On a Sunday evening at 119 Park Street, a live band tunes up and couples take the floor for a waltz, and for a few hours West Roxbury sounds exactly as it has for decades. The story of the Irish in West Roxbury is not the story of a tenement or a famine ship. It is the story of arrival, of working families who climbed out of the old downtown wards and bought a house with a porch on a leafy street at the far southwest corner of Boston.
The Place
West Roxbury sits in Boston’s far southwest corner, 4.61 square miles of triple-deckers and single-family homes bounded by Dedham, Brookline and the Charles River wetlands. It was settled in 1630, the same year as Boston itself, and stayed farmland for two centuries while the city grew up to its north.
The neighbourhood seceded from the town of Roxbury in 1851 and was annexed by Boston in 1874. Centre Street runs as its spine, a commercial corridor of churches, bakeries and pubs that has anchored daily life here for generations.
Of all Boston’s neighbourhoods it is among the most suburban in feel, with lawns and rotaries and commuter rail stops, and for much of the twentieth century it carried a reputation as the city’s Irish Catholic heartland.
How It Became Irish
The Irish did not start in West Roxbury. They started downtown, in the crowded wards of the North End, Fort Hill and the South End, where the famine generation landed in the 1840s and 1850s and took whatever work Boston would give them.
West Roxbury, by contrast, was still pasture and orchard when those ships arrived. In 1841 the most famous thing on its soil was Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist commune founded by George Ripley that drew Nathaniel Hawthorne and inspired his novel The Blithedale Romance. That experiment in genteel utopia failed by 1847. The Irish arrival came later, and it came by a very different road.
The streetcar and the second generation
The decisive change was movement. As Boston annexed West Roxbury in 1874 and laid streetcar lines outward, the children and grandchildren of the famine Irish began to leave the old downtown wards. They were no longer labourers fresh off the boat but tradesmen, police officers, firefighters, teachers and city clerks, the people historians would later call the lace-curtain Irish.
West Roxbury offered exactly what they wanted: space, ownership, respectability and distance from the slums their parents had escaped. A triple-decker or a single-family house here was proof of arrival.
The parish builds the neighbourhood
In Catholic Boston, the parish was the unit of belonging, and West Roxbury’s parishes grew with its Irish population. St Theresa of Avila on Centre Street served the older end of the neighbourhood. Then, as families filled the streets near the Dedham line, a new parish was carved out.
Holy Name Parish was founded in 1927 under its first pastor, Father William P. McNamara, drawing territory from Sacred Heart in Roslindale and St Theresa in West Roxbury. Its congregation first worshipped in a theatre in Roslindale while the great church rose on Centre Street.
The basement church was ready for Midnight Mass in 1929, and the main Romanesque Revival structure, designed by Edward T. P. Graham with a dome modelled on the Basilica di San Clemente in Rome, was completed in 1939. A school, parish hall and convent followed in 1953. The church commands the rotary at 1689 Centre Street to this day, the single most visible monument to the neighbourhood’s Catholic, largely Irish, century.
From Ireland directly, and from the inner city
The growth was not only generational. In the twentieth century, upwardly mobile Irish Americans moved to West Roxbury both from elsewhere in Boston and directly from Ireland. New arrivals, many of them young men and women out of the west of the country, found cousins and parish connections already established.
A second wave came with the busing crisis of the 1970s, when desegregation orders convulsed Boston’s schools. Many Irish Catholic families from Dorchester, South Boston and other older wards moved out to West Roxbury, which had its own deep tensions in that era but remained a destination for families seeking the neighbourhood’s quieter streets. By the late twentieth century the Irish stamp on West Roxbury was complete.
A social life of its own
What the parish did for the soul, the social club did for the weekend. The Irish Social Club of Boston was founded on 27 June 1945 by Irish veterans of the Second World War and their associates. It began with Sunday afternoon ceili dances at Hibernian Hall in Dudley Square, Roxbury.
In 1980 the club opened its permanent home at 119 Park Street in West Roxbury, and there it has stayed, hosting Sunday evening dances with live bands long after such institutions vanished elsewhere. For thousands of immigrants it was the first place in America that felt like home.
The Landmarks
Holy Name Church, 1689 Centre Street. The Romanesque Revival landmark that dominates the West Roxbury rotary, founded in 1927 and completed in 1939, with a sanctuary dome inspired by Rome’s San Clemente. In December 1942 it hosted funeral services for victims of the Cocoanut Grove fire, the deadliest nightclub fire in American history, a reminder of how tightly the parish was woven into the city’s grief.
St Theresa of Avila Church, 2078 Centre Street. The older Gothic parish a mile down Centre Street from Holy Name, serving West Roxbury’s Catholics long before the newer church rose. The two churches, one Gothic and one Romanesque, bookend the neighbourhood’s main street and its faith.
Irish Social Club of Boston, 119 Park Street. Founded in 1945 by Irish WWII veterans, settled at this address in 1980. Its Sunday dances and live bands have kept ceili and ballroom traditions alive for three generations, and it remains one of the last great Irish social institutions in the city.
Corrib Pub and Restaurant, 2030 Centre Street. A neighbourhood Irish pub in the heart of Centre Street, named after Lough Corrib in County Galway. It pours pints and serves stews and seafood to the same families who fill the pews on Sunday morning, a second home in the most literal sense.
