A Community History

The Somerville of the early 1980s looked remarkably different from the scene that I encountered in Davis Square last July. For most of Somerville’s history, the city’s architecture and character was colored by its role in heavy industry. In his tracing of metropolitan Boston’s development, urban historian James O’Connell describes how “slaughterhouses, brickyard, and iron and steel foundries were sited along Somerville Avenue and the railroad tracks … While other communities created parks and attractive residential enclaves on hilltops, Somerville developers cut down hills to fill wetlands, where they built railroads and factories” (116). In the Somerville of the early 1900s, only fifty-two of 2,400 acres were dedicated to parks and playgrounds (116). Conversely, in 2023, the digital real estate company Opendoor.com voted Somerville the most family-friendly city in America, citing in particular Somerville’s 60 public parks as the reason for their choice and noting that 100% of families live within a 10-minute walking distance to a park. So, how can we understand the scope of this change? 

Before it was a part of the city of Somerville, the land which now houses Davis Square was originally the home of the Pawtucket indigenous people. Somerville was settled by British colonists in 1630, as a part of Charlestown. After the Revolutionary War, the area began to shape from a pastoral farming community into a more urban development, and in 1842 Somerville formally split from Charlestown before becoming established as its own independent city in 1872 (Ostrander 20). The city’s population swelled dramatically between 1840 and 1900 as “the fields and brickyards of Somerville gradually gave way to looming factory buildings and belching smokestacks,” in large part due to the influx of Irish immigrants which made up one-fifth of the city’s total population (Reed 8). Somerville was connected to the greater Boston area through the railroad and became fully entrenched as a small-scale manufacturing city, which functioned as “an urbanized continuation of Boston” (O’Connell 115). Somerville’s status as an industrial manufacturing city, rather than a more residential suburb, solidified its working class roots: to house the poorly-paid workers laboring in the city’s factories and manufacturing plants, developers packed residents into dense rows of two-and three family townhouses. City centers housed neighborhood groceries and lunch counters, factories belched gray smoke, and residents were jammed like sardines into homes with small lots and no parks—as the Boston Evening Transcript snidely remarked in 1913, “a great part of this district is rather unattractive” (“Spring Real Estate Supplement”).