Where Irish immigrants lived in Boston: Fort Hill and the North End

Where Irish immigrants lived in Boston between 1847 and 1857 comes down to three districts: Fort Hill, the North End around North Square, and the waterfront blocks along Broad Street. Landlords split old merchant houses and warehouse lofts into subdivided rooms in each, and newcomers settled closest to the wharves where day labour was hired. By 1850, Irish residents made up more than half of the North End’s population alone.

Fort Hill and the tenements of Half Moon Place

Fort Hill sat on rising ground close to the harbour, in what is now Boston’s Financial District. Irish arrivals fleeing the coffin ships of the late 1840s crowded onto the hill and its surrounding streets, including Hope Street and Ann Street, alongside families already settled in the North End. Most had left the south west of Ireland, particularly counties Cork, Galway, Kerry, and Clare, and arrived through a quarantine station on Deer Island in Boston harbour, established at the end of May 1847 to screen sick passengers before the healthy majority moved on into the city.

By the years around the Civil War, the hill had become a dense knot of tenements, timber shanties, and dwellings cut into the slope itself. One of its best documented courts was Half Moon Place, a cul-de-sac lined with four storey tenement buildings hung with washing lines and reached by long external staircases, surrounded by 14 privies that investigators found overflowing when they inspected the court in 1849. A surviving sketch of the place is dated that same year, the year cholera reached it and killed dozens of the Irish families living there.

Boston’s city physician, investigating the district for the Committee of Internal Health, described what he found in blunt terms: a “perfect hive of human beings, without comforts and mostly without common necessaries,” where families lived “huddled together like brutes,” sometimes with wife and husband, brothers and sisters, sharing a single bed. His report noted dwellings on the hill housing as many as 100 people around a single sink and a single toilet, and counted 586 cellars in use as living quarters across the city, with as many as 15 people crowded into a cellar with no light or ventilation of its own.

Tension over the neighbourhood’s Irish population came to a head in June 1847, when nativist groups organised a march aimed at Fort Hill’s poorest residents. Bishop John B. Fitzpatrick urged Irish residents of Fort Hill and the North End to stay inside rather than confront the marchers, and city officials worked to prevent the demonstration from turning violent. The Boston Daily Evening Transcript, reporting on that summer’s arrivals, described the newcomers as “thoughtless, head-strong, imprudent people,” language typical of how the city’s press wrote about the district’s residents.

The North End’s Irish quarter around North Square

Irish newcomers began settling around North Square in the 1840s, drawn in part by St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Endicott Street. Founded in 1836, it was already the anchor of the city’s first Irish parish and remained a centre of parish life through the Famine years.

Property owners converted the North End’s old merchant mansions into boarding houses and subdivided tenement rooms to absorb the influx. Between 1845 and 1855, an estimated 50,000 Irish immigrants landed in Boston, according to Boston College’s Global Boston research project, enough to swell the city’s population by roughly half over that decade. By 1850, Irish residents made up more than half of the North End’s population, and researchers describe living conditions there in those years as the worst in the city.

Men from the North End took what work the wharves and building sites offered: loading and unloading ships, digging foundations, carrying hods of brick and mortar on construction crews, driving teams of horses between warehouses. Women went into domestic service in the households of Boston families, or took in washing and piecework at home. Grinding poverty and overcrowding brought the same sanitation failures documented on Fort Hill, and smallpox moved through the North End’s tenements alongside cholera through these years.

Broad Street and the waterfront blocks

Broad Street ran down toward the harbour docks and had an Irish population from at least the 1830s. On 11 June 1837, a young volunteer firefighter returning from a call jostled mourners in an Irish funeral procession on the street, and the confrontation grew into one of the era’s largest street riots, drawing roughly 800 active participants and an estimated 10,000 onlookers before Boston’s mayor called out state militia to end it. Police arrested 34 Irish Americans and four Yankees; a jury convicted the Irish defendants and acquitted the Yankees. The disorder helped push the city toward a paid fire department that September and a police department the following year.

Irish settlement on Broad Street continued through the Famine decade and after. Architectural drawings held by Historic New England, for stores and tenements built for developer Matthew Bartlett at Broad and Belmont streets, are dated 1856, evidence that landlords were still adding subdivided housing stock to the street a decade after the heaviest Famine arrivals. Rents on Broad Street, as on Fort Hill and in the North End, stayed high relative to the quality of the rooms on offer, since a captive population competing for beds within walking distance of the docks left landlords little reason to lower them.

