Living in West Roxbury, Boston, MA

About West Roxbury

Where it is

West Roxbury is the southwest corner of Boston: Roslindale and Jamaica Plain lie to the northeast, Chestnut Hill and Brookline to the north, Newton to the northwest, Dedham and Needham to the southwest, and Hyde Park to the southeast; VFW Parkway runs along its western side.

West Roxbury was settled in 1630 as farmland, part of the town of Roxbury, and the Westerly Burying Ground on Centre Street dates to 1683. In 1841 George and Sophia Ripley founded Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, at the Ellis Farm on what is now Baker Street; Nathaniel Hawthorne's stay there became The Blithedale Romance. The Boston and Providence Railroad opened its West Roxbury Branch from Forest Hills to Dedham in 1849, and on May 24, 1851, West Roxbury, then including Jamaica Plain, was incorporated as a separate town. It became part of Boston on January 5, 1874.

Centre Street is the spine of the neighborhood and its business district, with the Theodore Parker Church, a Boston Landmark whose present building dates from 1900, and the Westerly Burying Ground along it. Bellevue Hill, bounded roughly by LaGrange Street, Centre Street and the West Roxbury Parkway, rises to 330 feet, the highest natural point in Boston and Suffolk County, and carries the Bellevue Standpipe. In 1906 the New Haven Railroad extended the branch from West Roxbury to Needham Junction, the route of today's Needham Line.

Open land frames the streets. Boston's 2008-2014 Open Space Plan counted 645 acres of protected open space in West Roxbury, among them the 105-acre Millennium Park, built on the former Gardner Street landfill with material excavated for the Big Dig and opened on December 7, 2000, and Allandale Woods, which the plan called the city's largest urban wild. The 616-acre Stony Brook Reservation runs south from Washington Street in West Roxbury into Hyde Park, and Brook Farm, where the state bought 148 acres of the original land in 1988, is operated by DCR as a historic site.

Homes in West Roxbury

West Roxbury is mostly single-family homes, with some two-family houses. Boston's 2008-2014 Open Space Plan put single-family homes at about 55% of year-round housing units and noted that over three-quarters of units were built after 1920. The Boston Planning & Development Agency's tabulation of the 2016-2020 American Community Survey counts 13,868 occupied housing units, 61.7% of them owner-occupied, compared with 35.3% citywide.