Boston's financial district is considered the heart of New England's banking and finance. It is a veritable overlay of sleek modern office buildings and elegant high-rise structures of the early twentieth century. In the center of this contemporary skyline is evidence of the financial district's long history. Boston's first skyscraper, the Boston Custom House tower, stands high from where it was built in 1915 on top of the original 1849 custom house building.
Boston's Financial District chronicles the steady change from a romantic neighborhood to numerous banking and business houses. It was originally known as Old South End and was a residential site of elegant mansions designed by Charles Bulfinch and located on tree-lined squares and streets that emulated the aristocratic boroughs of London. The photographs in Boston's Financial District show evidence of the destruction wreaked by the Great Boston Fire of 1872 and the rebuilding of Boston's center of commerce. With its well-known banks and businesses, the financial district has witnessed some of the most monumental and influential historical changes in the city of Boston.

Boston's Financial District (MA) (Images of America)

Arts & Photography

Sammarco, Anthony Mitchell

Photography & Video

Arcadia Publishing

The Back Bay was one of Boston's premier residential neighborhoods between 1837 and 1901. From its quagmire beginnings and with the creation of the Boston Public Garden in the 1830s, the Back Bay was envisioned as an urbane and sophisticated streetscape of stone and brick row houses. The major center of the neighborhood became Art Square, now known as Copley Square, which was surrounded by Trinity Church, New Old South Church, Second Church of Boston, the Boston Public Library, and S.S. Pierce and Company. With images of swan boats and architectural delights, Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era illuminates a particularly vibrant period in this intriguing and relatively new neighborhood's past.

Boston's Back Bay in the Victorian Era (MA) (Images of America)

Once a part of Roxbury, West Roxbury was originally known as Westerly. Located six miles from Roxbury's town center at Meeting House Hill, which was settled by Puritans in 1630, Westerly was composed of farms and large estates. In 1840, Brook Farm, a transcendental community striving to live and commune with nature, brought fame to the hamlet. In 1851, after years of agitation headed by the Honorable Arthur Austin, West Roxbury officially separated from Roxbury and became an independent town. Meanwhile, the Boston and Providence Railroad, with various depots, such as Bellevue, Highland, West Roxbury, and Spring Street, launched a building boom that continued unabated well into the twentieth century. New streets and houses soon fragmented the farms and large estates. West Roxbury chronicles the development of this desirable and well-regarded Boston neighborhood through vintage images from the collection of the West Roxbury Historical Society and modern photographs taken by Charlie Rosenberg.

West Roxbury (Then and Now)

History

Americas

West Roxbury, located along the scenic Charles River, is a community of tree-lined streets and panoramic views, which has undergone tremendous changes since its incorporation as a town in 1851. Formerly known as “Westerly” or “South Street,” West Roxbury has grown from a largely rural area, accessible only by train, into a charming neighborhood of Victorian homes that still offers many of the same advantages that attracted people a century ago―the quietness of small town life, with the attractions of big city living just a short distance away. West Roxbury is also the former home of Brook Farm, a utopian community founded by Reverend Ripley. Brook Farm was a center of literary achievement that attracted such foremost thinkers of the nineteenth century as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Horace Greeley.

West Roxbury (Images of America)

The streets of Boston’s North End, some laid out in the seventeenth century, exude a rich history that has included every generation of immigrants to Boston since 1630. An active port, the neighborhood of the North End also included churches of every denomination, historic homes, and early commercial concerns. Immigrants from Russia, Ireland, Germany, Italy, and most other European countries settled in the North End and contributed to its development over the years. Today, most visitors to Boston tour the North End and see the Paul Revere House and the famous Old North Church. On the weekends, shoppers visit the bustling Haymarket and attend feasts and festivals amidst the appetizing ambiance of restaurant row. This thriving, lively area of town is an alluring meeting place for residents and tourists alike.

Boston's North End (MA) (Images of America)

Originally a narrow, barren strip of land known as the Neck, Boston's South End grew from a lonely sentry post and execution grounds to what is today the largest Victorian neighborhood in the United States. With the filling of the South Cove in the 1830s, the area became one of the greatest planned residential districts of its time, a heritage preserved in unique architectural features such as red brick swell bay facades, elaborate balusters, and fanciful porches.

Boston's South End (MA) (Images of America)

Boston is a city rich in the history of residents from all walks of life, every country and every ethnicity imaginable. From 1840 to 1925, Boston's diversity created a city with a thriving nexus of people who wove together a community that reflected their own unique heritage. In this lavishly illustrated book with over 200 thought-provoking and evocative photographs, Anthony Mitchell Sammarco and Michael Price have created an important book chronicling the determination, strength, and often manifold successes of immigrants who arrived in Boston. From the mid-nineteenth century when Boston's burgeoning population included one out of every three as being foreign born, the immigrants' arrival at the East Boston docks increased greatly between 1840 and 1925, where they were to pass into the New World, and a new life. In chapters that deal with the immigrants before their arrival, their first perceptions, to where they went, worked, and played, this book outlines the ancestors of many present-day Bostonians in the evolving process of Americanization.

Boston's Immigrants: 1840-1925 (Images of America)

PRICE, Michael

Laid out in 1848 as a rural garden cemetery by Henry A. S. Dearborn, Forest Hills Cemetery celebrates its 160th anniversary in 2008 as Boston's premier arboretum cemetery. Since the mid-19th century, its 250 magnificent acres have been the resting place of people of all walks of life, ethnicities, religions, and races. Among these are poets Anne Sexton and E. E. Cummings, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Forest Hills's landscape is a museum of sculpture, art, and monuments that chronicles the Victorian age to the present. The first crematorium in New England was here, and prominent Bostonian suffragette Lucy Stone was the first person to be cremated at Forest Hills in 1893. An active cemetery and an all-embracing place, Forest Hills offers a bucolic and picturesque setting for the "gathering of generations" and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Forest Hills Cemetery (Images of America)

Hyde Park, the last town annexed to Boston in 1912, was founded in 1868 from sections of Dorchester, Milton, and Dedham. For decades, Hyde Park thrived in proximity to the city while offering a bucolic setting along the Neponset River.

Hyde Park (Then and Now)

With Roslindale, Boston historian Anthony Mitchell Sammarco chronicles the development and evolution of this historic Boston neighborhood in over two hundred black-and-white images coupled with detailed and informative photograph captions. Originally known as “South Street Crossing,” Roslindale was once a part of Roxbury and later the Town of West Roxbury. The neighborhood was named “Roslin” by one of its early citizens after a fondly remembered Scottish town whose rolling hills evoked comparison with those of thisarea. In this volume, both gradual and radical changes in Roslindale’s landscape and architecture are documented in images culled from the archives of the RoslindaleBranch of the Boston Public Library as well as numerous private collections.

Roslindale (Images of America)

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Books by Sammarco, Anthony Mitchell