Having to leave Boston, frustrated

[missionhill]

Originally Posted by Whatsnext75

Wow I had no idea the north end used to be Jewish...and again I've lived here all my life. So calm down...i think most people think of the north end as being Italian.

The North End was very Irish when JFK's father Joe was growing up in the 1880s and 90s (according to Doris Kearns Goodwin's history of the family.) Italians came later after the Irish moved to better, newer housing. Interestingly (or not) most of the housing in the North End you see today is late 19th century/early 20th century tenement buildings. Maybe those were built for incoming Italians, who stayed put in the North End for generations. The Irish must have lived in the older brick and wooden houses left over from the North End's past as a more elite neighborhood (before the Revolution.) Few of those remain other than Paul Revere's. Developers built the same 4-story brick tenements in the West End and up the back (north) slope of Beacon Hill. The West End was a mix but had a number of Jews, as did Beacon Hill (north slope) where there's still a synagogue on Phillips St. The big Jewish enclave around 1900 was Chelsea but by 1920 the Jews had moved to Roxbury and Dorchester.

[Whatsnext75]

Interesting. Well now it's mostly just a mix of high income people living in the north end. Maybe still some old people.