East Boston

East Boston, affectionately nicknamed "Eastie" by its residents, is one of Boston's most storied and distinctive neighborhoods. Annexed by the city of Boston in 1836, it is separated from the Boston neighborhoods of Charlestown and downtown Boston by Boston Harbor, with neighboring communities including Winthrop, Revere, and Chelsea. Surrounded by water and New England's biggest airport, East Boston sits directly across the harbor from downtown — a mix of single- and multi-family homes that evoke an older Boston, alongside a shoreline studded with modern apartment buildings. Once referred to as Boston's "Ellis Island," East Boston has long been a community known for its diverse population of immigrants. Today, it is home to a rich tapestry of cultures, a growing waterfront, and one of the busiest airports in the country.

Origins and Formation

The landmass that is East Boston today originally comprised five islands sited east of the confluence of the Malden, Mystic, and Charles rivers, across the harbor from the westerly city of Boston. These islands included Noddle's, Hog's, Governor's, Bird, and Apple. The town of East Boston was first developed on the largest of these, Noddle's, a noted source of timber and grazing land used for farming by English colonists throughout the eighteenth century.

Samuel Maverick was the first European settler on Noddle's Island in 1633, but it would be another two hundred years before major development and landfilling began. Connected to the city by ferry and to the mainland at Chelsea and Winthrop by bridges, the area that would become East Boston was, as late as 1832, occupied by only a single family. It was for a long time known as Noddle's Island — named after William Noddle — and also as Maverick's, and sometimes as William's Island.

By 1833, William H. Sumner, with partners Steven White and Francis J. Oliver, had bought up half of Noddle's acreage. Together, they founded the East Boston Company and continued to consolidate additional landholdings. By 1834, the East Boston Company had complete control over the island. In anticipation of population growth, the proprietors adopted a grid street plan, the first planned neighborhood in the city of Boston.

During this early period, the Boston Sugar Refinery was founded, which was the first manufacturing establishment in East Boston — and they are credited with the creation of white granulated sugar. By 1835, ten wharves had been built. In 1836, the city of Boston annexed East Boston, and new industries sprung up, including a sugar refinery, an iron forgery, a timber company, and numerous shipbuilders.

Shipbuilding and Industrial Growth

Unlike neighborhoods rooted in colonial times, East Boston was created in the 1830s by connecting five islands in Boston Harbor, and the neighborhood prospered as a major shipbuilding hub in the 19th century. The waterfront geography made the neighborhood a natural center for maritime industry, and it quickly attracted some of the most prominent craftsmen in the trade.

The best known of East Boston's industrialists was Donald McKay, an immigrant from Nova Scotia who opened a shipyard on Border Street in 1845. Over the next forty years, McKay produced clipper ships that set speed records around the world, hiring skilled workers from Canada's Maritime Provinces, Scotland, and Scandinavia. His ships included the Flying Cloud (1851) and the Sovereign of the Seas (1852), the latter of which once sailed at an amazing speed of 22 knots.

During the nineteenth century, East Boston had more Canadian-born residents than any other neighborhood in Boston. Growing from a community of roughly 1,300 in 1855 to about 9,000 by 1900, Canadians worked mainly in the shipyards or later as carpenters, machinists, pile drivers, and clerks.

With the completion of the first railroads to the mainland in 1875 and the first streetcar tunnel to downtown in 1901, East Boston became more closely connected to the rest of the city, and it soon became a convenient landing area for a new wave of immigrants from Russia, Italy, and Portugal. The neighborhood's population grew from 36,930 in 1890 to 62,377 in 1915. The newcomers found work in the railroad docks, coal yards, machine shops, and candy, shoe, textile, and garment factories that replaced the old wooden shipbuilding industry.

A subway tunnel connecting the neighborhood to the rest of the city opened in 1904 and was the first undersea tunnel of its kind in the United States. This tunnel would eventually become part of the MBTA Blue Line, a transit link that remains central to the neighborhood's connectivity today.

Immigration and Community Heritage

East Boston's identity has been inseparable from immigration since its earliest decades. East Boston, or Eastie, is an immigrant neighborhood to its core. For nearly two centuries, it has been home to waves of first-generation Americans: Canadians in the 1840s; Irish immigrants in the 1850s; Eastern European Jews and Italians in the 1890s — and by 1915, the neighborhood was majority Italian.

