Living in East Boston, Boston, MA

About East Boston

Where it is

East Boston lies across Boston Harbor from downtown and Charlestown and borders Winthrop, Revere and Chelsea. Logan International Airport lies mainly in East Boston, with part of the airfield in Winthrop.

East Boston was built on Noddle's Island, the largest of five islands (with Hog, Governor's, Bird and Apple) that landfill had joined into one landmass, including the ground under Logan Airport, by the 1940s. The island was farmed through the 1700s. By 1833 William H. Sumner, with Steven White and Francis J. Oliver, had bought up half of it, and by 1834 their East Boston Company controlled the island and laid it out on a grid of streets, the first planned neighborhood in Boston. Donald McKay opened his shipyard on Border Street in 1845, and his clipper Flying Cloud (1851) twice sailed from New York to San Francisco in 89 days. Shipbuilding became the mainstay of the local economy.

The oldest streets are on Jeffries Point, at the southern end facing downtown, where Belmont Square (now Brophy Memorial Park) on Camp Hill survives from the original plan and is edged by brick bowfront houses built around 1847 to 1852. Eagle Hill has a National Register historic district of houses built roughly between 1834 and 1900. Maverick Square and Central Square are the main commercial areas. Transportation reshaped the neighborhood through the 20th century: the East Boston streetcar tunnel, now the Blue Line, opened in 1904 as the first underwater tunnel in North America; the airfield that became Logan opened on September 8, 1923; and rows of houses were cleared for the Sumner Tunnel (opened June 30, 1934) and the Callahan Tunnel (1961). The Ted Williams Tunnel brought I-90 to East Boston in 1995.

Recent planning has covered both the established neighborhood and its largest open site. The Boston Planning & Development Agency board adopted PLAN: East Boston on January 18, 2024, after work that began in 2018; it covers roughly two square miles, excluding Logan Airport and the Suffolk Downs site, and the zoning amendments to Article 53 that carry it out were adopted by the Boston Zoning Commission on April 24, 2024. At the former Suffolk Downs racetrack, whose last day of live racing was June 30, 2019, the agency approved in September 2020 a redevelopment of the 161-acre site in East Boston and Revere with 10,000 housing units and almost three million square feet of office and retail space. On the waterfront, Massport opened a 4.5-acre second phase of Piers Park in December 2023.

Homes in East Boston

East Boston's housing includes Greek Revival brick bowfront houses of about 1847 to 1852 on Belmont Square, Greek Revival, Italianate and mansard double houses on Jeffries Point (where most residential building came between 1840 and 1890), and Italianate, Second Empire and Renaissance Revival houses in the Eagle Hill historic district. The Boston Planning & Development Agency's tabulation of the 2016-2020 American Community Survey counts 17,123 occupied housing units, 25.6% of them owner-occupied and 74.4% renter-occupied.