Living in Union Hill, Worcester, MA

About Union Hill

Where it is

Union Hill has no official city boundary. Wikipedia lists it as an East Side neighborhood on the hill anchored by Grafton Street and Providence Street in southeastern Worcester, and names Massasoit Road as spanning Union Hill, Grafton Hill and Broadmeadow Brook; its documented landmarks stand on Providence Street (numbers 32 and 81) and Chapin Street.

Union Hill is one of the hills Worcester grew up onto in the 19th century. Wikipedia counts it, under its old name Sagatabscot, among the seven hills the city government lists, and notes that it is also called Grafton Hill. The Massachusetts Historical Commission's survey of Worcester records that between 1830 and 1870 the town spread east up Chandler, Oak and Union Hills, and that Worcester Academy operated in town until its relocation to Union Hill. That move came in 1869, when Isaac Davis, the academy's first president, bought the abandoned Dale General Hospital on Providence Street, a building designed by Elbridge Boyden in 1852 for a medical school and used as a Civil War military hospital, and gave it to the school as Davis Hall.

The campus filled in over the next two decades. The academy's National Register nomination calls Walker Hall (1889, Fuller & Delano) the first substantial building designed for the school on its Union Hill campus; Adams and Dexter Halls followed in 1892 and Kingsley Laboratories (Barker & Nourse) in 1897, and the campus was listed on the National Register as the Worcester Academy Historic District in 1980. Davis Hall lost a tower in the 1938 hurricane and was demolished in 1965. Down Providence Street, at number 32, the Shaarai Torah congregation opened a Classical Revival synagogue designed by Edwin T. Chapin on September 14, 1906. The survey behind Worcester's 1980 Multiple Resource Area nomination names Union Hill among the places where whole new neighborhoods of three-deckers were built in the period it dates 1890 to 1950.

In August 2015 the city announced the Union Hill Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative, committing $4 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds to housing rehabilitation and code enforcement, new sidewalks, road resurfacing and school health partnerships, with Oak Hill Community Development Corporation, Habitat for Humanity, Worcester Academy and HUD as partners. The city outlined the program at a press conference on August 17, 2015, at Worcester Academy's Alumni House, 51 Providence Street, and in November 2015 it received the National Community Development Association's Community Development Achievement Award. The academy's Walker Hall hosted a Union Hill neighborhood meeting on the city's calendar in June 2025.

Homes in Union Hill

The survey for Worcester's 1977-78 Multiple Resource Area National Register nomination names Union Hill among the places where whole new neighborhoods of three-deckers were built, in the period it dates 1890 to 1950; it did not nominate individual three-deckers because of their number. Housing and code enforcement was one of the three focus areas of the city's 2015 Union Hill initiative, whose projects included housing rehabs. No published count of housing types or ownership for Union Hill alone, with a dated source and a stated boundary, was found.