Creating Communities

People settle down and move while making communities in ingenious ways. Finding the cultural context and community stories in urban atlases often means reading them slightly against the grain. Over decades, the maps can show how people breathed life into the city.

RADIATING FROM JOY STREET: AFRICAN MEETING HOUSE

You might not guess just from looking at this 1883 Bromley atlas, but the brick building tucked away at 4 Smith Court off of Joy Street was built by Black artisans in 1806. And while the building is labelled (“Colored Baptist Church,” A) this name only captures one moment in this building’s history. This was the site of the country’s first African Meeting House, which brought together people of all backgrounds and became a gathering place for abolitionists before the Civil War. By 1883, when this atlas was published, the country was emerging from a period of intense activity which saw war and emancipation. The church still served as a meetinghouse for Black Bostonians in a part of Beacon Hill which the African American community had made into an epicenter of public engagement.

The atlases trace the building and movement of communities in late nineteenth century Boston. As changes in employment, transportation, and land values shifted the possibilities and pressures of residential geography, the centers of gravity for some communities migrated from historic core neighborhoods to more peripheral areas. At the tail end of the 1880s, some members of Beacon Hill’s Black community had begun moving to the South End.

In the below crop the (B the African Meetinghouse building) was a community center in the form of a synagogue, reflecting Jewish migration to Beacon Hill by the end of the century.

A change in the patterns of development is visible by comparing different years of atlases. Along Joy Street and Smith Court, there are fewer yellow buildings with an “X” cross—which indicated wooden stables or sheds—and an increase in brick row houses denoted by pink.

In 1972, the Museum of Afro-American History acquired the building and in 2004, restored it to its 1855 interior. Transcending the maps, a landmark of extraordinary endeavor radiates outward from Joy Street.

DRAWING AND ERASING LINES: ROXBURY CROSSING

Roxbury was annexed to Boston in 1868. Urban atlases from those years show a sparsely populated area to the west of Tremont Street heading into the core of present-day Nubian Square. Etching in and erasing streets created outlines for neighborhood blocks in this area, visible in the symbolic language of the atlases through dashed lines or written notes, as seen at the top of the page.

FILLING THE PAGE

There is more to this drawing process than pencil marks. Who designs and defines a neighborhood? The small scale of the atlases provide insight into this question of community formation. In this 1885 Sanborn plate, there are a few more wooden structures emerging on the blank sheet, a sewer covered by a street and several businesses, but there is not yet a discernible neighborhood. One interesting community structure— (A a First Dutch Baptist Church)—sits among the activity. Around the church, streets are being laid out, with a block starting to form that will eventually become a dense residential area.

Roxbury came into its own as a historically Black neighborhood spurred on by the arrival of Southern Blacks to Boston during the Great Migration, as well as pressures from urban development and racist exclusion, which limited Black residents to a few limited choices of neighborhood locales.

Further attempts to redefine the neighborhood from outside are evident in the 1971 plan of Campus High School Redevelopment when Roxbury was marked for urban renewal programs that dramatically shaped much of Boston’s post-war urban fabric—and often disrupted the textures of communities that had previously coalesced in the sites marked for large-scale clearance.

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In the 1915 Bromley the same building is a (B synagogue) and it anchors a small, pyramid-shaped block containing a fire house, a bath house, and several wooden residences. By 1931, while the block’s overall density remained largely the same, the occupant of this building became an (C African Methodist Episcopalian church).

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IMMIGRANT ICONS OF A WORKING CLASS NEIGHBORHOOD

The borders of a neighborhood might not change dramatically over a long period. Instead, transformation occurs at the scale of individual people and families as they repurpose urban space to strengthen communal ties, start businesses, establish social networks, and weave patterns of daily life.

This portion of the South Cove neighborhood, which was filled in from salt flats in the 1830s, became a hub of Syrian, Greek, Irish and Chinese communities at the turn of the century before eventually consolidating into what we now know as Chinatown. Looking at details in South Cove provides clues as to how different immigrant communities left their mark on the working class neighborhood.

The area has a strong block appearance which defines the neighborhood as a dense grid with commercial structures on ground floors, and residences above.

On the far left there is a (Syrian Greek Orthodox Church) (”G. O. Ch.”), just a few buildings farther down from the public playground. (The Denison House), which was part of the College Settlement Movement, a charitable reform effort to help poor and immigrant communities, was located on 93 Tyler Street.

On the block to the left of the plate, above Tyler Street, a playground has appeared next to a (municipal building), which featured a branch library on the first floor. In the middle section, there are gray X’s penciled in by the owner of this copy of the atlas, indicating buildings which had been demolished. Nearby, at 68 Hudson Street across from the Quincy School, is a Syrian Roman Catholic Church.

By the 1980s, economic investment following urban renewal stimulated efforts to visually represent the Chinese heritage of the neighborhood. In 1982, Taiwan donated the China Trade Gate, designed by David Judelson, to span Beach and Hudson Streets. This 1989 sketch by the Boston Redevelopment Authority marks certain buildings in the area as simply “Chinese” among several other—more nuanced—Western styles such as “High Victorian Gothic” or “Greek revivalist,” which refers to classical architecture rather than the Greek immigrant community.