They call them Townies. Not the new arrivals in the rehabbed brick on Monument Avenue. The old crowd. The ones whose grandfathers walked down to the Navy Yard before sunrise, whose mothers sat in the same pew at St. Catherine’s, whose names you saw on the back of every CYO jersey in the parish. Charlestown is a square mile of Boston pinned between two bridges, and for a hundred and fifty years it was as Irish as anywhere outside Galway city.
The Place
Charlestown is a small peninsula on the north bank of the Charles River, looking back across the water at downtown Boston. The Bunker Hill Monument rises from its highest point. The Tobin Bridge cuts across its northern edge toward Chelsea, and the Zakim carries traffic south into the city. The housing stock is famously dense: brick rowhouses and Federal-style townhouses on narrow streets that climb the hill in tight grids.
The Orange Line stops at Community College and Sullivan Square. The 93 bus, the ferry to Long Wharf, and the bridges are how most people get out.
How It Became Irish
Before the Irish
Charlestown was older than Boston. English Puritans settled the peninsula in 1629, a year before John Winthrop’s company crossed the Charles to found Boston proper. For most of two centuries it was a Yankee town of merchants, shipwrights, and tradesmen, with its own city government, its own newspapers, and a population that ran heavily Congregationalist and Protestant.
The British burned most of it on the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. The town rebuilt slowly. By the 1820s it was a respectable but second-tier industrial outpost across the river from Boston, with a Navy Yard at its waterfront and a small Catholic population mostly working as servants and dock labour.
The Famine Wave
Everything changed in the 1840s. The Great Hunger pushed more than a million people out of Ireland, and Boston was one of the closest American ports. The cheapest housing in greater Boston was in Charlestown’s lower wards, near the wharves. Families piled into wood-frame triple-deckers and the basements of older houses.
The Navy Yard hired Irish labourers by the hundred. Local foundries, brickyards, and the rope walks of the lower peninsula took on more. By the 1860s the demographic flip was already visible: Yankee families moving out to Somerville and Medford, Irish families moving in by the boat-load.
The Catholic Church kept pace. St. Mary’s, the original Charlestown parish, had been founded in 1828, when the Irish were still a small minority. By the time it built its current Gothic church on Warren Street in the 1880s, the parish was overwhelmingly Irish and big enough to need a second.
Charlestown at Its Peak
From roughly 1900 to 1970, Charlestown was one of the most concentrated Irish-American neighbourhoods in the United States. The parish boundaries were the social geography. You were St. Mary’s, St. Catherine’s on Bunker Hill Street, or St. Francis de Sales further up.
The Navy Yard was the great engine. At its World War II peak it employed more than 50,000 workers, many of them Charlestown men walking down through the gate at Gate One. The Boston Sand and Gravel plant on the inner harbour took on more. The Hood ice cream plant. The brewery on Rutherford Avenue.
Daily life ran on parish time. CYO basketball at St. Catherine’s gym. The Knights of Columbus on Bunker Hill Street. Charlestown High up at the top of the hill. The Bunker Hill Day Parade every June 17, a tradition dating to 1786 that commemorates the 1775 battle and has been, for over a century, the biggest day in the Townie calendar. Schools and businesses still close.
The Code and the Decades
Some of what held Charlestown together also held it back. The neighbourhood’s parochial loyalty calcified, in the 1960s and 1970s, into a famous code of silence around organised crime. The McLaughlin brothers, Bernie, Georgie, and Edward “Punchy,” ran the Charlestown Mob and went to war in 1961 with Buddy McLean’s Winter Hill Gang from Somerville.
The feud killed dozens of men over the course of the decade. Bernie McLaughlin was shot in broad daylight in City Square in front of more than a hundred witnesses. When the police came around, nobody had seen anything.
The code outlasted the mob. By the 1980s, the FBI’s frustration with Charlestown bank-robbery crews who would not name accomplices had become a national story. It is the world Ben Affleck’s film The Town drew on.
The Landmarks
The Bunker Hill Monument, Monument Square. A 221-foot Quincy granite obelisk dedicated on June 17, 1843, the 68th anniversary of the battle. Daniel Webster gave one of his most famous speeches at the dedication. The monument sits at the top of Breed’s Hill, where the actual fighting happened, and is climbed by every Charlestown schoolchild at least once.
St. Mary – St. Catherine of Siena Parish, 46 Winthrop Street and 55 Warren Street. The merged parish that descends from St. Mary’s, founded in 1828 as the second Catholic church in greater Boston, and St. Catherine of Siena on Bunker Hill Street. The current St. Mary’s Gothic building on Warren Street was completed in 1892 by Patrick Keely, the prolific Irish-American church architect.
