The West End Civic Association (WECA) selected The West End Museum as its 2019 donation recipient. This terrific neighborhood Museum enhances the West End and is dedicated to the collection, preservation and interpretation of the history and culture of the West End of Boston. This hidden gem is in West End Place, with its entrance on Lomasney Street.
“The Last Tenement” permanent exhibition, originally set up in 1992 at the Old State House by the Bostonian Society through a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was relocated to the Museum in 2006. It is housed in its own dedicated 1,100 square foot space. The exhibit documents the history of the West End during the immigrant era from 1850 to 1958 . Visitors view the neighborhood’s topographical history, architecture, and nineteenth-century blossoming as a desirable residential area. They see how the West End evolved into a densely populated urban district of working-class immigrants forming a small community – including over 20 ethnic backgrounds – of middle-class professionals and students.
The West End is recognized nationally to generations of students of urban planning and sociology as a textbook example of negative results from the 1950s federal <https://thewestendmuseum.org/wordpress/history-of-the-west-end/urban-renewa l/> urban renewal program. The lesson learned from the razing of Boston’s West End have instructed city planners and spurred neighborhood activists to cope more successfully with urban problems.
Museum hours are Tuesday – Friday from noon to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. thewestendmuseum.org.