Living in Dorchester, Boston, MA

About Dorchester

Where it is

Dorchester is bordered by South Boston, the South End, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain and Hyde Park; the Neponset River separates it from Quincy and Milton, and Dorchester Bay lies to the east. It is often divided into North Dorchester, the part north of Quincy, East and Freeport Streets, and South Dorchester.

Settlers who came on the Mary and John landed at Columbia Point in June 1630 and founded Dorchester months before Boston. The town held what is described as the first town meeting in what became the United States on October 8, 1633, buried its dead in the North Burying Ground at today's Uphams Corner from 1634, and opened the Mather School in 1639. Israel Stoughton built a grist mill on the Neponset River in 1634, and from 1765 chocolate was refined at Lower Mills, where the Walter Baker company made it until 1965. Boston took Dorchester in pieces, starting with Dorchester Neck (now South Boston) in 1804, and annexed the rest of the town in 1870.

Dorchester grew as a streetcar suburb. The Old Colony Railroad crossed it from 1845, Dorchester Avenue carried a horse-drawn streetcar, and by 1890 the streetcar and the three-decker had come together here, with three-deckers filling the land between the old village centers. Those centers are still the neighborhood's commercial squares: Uphams Corner and Bowdoin/Geneva in the north; Fields Corner, Codman Square, Peabody Square at Ashmont, Adams Village and Lower Mills to the south. The Red Line's Dorchester stations opened in 1927 and 1928, from Columbia (now JFK/UMass) through Savin Hill, Fields Corner and Shawmut to Ashmont.

Columbia Point, where the first settlers landed, now holds UMass Boston, which moved there in 1974, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, dedicated in 1979, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute and the Massachusetts Archives. The Fairmount Line gained new Dorchester stations at Talbot Avenue in November 2012 and Four Corners/Geneva in July 2013, and Pope John Paul II Park opened in 2001 on a former drive-in and dump along the Neponset. In May 2024 the Boston Planning Department began a Squares + Streets plan for Fields Corner, part of a citywide program covering housing, public space, small businesses and transportation in neighborhood centers; the department's project page showed it still in progress, with no adoption date.

Homes in Dorchester

Dorchester's housing includes single-family, two-family and three-family houses and condominiums. Three-decker apartment buildings went up in large numbers alongside the streetcar lines from around 1890, and Victorian houses fill hills such as Savin Hill, where lots were sold after the Civil War. The Boston Planning & Development Agency's tabulation of the 2016-2020 American Community Survey counts 44,979 occupied housing units, 37.3% of them owner-occupied, compared with 35.3% citywide.