Talk:West End, Boston, Massachusetts

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Just added some citations to the page. All sources can be found either at Boston's Central library or at the West End museum. There are still many things that could use fact-checking or citations. Sbacle 15:55, 17 July 2007 (UTC)


Citation of Citysquares.com is a mistake. The site has no page for the West End and is merely a commercial portal.

Several other citations would be far more useful, including these --

Juris A. Grauds, Urban Renewal in New Haven and Boston (Current Issues in Cities and Suburbs, Northeastern University, November 23, 2005, http://www.curp.neu.edu/pdfs/Grauds_Urban_Renewal_Boston_NewHaven.pdf). This publicly available article provides aerial photos showing the West End just before and just after demolition in the late 1950s.

Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (1962, Free Press). Nathan P. Glazer, review, "West End Story" (N.Y. Review of Books 1:1, 1963, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13760). The publicly available review describes the first major exploration of the social dimensions of the West End Project, by a now notable sociologist who lived in the West End before its demolition.

Thomas H. O'Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950-1970 (1993, Northeastern University Press). J. Charles Swift, review, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=10875851783912 (1995). This is a totally unapologetic history of the West End project from the view of real estate developers.

Monica Collins, Born Again (Boston Globe, August 7, 2005, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/08/07/born_again/). This represents a "mea culpa" from the Globe, 50 years overdue. It makes no direct mention of the Globe's shilling for the West End Project in the 1950s and 1960s, including a 1965 hagiography of its latter-day saint, Ed Logue, in the Sunday magazine.

E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing (2003, St. Augustine's Press). A diatribe accusing Philadelphia, Boston and other real estate developers in the 1930s through the 1950s of harboring racial prejudice. We are indeed shocked.

Sean M. Fisher and Carolyn Hughes, Editors, The Last Tenement: Confronting Community and Urban Renewal in Boston's West End (1992, Bostonian Society). Another late-arriving package mixing useful information and false sentiment.


Thank you for this information it seems you know quite a bit about the area youo should hop on board and make this a good article. I will take your information and work on a rebuild. Thanks again. Markco1 04:07, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

  • Made a stab at a rebuild hope it lives up to it's history Markco1 22:06, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Improving the page

I just added a more info. There are a few things I think would really add to the page.

  • Historical photos of the west end before renewal,
  • map of the street layout before renewal,
  • Statistical info on the current demographics of the west end: who lives there, what types of businesses are there, etc.
  • Important people from the west end: I've already added info about Lomasney. Leonard Nimoy is from the West end but I don't have a good citation for it. Anyone else?

I was unable to find pictures specifically of the old West End on Wiki. There are some maps of the street layout of all of old Boston, but nothing specific to the West End. I think it would be great to have some before and after pictures of the neighborhood as a whole. There are some great ones in the books listed as sources (almost all of which can be found at the Boston Public Library). I'm sure there are at least some good ones with expired copyrights. Nayone with a scanner want to give it a go?Sbacle 22:15, 26 July 2007 (UTC)