Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: How large is the South End neighborhood of Boston?
The South End is a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is bordered by Back Bay, Chinatown, and Roxbury. It is distinguished from other neighborhoods by its Victorian style houses and the many parks in and around the area. The South End is the largest intact Victorian row house district in the country, which is made up of over 300 acres.[2] Eleven residential parks are scattered around the South End. In 1973, the South End was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.[2] The construction of the South End began in 1849 when the neighborhood was built on tidal marshes.
Though housing in the South End is very expensive by U.S. and Greater Boston standards—it is rare to find a one bedroom condo for less than $400,000—the South End remains less expensive than the wealthiest central Boston neighborhoods (Beacon Hill and the Back Bay).
South of downtown are the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Mid Dorchester, and South Boston. Dorchester, including Mid Dorchester, is Boston's largest neighborhood and predominantly a working class community considered to be Boston's most diverse. Roxbury is populated largely by African Americans, Caribbean Americans, and Latinos and is historically the center of Boston's black community. Jamaica Plain is a community of white professionals and Latinos, and includes the larger side of the Arnold Arboretum. South Boston is a predominantly Irish-American neighborhood, which hosts the city's annual St. Patrick's Day parade.
As part of a plan to create a "New Boston", the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) and its 1957 successor, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, redeveloped neighborhoods throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The New York Streets section of the South End was redeveloped before the West End, and in the 1960s Scollay Square was leveled to create the Brutalist Government Center afterwards. The motivation behind these projects was to replace neighborhoods that had been classified as slums with neighborhoods that would bring in increased tax revenues. It is estimated that before the renewal project, the tax revenue from the West End was approximately $546,000 a year.
The Boston Courant was a weekly newspaper in Boston, whose coverage focused on issues of local interest to the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Downtown, Fenway, South End, and Waterfront neighborhoods. It had a circulation of over 40,000. 
The "Boston Courant" announced its closure in February 2016 after losing a wrongful termination lawsuit. In April 2016, the former publisher debuted the "Boston Guardian", with similar editorial content and neighborhood coverage.
The Boston Fire Department is still largely segregated. The current composition of firehouses largely depends on the neighborhood in which it is located. In the more affluent South End neighborhood, all 19 firefighters are white while in the rougher area of Hyde Park (Cleary Square) 38 of the 41 firefighters identify as minority. As of 2010, exactly 37 years after the court decree, one third of Boston firefighters are minorities. White firefighters were found to be positioned in the busiest fire units as opposed to minorities. In the busiest firehouses of Boston, 22% are minorities and 78% are white. Furthermore, 90 percent of firefighters hired since the consent decree ended in 2003 are more likely to be promoted than minorities.
The West End is a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, bounded generally by Cambridge Street to the south, the Charles River to the west and northwest, North Washington Street on the north and northeast, and New Sudbury Street on the east. Beacon Hill is to the south, and the North End is to the east. A late 1950s urban renewal project razed a large Italian and Jewish enclave in order to redevelop the area.
In the early parts of the 20th century, large waves of Italian and Irish immigrants began to settle into the areas just outside the center of Boston. South Medford soon became an enclave for Italian-Americans who brought with them the rich cultural heritage of "the old country" which they had previously bestowed so deeply upon Boston's North End neighborhood.
The South End's population has been diverse since the 1880s when Irish, Lebanese, Jewish, African-American, and Greek populations began to settle in the neighborhood. In the 1930s a substantial immigration from Canada's maritime provinces found economic opportunity in Boston, and homes in the South End neighborhood.
As the city of Boston has grown and evolved, its neighborhoods have changed as well. The names of the West End, North End, and South End refer to their positions on the Shawmut Peninsula, the original extent of Boston. Due to the annexation of surrounding communities, those neighborhoods are no longer at those geographic extremities. The Back Bay and Bay Village neighborhoods were formerly part of an actual bay, becoming the neighborhoods they are today after landfill projects expanded the size of the city. Brighton (including Allston), Charlestown, Dorchester (including South Boston, Mid Dorchester, Mattapan, and Hyde Park), Roxbury (including West Roxbury, Roslindale and Jamaica Plain), have all at some point been municipalities independent from downtown Boston, providing a source of well-defined boundaries for the largest areas.
The western part of the neighborhood was originally part of the body of water known as the Back Bay, west of the Boston Neck isthmus. This area was once known as South Bay, as the original waterline was in the area of Arlington Street (formerly Ferdinand Street). In the 1820s, the neighborhood was landfilled by developer Ephraim Marsh, in partnership with Francis Cabot Lowell, before the more extensive landfills of the adjacent Back Bay and South End neighborhoods. Through its history, the neighborhood has been known at different times as the Church Street District, South Cove, and Kerry Village.
