Tag: South End

The Rise and Fall of Black Boston’s First Hospital (episode 294)

Despite the name, Plymouth Hospital was a South End institution.  As the first training school for Black nurses in segregated Boston, Plymouth provided a needed service to an underserved community, led by a medical pioneer.  Dr. Cornelius Nathanial Garland moved to Boston from the deep south to seek opportunity, but while he found opportunity in the Hub, he also found a deeply segregated medical establishment.  To fight against this system and provide opportunities for Black Bostonians in medicine, he founded a hospital and nursing school.  However, the most radical civil rights leader in Boston would accuse Garland of reinforcing that very same system of segregated medicine.


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The Gettysburg Cyclorama: Mystery of the South End (episode 270)

Starting in 1884, audiences of veterans, schoolchildren, and everyday Bostonians streamed into a cavernous, castle-like building on Tremont Street in the South End to witness the closest thing to virtual reality that existed at the time.  The building still exists, though a series of renovations have rendered it much more ordinary and less palatial than it was back then.  The painting still exists too, and it still offers an immersive experience for visitors that blends reality and art, but not in Boston anymore.  The building was known as the Cyclorama, and it was purpose built to hold the painting, which was also known as the cyclorama, one of the most audacious artistic endeavors of the 19th century.  Together, they commemorated the turning point of the bloody Civil War that had ended two decades earlier.  


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The Hub of the Gay Universe, with Russ Lopez (episode 167)

Dr. Russ Lopez joins us this week to discuss his recent book, The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond.  Russ called in from a vacation in California to talk about Puritan attitudes toward sin and sodomy, the late 19th century golden age for LGBTQ Boston, the tragic toll of the AIDS crisis, and the long fight for marriage equality.


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When Boston Invented Playgrounds (episode 111)

In the late 19th century, a new revolution in play was born in Boston.  In an era when urban children had few spaces to play except in the alleys and courtyards around their tenements, and child labor meant that many kids had no opportunities to play at all, an immigrant doctor inspired a Boston women’s group to take up the topic of play.  From its humble beginnings in a single sandpile in the North End, the playground movement grew to a quasi-scientific pursuit, until it was finally adopted as a national goal. By the early 20th century, safe playgrounds with structured, supervised play were seen as vital to children’s moral and educational development.


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Tent City (Episode 77)

50 years ago this week, residents of one Boston neighborhood carried out an act of civil disobedience, bringing attention to the city’s need for affordable housing.  A group of mostly African American residents occupied an empty lot where rowhouses once stood.  It was Boston’s 1968 Tent City protest, and it helped change how the city approaches development and urban planning.


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Picturing the South End, with Lauren Prescott (Ep69)

We’re joined this week by Lauren Prescott, the executive director of the South End Historical Society and author of a new book simply titled Boston’s South End.  It’s part of Arcadia Publishing’s “Postcard History Series,” and it features hundreds of images from the South End Historical Society’s collection of historic postcards dating from the 1860s to the mid 20th century.  

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Episode 1: Remember Remember the Fifth of November

Update: We revisited this subject in Episode 75, with better audio, better research, and better storytelling.  You should listen to that one instead!

How did early Boston “celebrate” on November 5th each year?  By drinking, brawling, and burning effigies of the Pope, of course.  Listen to this week’s episode to find out more!

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