North End Tour

Zipporah Potter Atkins (c. 1645-1705), the first African American woman to purchase a home in Boston, was born to parents enslaved by Captain Richard Keayne. She was free because the 1641 law legalizing slavery in Massachusetts did not include children. Her father, Richard Done, received an inheritance from Keayne’s will that was passed on to her and possibly used to buy the property on Salem Street in 1670. The deed was uncovered at the Massachusetts Archives by Dr. Vivian R. Johnson, a retired Boston University history professor. Dr. Johnson also discovered that Atkins had initiated the deed of sale in 1699, making her the first African-American woman in Suffolk County to do so. When Zipporah Potter married and took the surname Atkins, the ceremony was conducted by prominent Protestant clergyman Cotton Mather.

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Formerly 22 Salem Street

Sophie Tucker (ca.1884-1966) was born Sonya Kalish while her mother and brother were en route from Russia to the United States to join her father in Boston. Sophie’s father had deserted the Russian army, immigrated to the United States and found work in Boston under the name “Charles Abuza.” The family lived in Boston as the Abuzas for the first eight years of Sophie’s life and then moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where she began singing in her father’s kosher restaurant. By the time she was seventeen, she was performing in New York City and on her way to headlines in vaudeville. Her signature song was Some of These Days. In later life she became a philanthropist for many causes.

The former home and grocery store of the family of Clementine Poto Langone (1898-1964) was on this site. As a child, she helped pack Italian food products to send west to Italian immigrants working on the transcontinental railroads. The grocery store was on the first floor with living quarters upstairs. When Clementine married Joseph Langone, Jr. in 1920, she moved next door to 190 North Street. In the 1930s, after her husband was elected to public office, she helped many Italian immigrants become citizens so they could be eligible for social security benefits and provided food and clothing to Italian people out of work. She was an active member of the North End Union.

The North End has been home to many immigrant groups. Typical of these are the Italians who settled here in large numbers starting in 1860 and continuing into the 1930s. Leonarda Corlito (1882-1958) and Frances LoRusso (1903-1971) are examples of women who left Italy in search of a better life in the United States. They were neighbors and good friends on Margaret Street. After training at the North Bennett Street School, Leonarda’s daughters sewed uniforms for the Army soldiers at the garment factory on Thatcher Street. Later, Pompeia, a daughter of Leonarda, married Frank, a son of Frances. Both Frances and Leonarda lost sons in the war: Anthony LoRusso and Anthony Corlito are commemorated with individual plaques on Margaret Street, and they share a plaque with others at the World War II memorial in Paul Revere Park. 

19 North Square

When she became Rachel Walker Revere (1745-1813) by marrying the recently-widowed Paul Revere in 1773, Rachel took on the care of the six surviving children born to Paul’s first wife, Sarah Orne Revere (1736-73), who died four months after her eighth child was born. Rachel had eight more children, three of whom did not reach maturity. In 1775, Rachel held the family and business together when the British did not allow Revere to return to Boston after his famous ride. She eventually joined him in Watertown until they returned to their home after the British evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776. Across the street is Rachel Revere Park, first dedicated in 1946 and restored in 2017. 

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Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879), editor of Boston’s Ladies’ Magazine, established the Seaman’s Aid Society in 1833 to provide employment for the wives of sailors as seamstresses and a place to sell their work. The Society also opened a Mariners House in the North End as a sailors’ boarding house and developed an industrial school for seamen’s daughters and a day nursery. Hale later became the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. In September of 1840, Hale organized the great women’s fair which raised enough money to complete the Bunker Hill monument. It had stood unfinished for more than a decade.

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Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Birthplace

4 Garden Court

The birthplace of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890-1995) was probably a bow fronted building like the one at No. 6 Garden Court. She was the first child of six born to Josephine Hannon and John F. Fitzgerald, who became Democratic boss of the North End’s Ward six and a leading Catholic spokesman for the Irish community, before being elected mayor in 1905.

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St. Stephen’s Church

401 Hanover Street

The only remaining church in Boston designed by architect Charles Bulfinch was completed in 1804. Its history reflects the neighborhood. In 1862, it became a Roman Catholic Church and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and her father were christened here. On the pews are the names of the North End women and men who helped raise the funds for the church’s restoration in 1965. A marker in memory of Rose Kennedy commemorates her baptism.

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Revere Mall

Three women prominent in North End history are honored by plaques on the left wall of Revere Mall. At the age of ten, Ann Pollard (1620-1725) was probably the first white woman to come ashore in Boston, landing with Governor John Winthrop at the foot of today’s Prince Street. Dr. Harriot Keziah Hunt (1805-75), who grew up on the waterfront at the foot of Hanover Street, became a doctor through self-study after being refused permission to attend lectures at Harvard Medical School. A women’s rights advocate and social reformer, Hunt advocated health education for women. Charlotte Cushman (1816-76), who was born on the site of the present North End branch library, became an internationally-known actress renowned for playing both male and female roles. She established a salon in Rome for women sculptors including Boston sculptors Anne Whitney and Edmonia Lewis and Watertown’s Harriet Hosmer.

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The first home of the Paul Revere Pottery, founded in 1908 by librarian Edith Guerrier (1870-1958) and artist Edith Brown (1872- 1932) and funded by philanthropist Helen Osborne Storrow (1864-1944), was in the basement of this building. Reflecting the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the pottery provided worthwhile employment for young North End Italian and Jewish women. The lower floors of the building served as the Library Club House under the supervision of Guerrier where young women formed clubs for reading, storytelling, and dramatics named for the meeting times. Fanny Goldstein (1895-1961), the assistant librarian at the North End branch, edited the newsletter for the Saturday Evening Girls. She went on to become the first Jewish woman to head a branch of the Boston Public Library in the West End, compiled a Judaica bibliography and was curator of the library’s collection. The Saturday Evening Girls continued to meet until 1969. The Pottery moved to Nottingham Hill in Brighton in 1915, operating until 1942.

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In 1889 Jewish philanthropist Lina Hecht (1848-1920) founded the Hebrew Industrial School (HIS) For Girls near the North Bennet Street Industrial School. After Hecht’s death, the settlement house opened for both boys and girls as The Hecht Neighborhood House and moved to Bowdoin Street in the West End. At a time when nearly a third of the North End’s population was Jewish, the school was established to help Eastern European Jewish immigrants adapt to American life. Anxious to teach their own youth, the Hebrew Ladies Sewing Society, reorganized by Hecht in the South End, donated cloth and sewing machines for HIS classes in millinery, pattern cutting, hand and machine sewing. In 1936, reconfigured as a community center, the organization followed the Jewish community into Dorchester. The Hecht House purchased the former Home for Destitute Jewish Children on American Legion Parkway where it operated for more than 20 years, merging with the Roxbury YMHA in the late 1950s. Again, reflecting the changes in demographics and needs of the community, the building was sold in 1970 to the Lena Park Housing Development Corporation.

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St. Leonard’s Church

Hanover Street, between North Bennet and Prince Streets

St. Leonard’s Church was the first Roman Catholic Church founded by Italian immigrants in Boston. Built in 1873, St. Leonard’s was restored in 1988. Women were prominent in the drive which raised more than a million dollars for the project. Their names are included on the tablets in the church’s Peace Garden.

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