East Boston

Not long after the settling of Boston, Noddle Island served as grazing land for cattle, but in the and Canadians came first, followed by Russian Jew s and Italians , then came Southeast Asians , and, most recently, large numbers of Central and South Americans .

The population of East Boston, which was recorded as a mere thousand in 1837 , exploded to a high of just over 64,000 according to the 1925 census. Most of these were families from southern Italy. Today the neighborhood is home to a little more than 38,000 people, with the median income per household around $31,000. Current demographic is a true potpourri of cultures, with groups of residents of Italian, Central American, Vietnamese, and even Irish descent populating various enclaves of the neighborhood.

Though the North End is today thought of as Boston's "Little Italy," Orient Heights , the historic hill in East Boston, was the very first area in Massachusetts to which Italians immigrated, back in the 1860's and '70s, and remains the heart of the Italian community in East Boston.

For a long time, transportation has played a role in the shaping of East Boston. The world's finest Clipper Ships were built at the shipyard owned by Donald McKay in the mid- 1800s ; the tunnel connecting the neighborhood to the rest of the city via subway, the first underwater tunnel of its kind in the US, opened in 1904; rows of houses were torn down to build the Sumner (1934) and Callahan (1961) tunnels, connecting automobile traffic from downtown Boston to the neighborhood; an airfield built in East Boston in the early 1920s eventually expanded to become Logan International Airport .

Today, East Boston is primarily known for Logan Airport and the controversy surrounding it. Conflict with the Massachusetts Port Authority (MassPort), which owns and operates Logan, has been a source of bitterness among local residents for decades. One expansion of the airport resulted in the community losing Wood Island Park, a greenspace designed by the noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted . In another episode, Logan construction caused noisy trucks to rumble through the neighborhood until a group of local women took to the streets with their baby carriages and blocked the vehicles. The tension between the airport and local citizens continues, with MassPort attempting to expand again and add a fifth runway.

Though East Boston has a spectacular view of the downtown skyline, the community's rents and property values have increased more slowly than the extraordinary growth seen in the rest of the metro-Boston region during the late 1990s and early 2000s . This slower growth can largely be attributed to two factors: the isolated nature of the neighborhood and the difficulties of real estate development with the pre-existing pollution along the waterfront & by a local government that hinders any potential for private investment.

East Boston is home to one of Boston's more popular public Beaches . Constitution Beach -- which is known to locals as "Shays Beach" -- is a small beach located in the Orient Heights section of the community. It has been undergoing renovations since the mid 1990s and is entering the final stages of the renovation process, in which a new public bathhouse and refreshment stand will be built. During peak season, it is not uncommon to see more than 1,000 residents on the sands of Constitution Beach.

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East Boston