The West Ender comes out four times a year. In the current issue, there are 40 notes and letters from former West Enders. Some send in old snapshots. Others reminisce lovingly about the old days in the neighborhood.
There’s a lesson here for architects and city planners. What is it that makes the West End so intensely remembered?
First, though, some background. The old West End was a neighborhood located roughly between Cambridge Street and North Station, surrounding Massachusetts General Hospital. There were perhaps 11,000 residents (though sources vary on the number). They were mostly a mix of first- and second-generation, low-income immigrants: Italian, Irish, Polish, Jewish, others.
In the 1950s, cities like Boston were worried about the flight of the middle and upper classes to the suburbs. So-called urban renewal became a way to get rid of poor people, in the hope of attracting the middle class and its money back to the city. The city took the land, demolished 900 buildings, and turned most of the site over to a developer who built a group of bland apartment blocks called Charles River Park. New streets and buildings were given Yankee names - Whittier, Longfellow - as if to erase the memory of the former diverse population.
A couple of small patches endured for a few more years, but by the end of 1960 the West End as a neighborhood was only a memory. It’s a memory, though, that refuses to die. Last October, a West End dance party was held in Malden. Last month, former residents returned for the annual West End Mass, held at St. Joseph’s Church, one of the half dozen or so buildings to survive the demolition.
On Saturdays, a group of West Enders meet at a mall in the suburbs, where they socialize and talk about their old lives. And in the West End Museum at 150 Staniford St., you can see horrifying film footage of the demolition - the area looks like a bombed-out war zone - or watch videos of oral histories.
