Living in Roxbury, Boston, MA

About Roxbury

Where it is

Roxbury sits at the center of Boston: Columbia Road separates it from Dorchester, Franklin Park is divided between Roxbury and Jamaica Plain along Walnut Avenue and Sigourney Street, and Ruggles station stands where Roxbury, the Fenway and Mission Hill meet. Melnea Cass Boulevard runs roughly over the line of the old Roxbury Canal.

Roxbury was settled on September 28, 1630. William Pynchon, one of the founders, left in 1636 with a group of the town's men to found Springfield. The town's houses were set on Roxbury puddingstone, a conglomerate quarried for foundations. Several 18th-century buildings survive: Governor William Shirley built the Shirley-Eustis House as a summer house between 1747 and 1751, and the Dillaway-Thomas House, built as a parsonage about 1750, served as a Continental Army headquarters during the Siege of Boston in 1775. Roxbury became a city in 1846, part of it was set off as the town of West Roxbury in 1851, and Boston annexed the rest on January 5, 1868.

Row houses and multi-family buildings followed trolley service, which began in 1887, and the Washington Street Elevated reached Dudley Square, now Nubian Square, on June 10, 1901. The building stock shows each period. On Fort Hill, around Highland Park, Greek Revival and Italianate houses that predate the Civil War stand among triple-deckers and row houses, below an 1869 standpipe tower built for Roxbury's water system. The Moreland Street district was built up between about 1840 and 1920 with Second Empire, Italianate and Queen Anne houses, and in Lower Roxbury the Tremont Improvement Company built row houses on filled salt marsh around what became Frederick Douglass Square in 1917.

The last train ran on the Washington Street Elevated on April 30, 1987, and the Orange Line moved to the Southwest Corridor, with new stations at Ruggles and Roxbury Crossing opening on May 4. Silver Line buses began running on Washington Street on July 20, 2002. The Boston Planning & Development Agency started PLAN: Dudley Square in 2016 to guide public and vacant parcels around the square, and its board approved the plan's development guidelines on July 11, 2019. On December 19, 2019, the city's Public Improvement Commission renamed Dudley Square as Nubian Square, and in 2022 the city designated the Highland Park Architectural Conservation District, about 170 acres of steep, puddingstone-studded land also called Roxbury Highlands or Fort Hill.

Homes in Roxbury

The Boston Planning Department describes Roxbury's housing as historic brick row houses and Boston's traditional triple-deckers; Fort Hill adds Greek Revival, Italianate and later Victorian houses, and Cedar Street has a run of 1871 Second Empire row houses. The Boston Planning & Development Agency's tabulation of the 2016-2020 American Community Survey counts 20,681 occupied housing units in Roxbury, 26.1% of them owner-occupied, compared with 35.3% citywide.