In the late 1840s, Boston was rapidly losing its aristocratic population to the lush and spacious countryside. The original confines of Boston Neck and its little space for growth had left the city overbuilt and overpopulated. The growing number of workers and immigrants populating the city centre was skyrocketing. If nothing were done soon, it seemed the city would lose its residential tax base, and its credibility as a major city entirely. The only

solution was new land. Boston's newest district, the South End, was filled land along the narrow isthmus connecting Boston to the mainland. Planners took a unique approach to the South End, choosing to make it a district of broad avenues and smart residential squares, much like districts of London, rather than the boring grid patterns developing over the rest of the country. Charles Bulfinch himself had made the first plan for the South End and its developers carried them out rather overwhelmingly, placing his trademark private parks and bow front houses generously throughout the area.

By the 1870s the new neighborhood of the Back Bay, further severed from working class districts and closer to the Charles River, drained much of the South End's aristocracy. Where the wealthiest Bostonians had once lived the very immigrants they had tried to escape settled. It was first Irish, then black, then Hispanic. Its gracious row houses became boardinghouses, Washington Street was covered over by elevated rail and by the middle of the 20th century many bow fronts were being torn down in favour of modern, low-income housing.

A yuppie revival of the South End improved the neighborhood a great deal with its improvement of historic property and creation of community gardens. The old Boston and Providence railroad tracks were buried and made into the Southwest Corridor Park. However, many minority groups living in the South End were priced out, and the demolition of the elevated railroad and its subsequent replacement with the Orange Line subway too far north from the South End's center left a transit void both there and in nearby Roxbury. However, the new MBTA Silver Line is currently under construction and should be serving these communities with a street level trolley by the end of 2002. Today, an urban mix of gays, artists, African Americans and students make the South End their home.

Even today, the South End seems divided between the increasingly wealthier northern half and the southern half, which has been spared most of the area's yuppie influx.