West on Centre, 1732 Centre Street. A long-running American bar and grill on the corridor, a gathering place that has hosted countless christening lunches, wakes and game-day crowds. It sits among the bakeries and coffee shops that now share Centre Street with the older pubs.
Theodore Parker Church, 1859 Centre Street. The Unitarian church named for the abolitionist preacher who served the old Second Parish here, notable for seven Tiffany Studios stained-glass windows installed between 1894 and 1927. It is a reminder that West Roxbury’s religious history runs deeper than its Catholic century.
Millennium Park, off Gardner Street. A 100-acre park opened on 7 December 2000, built on land filled with earth excavated during the Big Dig, beside the historic site of Brook Farm. Its meadows and river views are where West Roxbury families now walk, run and watch the Charles after Sunday Mass.
Where They Came From
The Irish of West Roxbury trace back, through one or two intermediate Boston neighbourhoods, to the great famine emigration of the 1840s and 1850s and the steady flow that followed it. The famine generation came overwhelmingly from the rural west and south of Ireland, from counties such as Galway, Mayo, Cork and Kerry, pushed out by the collapse of the potato and the land system that depended on it.
Many West Roxbury families are the third and fourth generation of those arrivals, who climbed from the downtown wards into the streetcar suburbs. Layered on top of them are the more recent immigrants who came directly from Ireland in the twentieth century, the ones who learned the ceili steps at 119 Park Street and joined the parishes their predecessors had built.
That mix, the long-settled Irish American and the freshly arrived, is what gave West Roxbury its particular density of Irishness. Today roughly 30 per cent of the neighbourhood’s residents still report Irish ancestry, the single largest group, ahead even of the substantial Italian community.
West Roxbury Today
West Roxbury is changing, as every Boston neighbourhood is. The bars that once lined Centre Street now share the block with Thai, Korean and Middle Eastern restaurants, upscale bakeries and a trendy coffee shop or two, and younger buyers priced out of pricier neighbourhoods are moving in. Around 58 per cent of residents are white, down from the near-uniform figure of a generation ago, and the neighbourhood is steadily more diverse.
Yet the Irish frame still holds. At about 30 per cent Irish ancestry, West Roxbury remains one of the most Irish neighbourhoods in Boston, a city that is itself one of the most Irish in America. Holy Name and St Theresa still ring their bells over Centre Street, the Corrib still pours, and the Irish Social Club still opens its doors on Sunday nights.
It is a neighbourhood holding two things at once: the memory of an Irish century, written in stone and stained glass and dance floors, and the ordinary churn of a twenty-first-century Boston neighbourhood that no longer belongs to any single group. For the families whose grandparents bought their first porch here, that is exactly what arrival was always meant to feel like.
The Irish journey through Boston did not end in West Roxbury, of course. It runs through the Irish of Dorchester and the Irish of Charlestown, the older wards that fed this one, and onward across the country to the Mission District of San Francisco, Savannah, Georgia, Pennsport in Philadelphia and the Irish Channel of New Orleans. West Roxbury’s near neighbours tell their own immigrant stories too, from the Armenians of Belmont to the Chinese of Wellesley. For the wider arc, the Global Boston project at Boston College maps the city’s Irish migration in detail, and the neighbourhood’s own outline is set down on Wikipedia.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Irish in West Roxbury, Massachusetts?
The Irish in West Roxbury arrived in the twentieth century as upwardly mobile families left Boston’s older downtown wards for the space and respectability of the streetcar suburbs. Some came directly from Ireland, and a further wave moved out from Dorchester and South Boston during the busing era of the 1970s.
What share of West Roxbury is Irish?
About 30 per cent of West Roxbury residents report Irish ancestry, the single largest group in the neighbourhood, ahead of the roughly 24 per cent who report Italian ancestry. That makes the Irish in West Roxbury one of the densest concentrations in a city already famous for its Irish heritage.
What are the main Irish Catholic churches in West Roxbury?
Holy Name Church at 1689 Centre Street, founded in 1927 and completed in 1939, and St Theresa of Avila at 2078 Centre Street are the two parishes that anchored the neighbourhood’s Catholic life. One is Romanesque, the other Gothic, and together they bookend Centre Street.
What is the Irish Social Club of Boston?
The Irish Social Club of Boston was founded in 1945 by Irish veterans of the Second World War and has occupied 119 Park Street in West Roxbury since 1980. It hosts Sunday dances with live bands and has kept ceili and ballroom traditions alive for generations of immigrants.
Is West Roxbury still an Irish neighbourhood?
Yes, though it is changing. West Roxbury is now more diverse, with around 58 per cent of residents white, and Centre Street’s old pubs share the block with restaurants from around the world. But at roughly 30 per cent Irish ancestry it remains one of the most Irish neighbourhoods in Boston.
Where did West Roxbury’s Irish families originally come from?
Most trace back to the famine emigration of the 1840s and 1850s from the rural west and south of Ireland, counties such as Galway, Mayo, Cork and Kerry. Their descendants climbed from Boston’s downtown wards into West Roxbury, joined later by people who came directly from Ireland in the twentieth century.
If your family’s story passed through West Roxbury, or any of the places the Irish have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a townland in Galway or Mayo to a porch on Centre Street, to wherever you are now.