Living in Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA

About Jamaica Plain

Where it is

Jamaica Plain, originally part of Roxbury, meets Roxbury at Egleston Square. Its sections run from Pondside, by Jamaica Pond and the Jamaicaway, and Parkside, beside Franklin Park, south to Forest Hills, near the Arnold Arboretum and Forest Hills Cemetery.

Settlement south of Parker Hill began shortly after 1630, when Boston and Roxbury were founded, and the name Jamaica first appears on maps in the late 1650s. In 1676 John Ruggles and Hugh Thomas gave land for the community's first school, later the Eliot School. From 1795 to 1886, the Jamaica Pond Aqueduct Corporation supplied water from the pond to Boston, Roxbury and later West Roxbury. The Boston and Providence Rail Road arrived in 1834, and in 1851 estate owners here helped split from Roxbury to form the town of West Roxbury, which voted to join Boston in 1873; annexation took effect in 1874. Breweries opened too: Highland Spring on Heath Street from 1867 and Haffenreffer, near Boylston and Amory Streets, from 1871 until 1964.

Triple-deckers first appeared in the 1870s and spread quickly in the 1890s. Larger houses went up on former estates: Sumner Hill on the Greenough land, Parley Vale and Robinwood Avenue in the 1880s, and Moss Hill and Woodland Road on Bowditch family land in the 1890s. By the early 20th century most buildable lots were filled. Much of the neighborhood's edge is parkland in Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace: Olmsted Park and Jamaica Pond along the Jamaicaway, the Arnold Arboretum and the Arborway in the south, and Franklin Park beside the Parkside section; the 1848 Forest Hills Cemetery is in the Forest Hills section.

In 1969 Governor Francis Sargent cancelled a planned extension of I-95 through the area after community opposition. The cleared land became the Southwest Corridor: the Orange Line moved from the elevated Washington Street line into a below-grade cut in May 1987, and the park above it was completed in 1990. On March 2, 2017, the Boston Planning & Development Agency board adopted PLAN: JP/ROX, guidelines for about 250 acres between Forest Hills, Egleston Square and Jackson Square, generally bounded by Washington Street, Columbus Avenue and Amory Street, covering housing, jobs, urban design and transportation.

Homes in Jamaica Plain

Jamaica Plain's housing mixes wood-frame triple-deckers, built from the 1870s and especially in the 1890s, with late-19th-century single-family houses on former estates such as Sumner Hill and Moss Hill. The Boston Planning & Development Agency's tabulation of the 2016-2020 American Community Survey counts 18,129 occupied housing units in the neighborhood, 45.6% of them owner-occupied, compared with 35.3% citywide.