The Irish made up the largest foreign-born group in East Boston. Irish migration surged with the Great Famine of the 1840s, and the Census recorded more than 3,500 Irish-born residents in 1855. The majority worked as laborers who drained the swamps, built the wharves, and later moved goods on East Boston's bustling waterfront. John F. Kennedy's great-grandfather was one of many Irish people to immigrate to East Boston, and the Kennedy family lived there for some time.

Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe were among the first of the newer migrant groups to arrive in East Boston in the 1890s. Fleeing violent pogroms in the Russian empire and the crowded living conditions of the North and West Ends, Jews settled in the area north of Maverick Square and in Eagle Hill. By the early twentieth century, there was a thriving Jewish retail area of kosher markets, restaurants, and other businesses along Chelsea and Porter Streets. Russian Jews began arriving in East Boston in the 1890s, and by the 1910s, it had become one of the largest Jewish communities in New England.

From 1920 to 1954, East Boston was the site of the East Boston Immigration Station, which served as the regional immigration hub for Boston and the surrounding area. The influx of newcomers created a need for new family housing, and hundreds of triple deckers were constructed beginning in the 1880s. Older buildings that were converted to triple deckers in the late 19th and early 20th century are incredibly common in East Boston — known as "imposter triple deckers," they are East Boston's quintessential vernacular house type.

Colombians have been settling in East Boston since the 1980s and are now the neighborhood's second largest foreign-born group. Sometimes called "Little Colombia," East Boston hosts roughly three-quarters of the city's Colombian population, found from Maverick Square to Orient Heights. According to 2020 Census data analyzed by the Boston Planning & Development Agency, East Boston had the highest population of Hispanic or Latino residents in Boston, at 50.4% of the neighborhood, with a total population of 43,066.

East Boston is also home to the nation's first branch library, built in 1870.

Logan International Airport

In 1923, what would become Logan International Airport opened; it now takes up roughly half the land mass of East Boston. For many, East Boston is synonymous with Logan International Airport, New England's largest and one of the nation's busiest airports, with approximately 40.8 million passengers annually.

Governor's Island, Bird Island, and Apple Island became part of the expansion of Logan International Airport, gradually reshaping the geographic and social landscape of the neighborhood. Massport, which owns and operates Logan, has a rocky history with residents, as it razed homes and even a Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park to grow its operations. Residents must grapple with noise and pollution from planes taking off, but many say the port authority has now evolved into a major supporter of parks, youth programs and other community initiatives in the neighborhood.

In 1968, East Boston women known as the Maverick Street Mothers protested Logan Airport expansion, blocking trucks with their children in strollers — one of the earliest and most celebrated acts of community activism in the neighborhood's history.

Parks, Culture, and Modern East Boston

East Boston is a neighborhood in flux. Today it features several new luxury condominium projects and the ICA Watershed, the Institute of Contemporary Art's seasonal space in the Boston Harbor Shipyard & Marina.

Piers Park on Marginal Street is a 7-acre waterfront park with great views of Boston, a public sailing facility, and in the spring and summer months, weekly concerts and public events. With the long-awaited Phase II of the park opened in 2023, the park's size effectively doubled, featuring a renovated sailing center, a second exercise park, a new playground, a splash pad, and open space for playing ball.

The most iconic site in East Boston is the 35-foot statue of the Mother of God atop Orient Heights. The Madonna Queen of the Universe Shrine, built in 1954 from copper and bronze, is the national headquarters of the Don Orione Fathers, also known as the Sons of Divine Providence. The statue is a replica of one in Rome created by Jewish sculptor Arrigo Minerbi to thank the Don Orione Fathers who shielded him and his family from the Nazis during World War II.

East Boston is a big part of the city's focus on climate resilience, as many locals fear the neighborhood could be cut off from mainland Boston in a worst-case-scenario weather event. As the neighborhood with the least tree canopy in Boston, it is also receiving extra attention in the city's effort to plant more trees as a way to decrease the impacts of a warming climate.

Today, Latinos comprise more than half of Eastie's residents, the majority from Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala, giving the neighborhood one of the most vibrant and diverse culinary and cultural scenes in all of Boston. East Boston was once a center for shipbuilding, but it has always been a neighborhood of immigrants — and you can see the diversity in the neighborhood's many ethnic restaurants.