense of what a place was like when the map was drawn, and provide information about how a place has changed over time. As I’ve gotten into the research required to nominate my neighborhood for the National Register of Historic Places, I’ve found old maps of the area to be an incredibly useful resource.

There are dozens of maps of Jeffries Point spanning nearly 300 years of history in the Boston Public Library’s map collection. The earliest of these maps provide important information about the neighborhood’s origins. Many of the later maps show individual buildings in the neighborhood. By comparing the shapes and locations of buildings on historic and current maps, we can estimate construction dates, and even track additions and changes to  individual buildings over time, all of which is essential information for the National Register nomination form. And these days, GIS (geographic information system) software, like QGIS, is available for free, making it easier than ever to quickly and accurately overlay and compare different maps.

But before we look at some old maps, those of you who aren’t familiar with Jeffries Point may be wondering exactly where it is. Here’s a present-day map of the area (click any of the images in this post to enlarge them).

The distinction between Jeffries Point and East Boston can be a little confusing. East Boston is one of Boston’s 23 ‘official’ neighborhoods. It’s situated along a peninsula in Boston harbor, completely separated from the rest of the city by water. It’s a big neighborhood – it covers about the same amount of land as all of Boston’s downtown neighborhoods combined – and over time, different sections of East Boston developed their own characters and identities and eventually came to be seen as distinct neighborhoods.

Jeffries Point is one of these neighborhoods-within-a-neighborhood. It’s located at the southern tip of East Boston, surrounded by the harbor on two sides. The neighborhood straddles a hill that overlooks the harbor and downtown Boston beyond. For much of its history, Jeffries Point has been defined by its harbor-front location, and even today, its harbor views, sea breezes, and maritime character continue to make it a desirable place to live.

That’s Jeffries Point today. But let’s back up a bit. All the way back to 1837 when East Boston was a brand new neighborhood, located on one of the largest islands in Boston Harbor (it would be nearly 100 years before landfill projects turned East Boston into a peninsula).

A few years earlier, a group of businessmen and investors bought the island and formed a real estate venture called the East Boston Company with the goal of developing a new neighborhood. By 1837, they had laid out streets and divided the island into lots. The area we now call Jeffries Point then had the rather unimaginative name “Section 1.” Here’s a closer look at Section 1 in 1837:

A quick comparison of this map to the present-day map of Jeffries Point reveals some major differences. The landmass of the neighborhood was much smaller in 1837, and it was almost completely surrounded by water. Here’s a comparison of Jeffries Point in 1837 and Jeffries Point today. The black line is the current shoreline.

I’d never thought much about the origins of the name Jeffries Point, but the first time I saw this map, the name suddenly made sense – the neighborhood was originally a peninsula (or, more precisely, a point), and the land at the end of the point was owned by a man with the last name Jeffries. Over the years, the tidal marshes, mud flats, and shallows surrounding the neighborhood were filled in, gradually expanding the neighborhood’s landmass until it was no longer a point. In 1837, Maverick Street, along the northern edge of the neighborhood, marked the boundary between land and sea. Today, the same street divides the neighborhood from Logan Airport.

If you look closely, you’ll also find, amazingly, that many aspects of the neighborhood haven’t changed over the past 180 years. The street layout is the same. Even the street names haven’t changed. Belmont Square, a large, open space at the center of the neighborhood, still exists as well, although it’s now called Brophy Park.

At the same time, it’s important to note that this map was drawn for the East Boston Company, and it reflects the company’s aspirations, which didn’t always line up with reality. In 1837, many of the streets depicted on the map were still under construction, and the northern section of the neighborhood between Everett and Maverick Streets was a salt marsh (which helps explain why none of the lots in that area had been sold).

