The abrupt and startling difference in scale between the low-rise Vieux Carré and the towering buildings of the business district on the opposite side of Canal Street highlights the contrasting histories of these two areas of New Orleans. What is now known as the...
Most of this primarily residential area of New Orleans upriver from the Central Business District comprises what was once the independent city of Lafayette and the seat of Jefferson Parish. It was annexed to New Orleans in 1852, and today...
New Orleans’s expansion upriver was encouraged, beginning in 1835, by the steam-powered New Orleans and Carrollton Railroad, laid out along St. Charles Avenue and one of the nation’s first such transit lines. As elsewhere, a “resort” was at the terminus in the Carrollton suburb to...
Mid-City extends from Tremé and the Central Business District in a northwest direction toward the Metairie Ridge. Although the higher ground along the Metairie Ridge had been acquired for cemeteries as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the area’s development came in the...
The ranch-style houses that characterize many of the twentieth-century suburbs on the Lake Pontchartrain side of New Orleans are typical of those in residential neighborhoods throughout the United States. The oldest remnants of this area’s history are the fragments of the walls...
The elevated strip of land, known as Gentilly Ridge, that runs through this area was occupied by Native Americans before Europeans began to settle here in the eighteenth century. The surrounding swamps and marshes, however, were not drained until the...
Algiers, on the west bank of the Mississippi River opposite the Vieux Carré, was annexed by New Orleans in 1870. In the eighteenth century it was the site of the Company of the Indies’s first plantation, Louisiana’s first slave-trading depot, and New Orleans’s gunpowder magazines...
As the nation's oldest major city, Boston, along with its surrounding cities and towns, has evoked many images in the national consciousness over the past four centuries: “A Paradise of All Those Parts,” “A City Upon a Hill,” “The Cradle of Liberty,” “The Hub of the Solar System,” “The...
The original civic and mercantile heart of Boston emerged in the area from Dock Square to the intersection of King (now State) and Cornhill (now Washington) streets. This area provided the connection between the original North and South Ends and the extension of King Street...
The Central Business District extends south and east from Boston Common (BH1) with Washington Street as its historic and current spine. The major shopping streets of the city are located here, mixed with key institutions and a...
During the second half of the twentieth century, the financial core of Boston moved from the intersection of Congress and State streets, its historic home, to larger buildings between the Central Business District and the South Station Transportation Center (...
The site of Boston was chosen for its excellent harbor, dotted with islands and lighthouses. From the earliest settlement, the Shawmut Peninsula was constantly expanded by the building of wharves (wooden piers with warehouses on top or nearby) along the harbor front. Beginning in the North...
Mythically considered the Italian neighborhood in Boston, the North End witnessed dramatic changes over the past four centuries. The northernmost of three projections from the original Shawmut Peninsula, the North End hosted important individuals and institutions from 1630 on. The landmass...
Boston's Clark or North Square was once the site of some of the city's most progressive architectural efforts, especially the long-destroyed Foster-Hutchinson house (1690–1692), the earliest classically ornamented urban mansion, and the Clarke-Franklin House (1711–1712), one of...
Of the three projections of the Shawmut Peninsula, the West End attracted the least development during the colonial period. A tidal dam built in the mid-seventeenth century across the cove between the West and North ends proved a failure, being replaced between 1807 and 1828 by a regular...
The location during the colonial period of the beacon used to warn the inhabitants of any imminent danger, Beacon Hill is the highest of three “mountains”—Cotton (or Pemberton) Hill, Beacon Hill, and Mount Whoredom, renamed Mount Vernon—that topped the Shawmut Peninsula. These hills were...
Boston's Chinatown originated in the late 1870s with the arrival of large numbers of Chinese immigrants. They concentrated in the original South End neighborhood, which had been developed in the early nineteenth century on the South Cove landfill by the South Cove Associates. That...
West of Chinatown—along Tremont, Washington, and Boylston streets—arose the Theater District from the mid-nineteenth century until the Depression. Despite the history of “improper” plays being “banned in Boston,” the city welcomed its first theater in the late eighteenth century...
The 1840s–1870s was a tremendous period of growth for the city of Boston and for the South End neighborhood in particular. Created by landfill operations initiated first in the early 1800s and growing dramatically in the 1840s, the South End was envisioned as a middle- to upper-middle-...
The blocks of the South End between Harrison and Albany streets comprise a substantial, early industrial district of Boston. The land east of Washington Street was extended by landfill throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Beyond Albany Street, the area had...
The Back Bay was so named because it was originally a large bay in the Charles River estuary, west or back of the Shawmut Peninsula, that extended south from the Cambridge shore (originally farther north) to the area of Washington Street in the South End. This marshy domain of more than...
The artificial creation of a natural-looking meandering stream attracted the development of a new residential and institutional district in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before 1881, the land and the landscape here did not exist. Solving an environmental problem...
As the name suggests, the West Back Bay was intended originally as an extension of the first-class residential district of the Back Bay. The Charles River Improvement Company, founded in 1890 by Charles Francis Adams, purchased the rights to fill land out to the line of...
Fire and water have defined Charlestown most dramatically. The water came first with the natural advantages of deep channels in the Mystic and Charles rivers and inner Boston Harbor surrounding the triangular-shaped community on three sides. A narrow neck at the northwest corner (Sullivan...
Despite the high traffic volume generated by Logan Airport (EB1), East Boston remains strangely isolated from the rest of the city. Built on a peninsula extending from the city of Revere to the northeast, East Boston is delimited by Chelsea...
Among the city's most dramatic stories of topographic change, South Boston more than doubled its landmass through extensive landfill operations that began in the early nineteenth century, extending to Dorchester Bay to the south, inner Boston Harbor to the east and north, and Fort Point...
Famous for its nineteenth-century slaughterhouses started at the time of the Revolution, Allston/Brighton, with its 4.5 square miles, is the largest of the Boston neighborhoods. While considered now one community, Allston lies to the north of Brighton Avenue and N. Beacon Street; the...
Rocks generated the name and early character of Roxbury. The three drumlins that define the Roxbury highlands are composed of a conglomerate called Roxbury puddingstone, a popular building material used throughout Boston in the late nineteenth century. These rocky highlands differentiated...
The three-decker and the streetcar symbolize the evolution of Dorchester as one of the larger neighborhoods in Boston. With more than five thousand surviving examples in Dorchester, the three-decker is the ubiquitous image of the development of this working-class periphery to the central...
