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The history of Boston's immigrants

Immigrant kids at Washington School in the West End

Immigrant children playing on the roof of the Washington School in the West End in 1909. See it larger.

Global Boston is an online exhibit by the Boston College history department on the history of Boston's immigrant communities that includes a look at specific groups and some of the neighborhoods they settled in, as well as a Boston immigration timeline.

Photo by Lewis Hines, from a Library of Congress collection. Also see: Norman Street before it disappeared, to be replaced by the Lindemann Center and history of the Washington School.

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For the person who wondered about the focus on Italian immigrant families in narratives of the Molasses flood:

Boston’s North End neighborhood became the locus of Italian settlement in eastern New England. Once the home of English colonists and revolutionaries like Paul Revere, Irish and Jewish immigrants settled in the North End before the wave of Italian immigration in the late 1800s. By the early 20th century, the North End was densely filled with tenements, in which tens of thousands of Italians lived.

It's important that the molasses flood hurt a lot of people who weren't killed and caused a lot of property damage.

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A huge downtown roofdeck with 360 views of the city, harbor and Charles being used for the public benefit of the community.

It was the only municipal building in Boston with a roof garden, which stayed open in 1907 during the evening until ten p.m. (for the mothers and children of the congested tenement house district . . receiving the benefit of a cool breeze. It was so popular that at one point 600 or 700 mothers and children slept on the roof. In 1911 the Washington School is recorded as teaching children grades one through eight, as well as E.S.L. to immigrants.The school served the entire community regardless of age; in 1931 the evening school program graduated a fifty-four year old mother and a forty-three year-old father from high school.

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You're so right about the remarkable concept of prime rooftop real estate devoted to education-starved immigrants. I was working at Mt. Sinai Hospital last week and had a chance to gaze out across the rooftops north of East 101st St bordering the top of Central Park. Sure enough, there were an array of school rooftops with this same curvilinear fenced-in design and spectacular views. My guess is that rooftop playgrounds must have been cheaper than setting aside parcels of land at ground level. When you look at the little-used roof decks, patios and balconies in many city buildings it makes the idea of public access to spaces like this all the more appealing.

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Suffered greatly and had to flee their homeland after suffering torture, murder and rape at the hands of the Viet Cong led by Ho Chi Minh. Unfortunately when they look out their windows in Dorchester they see the Rainbow Swash with a large profile of Ho Chi Minh. I find the profile of Ho a slap in the face to Vietnam veterans and their allies who worked extremely hard to find a better life in America. The profile of Ho is a lot more offensive than a street named Yawkey.

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Then why did they settle basically next to the gas tanks? I mean, the United States as a whole is a large country, and even in the Boston area there are other places to go (example- where did the Cambodians settle in Massachusetts?)

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If you say you look at that gas tank, and see a profile of Ho Chi Minh, I believe you. It's not because anybody painted it to look like that, though. Do you see the same profile in clouds in the sky? If you don't, you're not looking. The world is full of imaginary faces; you just have to know where to find them.

Myself, I do think that there's a profile on the gas tank, but it's not Uncle Ho, it's Colonel Sanders. Unless they are actually the same person.

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If I understand it correctly, it was a protest statement in the early days of the war created by a nun who oppose the war.. Most of us vets have matured and mellowed in our later years. We don't go looking for windmills to tilt at - Much more offended by the overt discrimination, racial animus and misoginy directed at American people (by Americans) then a profile that has been on a gas tank for 40+ years.

There was never, by the way, an inherent hatred of Ho Chi Minh by many, many Vietnamese. I was in country on the day he died and observed large, long, progressions of Vietnamese carrying candles while marching down Pasteur Street. Was a real shocker and changed my mind about the war. Much more hate for Ngo Dinh Diem and the Nguyen Van Thieu administration than Ho.

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never more than a bizarre conspiracy theory. The woman who painted it denied any such intent, and you have to have smoked some serious shit to see any resemblance. It was dreamed up by people with a grievance who thought everybody who protested against the war, which she did, was a Viet Cong fifth columnist.

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Better or worse than street urchins? Discuss.

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I would say roof urchins occupy a higher plain.

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I took a look at the site. Under Ethnic Groups, they somehow managed to forget Germans. Apparently, they weren't 'ethnic' enough.

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Maybe it's a work in progress? Yes, a piece on the German community in Boston would make a fascinating story, in part to answer the question: What happened to it? I mean, we still have the Deutsches Altenheim in West Roxbury, and the Haffenreffer smokestack in JP, but other than that ...

The site also doesn't pay much attention to Albanians, who have flocked to Roslindale, but I'm not quick to assign some ulterior motive for that.

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German-Americans sort of disappeared as a visible ethnic group once the US entered World War 1. From what I understand, they made extra efforts to assimilate and not stand out, as their loyalty was suspect. Often the impetus for recording the history of different populations comes from within, and absent a strong sense of identity, that isn't happening among the descendants of Deutschland. @anon 11:31am your post reminded me: There was a Catholic church on Shawmut Street in the South End serving the German community, and after it closed the German-language service was moved to the cathedral. It was discontinued in 2014. The Faith Lutheran church in Cambridge has German services once a month.

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