Neapolitan Fishermen · The Airport That Took the Waterfront · A Community That Stayed
The other Italian Boston — less famous, more forgotten, no less real
| Period of Italian Settlement | 1890s–1960s (peak 1920s–1950s) |
| Primary Origins | Naples and Campania; Calabria; Abruzzo; some Sicilian |
| Key Institution | Sacred Heart Church (Central Square) — spiritual centre of Italian East Boston |
| Major Disruption | Logan Airport expansion (1940s–1970s) displaced significant portions of the neighbourhood |
| Current Character | Latin American majority since 1980s; Italian heritage visible in parish records and older families |
| Notable Local | Donald Gleason (Donnie Eastie), longtime community organiser who documented the old neighbourhood |
East Boston occupies a peninsula — originally a cluster of islands that were landfilled together in the early nineteenth century — separated from the main city by Boston Harbour. Before the Blue Line tunnel opened in 1904, the only way to get there was by ferry, which made it a distinct community in a way that few Boston neighbourhoods ever were: an island of working people cut off from downtown by water.
The East Boston Company, founded in the 1830s, marketed the new landfill as a residential development for the respectable middle class. What it became instead was an entry point for immigrants — first the Irish, then the Eastern European Jews, then, from the 1890s onward, Italians from Naples, Calabria, and Abruzzo who found the waterfront air familiar and the ferry to Jeffries Point a manageable crossing from the ships that had brought them to Boston Harbour.
The first Italian arrivals in East Boston were predominantly from Naples and the surrounding Campanian towns — labourers and fishermen who had passed through Naples before emigrating, and who recognised the harbour-side life that East Boston offered as something close to what they had left. The fishing trade along the East Boston waterfront, particularly around Jeffries Point, was substantially Italian-run by the 1910s.
By the 1920s, the streets of East Boston's core — Meridian Street, Bennington Street, Sumner Street, Orient Heights — were lined with Italian grocery stores, barbers, funeral homes, and the social clubs that served as informal community halls. Sacred Heart Church, in Central Square, became the spiritual centre of Italian East Boston, displacing the earlier Irish parishes in the neighbourhood's devotional geography.
East Boston's Italian community was smaller and less architecturally concentrated than the North End, but it was in some ways more economically diverse. The proximity to the waterfront industries and to the rapidly expanding airport created employment opportunities in trades and small manufacturing that complemented the fishing economy. By the 1930s there was a discernible Italian professional class in East Boston — doctors, lawyers, contractors — who had come up through the neighbourhood's parochial schools and established themselves in the streets where their parents and grandparents had first landed.
The Italian East Boston community maintained its own mutual aid societies, its own festa calendar (centred on the neighbourhood's churches rather than the North End's street processions), and its own newspaper stands carrying the Italian-language press — L'Italia, Il Progresso Italo-Americano — that connected the neighbourhood to the broader Italian-American world.
The most significant event in East Boston's Italian history was not immigration but demolition. Logan International Airport, which began as a small municipal field in 1923, expanded relentlessly across the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, claiming waterfront land that had been the heart of the neighbourhood's Italian settlement.
The expansion displaced thousands of families. The streets around Jeffries Point and Orient Heights were partially demolished to extend runways. The fishing community that had operated from the waterfront was squeezed out. Families who had lived in the same block for two or three generations were relocated to Revere, Winthrop, or the North Shore suburbs — a dispersal that fractured the community's geographic coherence without eliminating its cultural memory.
The families who stayed — and many did — found themselves in a neighbourhood whose Italian character was being simultaneously eroded by airport noise and demographic change. By the 1970s, Latin American immigration was transforming the remaining streets, and by the 1990s East Boston had become predominantly Central American. The Italian community had largely dispersed to the suburbs.
What remained was the parish infrastructure — Sacred Heart Church, the parochial school, the cemetery records — and a generation of older families who had stayed. The Italian mutual aid society records and the parish baptismal registers at Sacred Heart are the primary genealogical resources for descendants of East Boston's Italian community.
Sacred Heart Church on Meridian Street holds baptism, marriage, and burial records from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth. The Boston City Archives holds voter registration and assessment records that can place a family at a specific address. Once you have a village of origin (often recoverable from naturalization papers), the Italian Stato Civile records at Antenati.san.beniculturali.it give multi-generational family data for Neapolitan and Campanian families.
The North End's Italian community was physically preserved — the narrow streets, the feast societies, the pastry shops — while East Boston's was fractured by the airport expansion and demographic transition. Less of the built environment survived, which means less of the cultural memory is physically anchored. But for families with East Boston roots, the community was no less real or formative.
Campania (Naples and surrounding provinces) was the dominant origin, supplemented by Calabria and Abruzzo. Unlike the North End's strong Sicilian presence — particularly from Sciacca — East Boston's Italian community was predominantly from the mainland south. This distinction matters for genealogical research: Campanian civil records are held in provincial archives in Naples, Salerno, and Avellino, rather than in the Sicilian archives.
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