A brief history of the North End

on

The North End area of Fallout 4 contains several marked and unmarked locations, including: 

Madden's boxing gym on Salem Street in Fallout 4, near the Old North Church.
Screen capture by Jewelsmith

An actual photo of the corner of Salem and Prince Streets in Boston's North End neighborhood, with a green building similar to Madden's boxing gym in Fallout 4, and an Italian bakery. (Image from Google maps street view)

The Massachusett people inhabited the area until Europeans arrived, then they were decimated by disease (I've read estimates of 75-90% population loss) and further displaced by religious conversion and racism. 

English colonists settled there in the 1600s, and by the mid-1700s, just before the American Revolution, the North End was a hub of activity. 

But the North End changed after the Revolutionary War. Around 25% of the population (presumably Loyalists) moved to England or Canada, and wealthy merchants moved to the West End or Beacon Hill. Many homes (including Paul Revere's house) became warehouses and sailor boarding houses. 

The land itself changed during the 1800s. The North End and other areas of Boston expanded through land reclamation projects, as shown in the diagram below. 

Map of the peninsula from Fallout 4 (left), with a green icon to indicate Swan's Pond in the Boston Common area, and a 1903 diagram (right) showing Boston Common and the actual shape of the original Shawmut Peninsula in black, with reclaimed land in gray. 
Fallout 4 map courtesy of Fallout4map.com 
Diagram from "Boston: A Guide Book" (public domain)

The Irish had been in Boston since the American Revolution. Patrick Carr of Ireland was shot by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770, and General George Washington even used the password "Saint Patrick" as a secret code with his Colonial troops. 

When tens of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived during and after the years of the Irish potato famine in the 1840s and 1850s, many settling in the North End. Disease was rampant in the impoverished and overcrowded neighborhood. A cholera epidemic hit the North End hard in 1849. 

“Children in the Irish district,” wrote Bostonian Lemuel Shattuck, “seemed literally born to die.” 

An area known as the "Black Sea" along Ann Street (now North Street) was estimated to have 227 brothels, 26 gambling dens and 1,500 establishments that sold liquor. It was described as "squealing with fiddles" and populated with criminals. 

In the 1870s, Jewish and Italian immigrants arrived. Salem Street and the blocks around it became a busy shopping district filled with Kosher butchers, bakers, delicatessens, tailors and food markets. 

A pizza place in the post-apocalyptic North End of Fallout 4 
(Screen capture by Jewelsmith)

Inside the Fallout 4 pizza place are an espresso machine and two fireplaces set up to look like pizza ovens (Screen capture by Jewelsmith)

Just like now, immigrants had to deal with a lot of discrimination, like this jerk Samuel Adams Drake who wrote about the North End in 1871: 

“Nowhere in Boston has Father Time wrought such ruthless changes, as in this highly respectable quarter, now swarming with Italians in every dirty nook and corner. In truth, it is hard to believe the evidence of our own senses, though the fumes of garlic are sufficiently convincing.” 

By 1895, the North End was 1/3 Irish, 1/3 Jewish and 1/3 Italian. But by the 1920s it was mostly Italian, and in the 1930s there were 44,000 Italians living in an area less than one square mile in size. 

The North End was also the location of the 1919 Great Molasses Flood, aka the Boston Molasses Disaster or Boston Molassacre. A large storage tank burst at the Purity Distilling Company and the resulting wave of molasses killed twenty-one people and injured one hundred and fifty more. 

In the aftermath, residents filed one of the first class-action lawsuits in Massachusetts. 

The disaster occurred on Commercial Street, and the area is now a park near Copps Hill Burying Ground, the burial place of Shem Drowne. 

Yes, Shem Drowne is a real person, not just a character in Fallout 4. In the game, Shem Drowne is buried in North End Graveyard, across the street from Mean Pastries. 

Additional sources: 

Comments

Post a Comment