Living in South Boston, Boston, MA

About South Boston

Where it is

South Boston lies south and east of Fort Point Channel, along Dorchester Bay, with Castle Island beside City Point and Andrew station on its west side. The Seaport, or South Boston Waterfront, north of the residential streets is treated by the city's planners as a separate neighborhood.

South Boston was Dorchester Neck, a narrow peninsula belonging to the town of Dorchester. On the night of March 4, 1776, Continental troops fortified Dorchester Heights, and the British evacuated Boston on March 17. Boston annexed the peninsula in 1804, bridges over Fort Point Channel tied it to downtown, and landfill widened its connection to the mainland. In 1822 land on the peninsula was set aside for public institutions, including a jail and an almshouse; after they moved, East Broadway was extended to the end of the peninsula in 1854 and 4.5 acres became Independence Square.

The streets climb to Dorchester Heights, the highest area of South Boston. Near the top of Telegraph Hill, an 1849 reservoir was later filled and replaced by South Boston High School in 1901, and the rest of the summit was laid out in the 1850s as Thomas Park, now centered on a 115-foot marble monument completed in 1902. Mansard and brick row houses, some with marble and sandstone fronts, went up around Independence Square in the fifteen years after the Civil War. At City Point the granite Fort Independence, built between 1833 and 1848, stands on Castle Island, which the city joined to the mainland by filling the flats between 1890 and the 1920s; Day Boulevard now runs past Pleasure Bay, M Street Beach and Carson Beach.

Recent city planning has looked at the neighborhood's edges. The Boston Planning & Development Agency completed PLAN: South Boston Dorchester Avenue in December 2016, with the projects reviewed under it mostly on Dorchester Avenue, Old Colony Avenue and nearby streets, and a follow-up transportation plan was finalized in 2021. To the north, the waterfront along Fort Point Channel and Boston Harbor was the focus of the city's 1,000-acre Innovation District plan announced in 2010, and the city's research tables report it as the separate South Boston Waterfront neighborhood.

Homes in South Boston

South Boston's housing includes mansard and brick row houses from the 1860s and 1870s around Independence Square and along East Broadway, and triple-deckers, which here were mostly built with flat roofs. The Boston Housing Authority's Mary Ellen McCormack (1936) and Old Colony (1941) developments are in the neighborhood, and the second phase of Old Colony's redevelopment was completed in 2014. The Boston Planning & Development Agency's tabulation of the 2016-2020 American Community Survey counts 17,109 occupied housing units, 43.4% of them owner-occupied, compared with 35.3% citywide.