Boston West End condos for sale
Charles River Park vs. West End
If you read a sign that says, “If you lived here, you’d be home now” it means you are on Storrow Drive, driving by Charles River Park. Soon, also known as Boston’s West End.
Charles River Park — a name now connoting Boston condo luxury urban living, but it also has a history burdened with half a century of baggage over urban renewal and the destruction of a beloved neighborhood of the West End — as the old neighborhood storefronts and four-story brick row houses were destroyed in the late 1950s.
In replace of this tight knit neighborhood, developers came in and built complex of high and mid-rise luxury condominiums, starting in 1959 and embracing the name of the historic neighborhood it displaced.
Boston West End
Equity Residential, a large national developer and manager of rental properties , decided soon after it bought Charles River Park in the late 1990s that a new image was called for; the name continues to evoke painful memories decades after more than 30 blocks of the old West End were leveled.”
The West End is synonymous in Boston and the nation for some of the most destructive and embittering aspects of urban renewal initiatives of the mid-20th century, when neighborhoods labeled slums were bulldozed to make way for modern Boston high rise condo living.
The West End project was one of three large initiatives then planned for Boston, which in the post-World War II years was showing its age and losing population to the growing suburbs. It was one of the first urban renewal projects in the nation — both to be completed, and to be declared a public policy disaster for the American city, as well as a personal tragedy for families displaced by “progress.
It was the Boston Housing Authority and US Housing and Home Financing Agency that came up with the idea at mid-century to sweep away a rundown neighborhood and replace it with a dozen or so high-rise apartment buildings. They sold out to Rappaport Company.
Rappaport and his partners in Charles River Park Inc. won the rights to the redevelopment and promptly hired architect and planner Victor Gruen.
Rappaport’s company built towers, mid-rise structures, parks, and amenities in the 1960s and ’70s that became homes to hundreds of satisfied new Boston luxury dwellers; white-collar professionals took up residence in what had been a mostly blue-collar, mixed-ethnic neighborhood. Today, in 2019 Hawthorne Place and Whiter Place buildings are Boston luxury condominiums.
Conclusion
But that’s the past. In 2019 Charles River Park condos have brought back a vibrant neighborhood of young professionals and Senior’s who have close access to MGH.