The Charlestown Navy Yard, First Avenue. The yard operated from 1800 to 1974, building and repairing American warships through every conflict from the War of 1812 to Vietnam. Generations of Charlestown Irish drew pay there. Decommissioned in 1974, the site is now part of Boston National Historical Park and home to the USS Constitution.
The Training Field, Winthrop Square. A colonial militia ground from the 1640s, now a small green park with a Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Monument by Martin Milmore, himself an Irish immigrant sculptor. Three thousand Charlestown men served in the Civil War. Their names are on the bronze tablets at the Winthrop Street entrance.
Charlestown High School, 240 Medford Street. The neighbourhood high school since 1848. For most of the twentieth century, every Townie kid passed through its doors.
The Bunker Hill Day Parade, June 17 (or the Sunday before). The parade has been held in some form since 1786 and is, for most of the neighbourhood, a more important day than the Fourth of July. Drum and bugle, fire trucks, the high school band, every parish in turn.
Where They Came From
Most of the famine wave that filled Charlestown came from the south and west of Ireland. The big counties of departure were Cork, Kerry, Galway, Mayo, and Clare, with smaller contingents from Tipperary, Limerick, and Roscommon. Many came through the port of Cobh, then called Queenstown, and through Liverpool to Boston.
Once a few families from a parish in West Cork or Connemara were settled in Charlestown, the next ones followed. A cousin in the Navy Yard could get a young man a foot in the door. A sister already in service at a Beacon Hill house could find a place for a younger sister. That is how a tiny stretch of Irish coastline ended up replicated, household by household, on a hillside in Boston.
Charlestown Today
The Townies are still here. They are also, increasingly, somewhere else. Gentrification arrived in waves through the late 1980s and the 1990s, as Boston professionals discovered that a brick rowhouse five minutes from downtown was a bargain. Prices ran up. Old families sold and moved out to Stoneham, Medford, Wilmington, and southern New Hampshire.
Charlestown today is layered. The original Yankee bones, the long Irish century, and the post-1990 wave of yuppies and young families all coexist within the same square mile. The parishes are smaller. The parade is still the parade.
St. Patrick’s Day at Sullivan’s. The Bunker Hill Day breakfast. A funeral at St. Mary’s where half the mourners had to drive in from twenty miles out. The neighbourhood the Townies built has not vanished. It has scattered, and on the third Sunday in June a great deal of it comes home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Irish settle in Charlestown?
Charlestown had cheap housing near the wharves and a major employer in the Charlestown Navy Yard. After the Great Famine of the 1840s, Irish families poured into the peninsula’s lower wards and into Navy Yard work. By the 1860s Charlestown was visibly tipping from Yankee to Irish, and chain migration kept the pattern going for the next century.
Is Charlestown still Irish today?
Less than it was, but still substantially. Gentrification from the late 1980s onward pushed many old families out to Stoneham, Medford, Wilmington, and southern New Hampshire. The parishes, the Bunker Hill Day Parade, and a loyal core of “Townie” families keep the Irish identity of Charlestown alive even as the demographics shift.
What are the most famous Irish landmarks in Charlestown?
The Bunker Hill Monument on Breed’s Hill, the merged St. Mary – St. Catherine of Siena Parish on Warren and Bunker Hill Streets, the Charlestown Navy Yard at the waterfront, and the Training Field in Winthrop Square with its Civil War monument by Irish-immigrant sculptor Martin Milmore. The Bunker Hill Day Parade every June 17 is the community’s biggest annual event.
Where in Ireland did the Charlestown Irish come from?
Mostly from the south and west: Cork, Kerry, Galway, Mayo, and Clare, with smaller numbers from Tipperary, Limerick, and Roscommon. Many embarked at Cobh (then Queenstown) and travelled via Liverpool to Boston. Chain migration meant whole West Cork and Connemara parishes ended up represented on a single Charlestown street.
When did the Irish first arrive in Charlestown?
The first significant Irish Catholic presence in Charlestown dates to the late 1820s, when St. Mary’s parish was founded in 1828. The transformative wave came in the late 1840s and 1850s with the Great Famine, and Charlestown remained a heavily Irish working-class neighbourhood until the 1990s.
What is a Townie?
“Townie” is the informal demonym for a Charlestown native, especially one from the long-established Irish-Catholic, working-class community. The term carries a strong sense of parochial loyalty and old-neighbourhood identity. It is held in clear contrast to the newer professional residents who arrived after the gentrification waves of the late 1980s and 1990s.
If your family’s story passed through Charlestown, or any of the Boston neighbourhoods the Irish made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a parish in West Cork or Mayo, to a rowhouse under the Bunker Hill Monument, to wherever you are now.