Living in Hyde Park, Boston, MA

About Hyde Park

Where it is

Hyde Park is Boston's southernmost neighborhood. The George Wright Golf Course lies partly in Hyde Park and partly in Roslindale, the Stony Brook Reservation runs south from West Roxbury to Mother Brook in Hyde Park, and the city's open space plan places Hyde Park's eastern sections next to Mattapan. In Readville it meets Milton to the south and Dedham to the west. Hyde Park Avenue and the Amtrak and MBTA tracks cross the neighborhood, with most of its open space to their west.

Hyde Park was assembled from the edges of three older towns: Grew's Woods in Dorchester, Fairmount in Milton and Readville in Dedham. Mother Brook, ordered dug in 1639 to divert Charles River water to the Neponset, powered mills in what is now Readville, which was called Dedham Low Plains until 1847, when it was renamed for James Read of the Dedham Manufacturing Company. Henry Grew settled there in 1847, rail lines extended from Boston in the 1850s, and in 1856 Alpheus P. Blake's Fairmount Land Company and Twenty Associates bought 100 acres and began building houses. On April 22, 1868, the Town of Hyde Park was incorporated in Norfolk County from about 1,300 acres of Dorchester, 800 of Dedham and 700 of Milton. Its voters chose to join Boston in 1912.

Cleary Square and Logan Square frame the central business district, and the Hyde Park Branch Library, which opened in its present building in September 1899 and became a Boston Public Library branch at annexation, is the only branch that began as a town library. Fairmount Hill, on a hillside above the Neponset River, keeps late-19th- and early-20th-century houses in Italianate, Gothic Revival and Victorian styles. Readville was industrial: Camp Meigs trained Union regiments there from 1862 to 1865, including the 54th Massachusetts; the Readville Trotting Park followed on the site until 1937; the B.F. Sturtevant Company had a 20-acre plant employing 1,500 people by 1912; and the New Haven Railroad's locomotive and car shops ran until 1960.

Boston's 2008-2014 open space plan counted single-family homes as 48% of Hyde Park's housing units and two-family homes as 24%, and found most of its open space west of Hyde Park Avenue and the rail line; the state Department of Conservation and Recreation held 470 acres in the neighborhood, mainly in the Stony Brook and Neponset River reservations. A rezoning begun in April 2008 was approved by the Boston Zoning Commission in February 2012. Cleary Square is now the subject of a Squares + Streets small area plan: the Planning Department released a draft plan and zoning map on March 17, 2026, followed by a revised draft.

Homes in Hyde Park

Hyde Park's housing is mainly single-family and two-family homes: Boston's 2008-2014 open space plan put single-family homes at 48% of units and two-family homes at 24%, nearly three-quarters together. Fairmount Hill keeps houses in late-19th- and early-20th-century styles, including Italianate, Gothic Revival and Victorian. The Boston Planning & Development Agency's tabulation of the 2016-2020 American Community Survey counts 59.5% of occupied units as owner-occupied (7,893 units), compared with 35.3% citywide.