Mission Hill is a neighborhood of approximately 18,000 people in Boston, Massachusetts roughly bounded by Columbus Avenue and Roxbury to the south, Longwood Avenue to the east, and Riverway/Jamaica Way and the town of Brookline and the Boston neighborhood Jamaica Plain to the northwest and southwest respectively. It is served by the MBTA Green Line E Branch and the Orange Line and is within walking distance to the Museum of Fine Arts and includes much of the Longwood Medical and Academic Area. Due to these adjacenies, the neighborhood is often struggling with institutional growth taking residential buildings and occupying storefront commerical space but recent years has seen complete makeover with new retail, resturants and residential development giving the neighborhood a stronger political voice and identity.
Mission Hill is an architectural landmark district with a combination of freestanding houses built by early wealthy landowners, blocks of traditional brick rowhouses, and many triple deckers. Many are are condominiums, but there are also some single-family homes. Up until the late 19th century, much of the area was an orchard and puddingstone quarry with large swaths owned by merchants Franklin G. Dexter, Warren Fisher and Fredrick Ames. By the early 1900's though, the hill was covered in triple-deckers. The neighborhood was also home to most of the breweries in Boston, many of which are now being converted into loft condominiums.
The neighborhood has two main commercial streets: Tremont Street (running north and south) and Huntington Ave. (running east and west). Both have several small restaurants and shops. Brigham Circle, located at the corner of Tremont and Huntington is the commerical center of the neighborhood, with a grocery and drug store, bistros and banks. Brigham Circle is one of the small commerical centers that form a ring around downtown Boston along with Dudley Square, Coolidge Corner, and Packards Corner that along with others were the first streetcar suburbs of Boston.
At the top of the hill is New England Baptist Hospital and Parker Hill Playground, which is also the highest point in the city where you can observe the panoramic view of downtown Boston, Boston Harbor, and the Blue Hills. Along Tremont Street is Mission Church, officially named the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, built in 1871 of locally quarried Roxbury puddingstone. Nearby on Tremont Street is the newly restored Parker Hill Library, the neighborhood branch of the Boston Public Library and designed by architect Ralph Adams Cram in 1929.
The neighborhood was once home to large numbers of families of German and Irish decent, including Boston mayor and Massachusetts governor Maurice Tobin until the combined effects of urban renewal, white flight and institutional growth forced many to flee the neighborhood. In the early 1960's the Boston Redevelopment Authority razed several homes in the Triangle District section of the neighborhood to make way for new residential towers. In the late 1960's, Harvard University bought the wood frame and brick houses along Francis, Fenwood, St. Alban's, Kempton Streets, and part of Huntington Avenue, and announced plans to evict the families living there and to demolish the buildings. Most buildings were demolished, replaced with Mission Park residential complex of towers and townhomes in 1978 after neighborhood residents organized the Roxbury Tenants of Harvard Association and forced Harvard to rebuild. The remaining original buildings are currently rentals, all owned by Harvard with plans to demolish them to make way for further institutional growth.
By the 1980's, the area was deemed dangerous and many of the families had moved away. The 1989 incident involving Charles Stuart further intensified this view due to the negative (but ultimately inaccurate) media coverage. With property values low, many of the homes were bought by absentee landlords and converted into rental housing. The inexpensive rents brought many students from nearby colleges and universities, especially MassArt and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, which has a large studio building in the neighborhood. The Mission Hill Artists Collective hosts Open Studios in the fall of each year.
As the neighborhood became more desirable and trendy and past fears faded by the mid-1990's, the area began a massive change as homeowners moved into newly converted condominiums to take advantage of the fanastic views of the city and proximity to the Longwood Medical Area and downtown Boston. Today, the neighborhood is briskly gentiyfying and diversifying in favor of a mix of new luxury condominums and lofts, triple-deckers converted to condominums, surviving student rental units, newly rebuilt public housing, and strong remnants of long-time residents. Racially, Mission Hill is the most diverse in the city, with an balance of white, Asian, Hispanic and African-Americans.
While properly called Mission Hill and an offical neighborhood in Boston, the area is also known as Parker Hill and Roxbury Crossing. Both of these terms actually refer to sections of Mission Hill, along with Triangle District, Back of The Hill and Calumet Square.
|