If a present-day resident of Jeffries Point were to travel back in time to 1837 and walk the neighborhood’s streets, she would hardly recognize her neighborhood. The area was almost completely empty. The newly graded streets cut through meadows, marshes, and pastureland. Only a handful of houses, represented by little gray rectangles on the map, had been built. The most prominent of these houses – a mansion near the top of the hill in lot 47, built for Benjamin Lamson, an early investor in the East Boston Company – would have stood out. But this mansion was demolished in 1910 to make way for an elementary school. In fact, as far as I can tell, none of the buildings shown on this map survive today.

Even though the neighborhood was sparsely settled in 1837, a close look at the size and layout of the open lots reveals clues about the East Boston Company’s vision for the neighborhood. In fact, this was a time before zoning codes existed, and decisions about lot size and layout were one of the only ways the East Boston Company could influence the course of development in the neighborhood. The smallest lots in Jeffries Point were located at the western edge of the neighborhood, with larger lots further east and the largest lots located along the southern waterfront.

The reason for the varied lot sizes has to do with the scarcity of transportation options in the 1830s. Public transportation was nearly non-existent, and private transportation was largely limited to horses, which were unavailable to all but the wealthiest city dwellers. In their day-to-day lives, most people walked wherever they needed to go. Today, walkable neighborhoods are desirable, but in the 1830s they were essential. Factories, docks, shops, churches, schools, worker housing, and housing for wealthy business owners all needed to be within easy walking distance of one another. It was this kind of intensely walkable, mixed-use neighborhood that the East Boston Company had in mind when they laid out East Boston over 180 years ago.

Steam-powered ferries, a relatively new technology in the 1830s, provided a vital link between East Boston and downtown. Without this fast and reliable form of water transportation, East Boston likely would’ve remained farmland. So it’s no surprise that the neighborhood’s earliest development was clustered around the ferry landing, just to the west of Jeffries Point near Maverick Square (then known as Hotel Square).

By 1837 a sugar refinery, warehouses, and a hotel had been built in this area. The deep, narrow lots surrounding Maverick Square, including the lots in the western end of Jeffries Point, were mostly empty. But these small lots were sized to encourage dense development around the ferry landing, then the neighborhood’s industrial and commercial hub. In particular, these small, affordable lots were designed to accommodate rows of modest worker housing to support East Boston’s burgeoning industrial economy.

Just a quarter-mile to the east, the lots became much larger. With their hilltop location, harbor views, and proximity to the landscaped Belmont Square, these lots were set aside for the new neighborhood’s wealthiest residents. At upwards of three times the size of the lots surrounding Maverick Square, these lots were large enough to accommodate grand houses, stables, and landscaped grounds. Benjamin Lamson’s mansion in lot 47 provided an early prototype for this kind of upscale development. Despite the intended grandeur of these lots, they were located right next to higher density worker housing, within easy walking distance of the ferry landing and the neighborhood’s industrializing waterfront.

Decisions made about Jeffries Point’s layout in the 1830s have reverberated through the years, and in many ways still define the neighborhood I live in today. Constrained by the limits of the transportation technology available at the time, the East Boston Company designed a neighborhood where businesses, housing, factories, and docks were built side by side. The end result was a vibrant, 19th century urban neighborhood. But this dense, walkable layout has remained vital today for an entirely different set of reasons. It’s environmentally sustainable, making walking, biking, and using public transit more attractive than driving a car; it allows residents to live close to work and reduces commute times; its density and human scale encourage a tight knit community where neighbors know one another; and it produced an architecturally diverse neighborhood that now supports a diverse community with a variety of housing options, from grand townhouses to modest workers’ cottages, converted factory lofts to apartment houses.

The original planners of East Boston never could have imagined that their design for the neighborhood would remain relevant 180 years later, but the dense, multi-use development that they encouraged may be their greatest legacy.

I’ll leave you with a map showing present-day buildings (in pink) overlaid on the 1837 map of Jeffries Point.

How did we get from the nearly empty Jeffries Point of the 1830s to the dense, urban neighborhood we see today? Check back next time for Part 2 to find out.

This post is part of a series about the process of nominating my neighborhood for the National Register of Historic Places. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.