Overcrowding and the 1849 cholera epidemic

Cholera reached Boston in the summer of 1849, carried by emigrant ships arriving from England. By the end of the year, the city had recorded 611 cholera deaths, more than 500 of them among Irish immigrants. The Boston Committee of Internal Health investigated the outbreak and published its findings that December in the Report of the Committee of Internal Health on the Asiatic Cholera, which described overcrowding, poor ventilation, and failed drainage in the tenements of Fort Hill and the North End. Working from the miasma theory common to the period, the committee tied the disease more to the perceived habits of residents than to the housing itself.

Public health reformer Lemuel Shattuck went further the following spring. His Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts, presented in April 1850, gathered birth and death records street by street across the city, an early use of demographic data to describe public health, and it drew on Boston’s Irish tenement districts for some of its starkest evidence.

Where Irish immigrants lived in Boston, and why

Proximity to work shaped where families settled more than anything else. Men from Fort Hill, the North End, and Broad Street found work as dockworkers, hod carriers, teamsters, and general labourers, while many women went into domestic service. Living within walking distance of the wharves and rail yards where such work was hired mattered more to a family’s survival than the size or condition of a room.

Landlords found that dividing existing buildings into small rented spaces was more profitable than keeping them as single-family houses, and the sheer scale of demand meant even rooms without light or ventilation found tenants at high rents. As the decade wore on, some families moved to the newly filled land at South Cove, and later to South Boston and Charlestown, though Fort Hill, the North End, and Broad Street held the heaviest concentrations of Boston’s Irish population through the 1850s.

Kinship reinforced the pattern. Immigrants who already had a relative, a former neighbour, or someone from the same parish at home settled near them rather than searching the wider city for cheaper or healthier housing, which meant a single overcrowded court could keep filling long after conditions inside it were already notorious. The result was a set of districts that grew denser rather than wider through the worst famine years, even as the city’s overall land area was expanding through landfill projects elsewhere in the harbour.

What historians cannot know

Much of the surviving record of these tenements comes from outsiders: municipal health inspectors, newspaper reporters, and clergy writing for audiences already inclined to read Irish poverty as a moral failing rather than a housing crisis. Few of the people who actually lived in Half Moon Place or the tenement blocks of Broad Street left written accounts of daily life there in their own words.

Figures for how many people occupied any single building at a given time are estimates drawn from health reports and later research rather than a complete census, and the individual names and addresses of most tenants in these districts have not survived. City directories of the period listed household heads inconsistently, especially for families who moved within months of arriving, and lodgers sharing a single room with several other households often went unrecorded altogether. What can be said with confidence is where the districts stood, how dense they became, and how the city’s institutions responded once disease exposed the conditions inside them.

What became of Fort Hill

Fort Hill did not survive as a neighbourhood. In the two decades after the Civil War, the city levelled the hill itself and used the excavated earth to fill the harbour along what became Atlantic Avenue, clearing the way for warehouses and offices. The Irish families who had crowded its slopes and courts were displaced as the ground beneath them was carted away. Today the site lies inside Boston’s Financial District, with little at street level to mark the tenements, courts, and staircases that once stood there.

The North End’s Irish population thinned over the following decades too, as newer arrivals from Italy began moving into the same streets around North Square. Broad Street, closer to the working harbour, kept a mixed immigrant population well into the twentieth century. Anyone tracing where Irish immigrants lived in Boston through these years is working from the same patchwork of health reports, parish registers, and newspaper accounts described above, and the gaps in that record are as real as the facts it does confirm.

Sources and further reading

• Report of the Committee of Internal Health on the Asiatic Cholera, City of Boston, 1849 (digitised collection, National Library of Medicine).
• Lemuel Shattuck, Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts, 1850.
• Global Boston, Boston College digital history project: “Irish,” “The North End,” and “Cholera Report” pages.
• U.S. National Park Service, “President John F. Kennedy and the History of Irish Immigration in Boston.”
• Boston Irish, “These Thoughtless, Head-Strong, Imprudent People: June 1847 and the Mass Arrival of the Famine Irish,” 2024.
• Historic New England, architectural drawings collection: stores and tenements for Matthew Bartlett, Broad and Belmont Streets, Boston, 1856.

For the epidemic that struck these same streets, see how cholera moved through Boston’s Irish tenements. For the crossing that brought these families to the city in the first place, see what the coffin ships of Black ‘47 were like. For the parish networks that grew up around St. Mary’s, see how Boston’s Irish Catholics built mutual aid through their parishes.