Screening: Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston

Special Guest: Carmen Pola, Boston Politician and Community Activist

The story of what happened to Mission Hill is the story of many of America’s older ethnic neighborhoods. Seventy years ago, Mission Hill was an Irish neighborhood of homes and small stores in which people lived near their schools, their churches, and their shopping areas. But between 1940 and 1980 it changed: thousands of units of public housing were built and decayed there. Nearby hospitals expanded, displacing people from their homes. Developers and speculators bought and sold property and built twenty-story apartment houses. A new, poor population and an affluent professional population arrived to compete for parts of the old neighborhood.

Today this film, completed in 1978, remains unique in presenting one neighborhood’s social history set against the larger forces that reshaped a major American city. A must for courses in urban studies, race relations, and social problems.

Neighborhood Matters is a lunchtime series that celebrates the ways in which community groups have shaped the neighborhoods surrounding the Northeastern campus. This series is co-curated by the Northeastern Center for the Arts and the Archives and Special Collections at the Northeastern University Library.

Lunch will be served.

Partner: Northeastern Center for the Arts, Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern Libraries

Part of the Neighborhood Matters Screening Series