The West End That Was

In the spring of nineteen fifty-eight, the Boston Redevelopment Authority began demolishing the West End. It did not finish for two years. When it was done, forty-eight acres of central Boston had been cleared. Seventy-five hundred people had been displaced, most of them Italian and Jewish and Eastern European families who had been in the neighborhood for three generations, whose children went to the same schools their parents had attended, whose social world was built block by block around a geography that no longer existed.

The official language was slum clearance. The West End, in the official description, was a blighted area where deteriorated housing and overcrowding required intervention. A sociologist named Herbert Gans decided to check this description against reality. He moved into the neighborhood before demolition began, lived there, observed what he saw, and wrote a book about it. The book was called The Urban Villagers. It documented in precise detail what was actually there: a functional, dense, working-class neighborhood where people knew their neighbors, where the streets were safe at night, where an informal economy of mutual support had been built over decades. It was not a slum. It was a community without the political power to call itself anything else.

Gans's book, published in nineteen sixty-two, became one of the foundational texts of American urban sociology. It helped establish the concept that urban neighborhoods have social value that does not appear in a housing inspection report. The people who had actually lived in the West End did not need a book to tell them what had been taken.

What the West End case changed was every other ethnic neighborhood in Boston. Charlestown, the South End, the North End, Chinatown, watching what happened to the West End, organized. Community boards, zoning fights, political networks built specifically to resist the next plan. The West End was destroyed. Its destruction taught the city's other neighborhoods how to survive.