The Council created a districting committee to propose several different possible district maps and hold public hearings before presenting one plan to the Council to approve. State law required the City Council to make a final decision on the districts within 90 days of being notified that the referendum had officially passed, meaning that the Council voting on the districts would be the 1982 Council, not the 1981 Council creating them. Then-president Patrick McDonough, who opposed district representation, appointed Rosemary Sansone, a major advocate of district representation, as chair of the districting committee, but chose Frederick C. Langone, Dapper O'Neil, and John W. Sears as the other three members, all of whom opposed district representation. Both Langone and O'Neil would be returning to the Council in 1982, but Sansone did not run for re-election in 1981 and would not be able to vote on the district boundaries if the committee did not work quickly to present a plan to the Council before the end of the year. Public hearings over possible district boundaries were full of heated debate between advocates of drawing lines to protect neighborhood unity and advocates of drawing lines to create two predominantly minority districts and give minorities a voice in local government. Contention centered around Dorchester and the South End. Dorchester, Boston's largest neighborhood, needed to be split into at least two districts. A simple split in half would create either a north and a south district or an east and a west district. An east district would be largely White (75% or greater) and a west district would be largely African-American. North and south districts would have less extreme majorities. Many residents were opposed to both divisions, stating that they would increase racial segregation in Dorchester and continue the political powerlessness of minorities. A more complicated split taking into account areas with large minority populations would create one predominantly minority district and one predominantly white district but treat Dorchester as several smaller neighborhoods to be divvied up among surrounding neighborhoods rather than as one community. In various proposals, the South End, due to its location, was grouped with either South Boston or Back Bay/Beacon Hill by advocates of neighborhood unity, or Roxbury by advocates of minority-dominated districts.
Working with the city of Boston, GrubStreet founded the Memoir Project in 2006, which involves older residents in 10 Boston neighborhoods, including Nantucket, to write. The joint effort aims at teaching and encouraging the elderly to use writing as a creative outlet as well as document and preserve their stories for future generations. Neighborhoods involved include: Chinatown, Charlestown, East Boston, Mattapan, Roxbury, South Boston, and the North End. Two anthologies of collected works have been published: "Born Before Plastic" and “My Legacy Is Simply This: Stories From Boston’s Most Endearing Neighborhoods.” Another anthology is to be published.
The South End is host to numerous community organizations including South End Community Health Center, South End Baseball, Youth Enrichment Services, the South End Lower Roxbury Open Space Land Trust, Mytown (an organization training youth to lead walking tours on neighborhood and Boston history), the South End Historical Society, Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion, and United South End Settlements.
The South End used to be known as a gay, artistic, and cultural neighborhood, although rising costs in the neighborhood threaten this character. Unlike in cities such as New York City, there are no city policies to help artists keep their long-term studios. Art galleries, however, are flourishing even though there are not many. GardenMoms, now one of Boston's most popular online parent groups with over 2500 members citywide, was started by several South End moms in 2002, and helped confirm the role of families as a growing and important facet of this community. (It is named after the South End cafe it started in, The Garden of Eden.)[21]
The land belonging to the South End has been part of the city of Boston since its creation, though at the time of first settlement it was much smaller and surrounded by large tidal flats. The neighborhood was expanded and developed by filling in the marshlands, part of a larger project of the filling of Boston's Back Bay (north and west of Washington Street) and South Bay (south and east of Washington Street), from the 1830s to the 1870s. Fill was brought in by trains from large trenches of gravel excavated in Needham, Massachusetts. The South End was filled and developed before the neighborhood now known as Back Bay, which was mostly built after the American Civil War. Nineteenth-century technology did not allow for driving steel piles into bedrock, and instead a system of submerged timbers provided an understructure for most South End buildings.[5] Recent decreases in underground water levels have caused damage to some wood pilings by exposing them to air. A series of monitoring wells have been drilled and the water level is now checked by the Boston Groundwater Trust,[6] and can be adjusted by the introduction of water.
By 1950, Boston was slumping. Few major buildings were being built anywhere in the city. Factories were closing and moving their operations south, where labor was cheaper. The assets Boston had—excellent banks, hospitals, universities and technical know-how—were minimal parts of the U.S. economy. To combat this downturn, Boston's politicians enacted urban renewal policies, which resulted in the demolition of several neighborhoods, including the New York Streets district in the South End, the old West End, a largely Jewish and Italian neighborhood, and Scollay Square. In their places went a new headquarters for the Boston Herald, the Charles River Park apartment complex, additions to Massachusetts General Hospital, and Government Center. These projects displaced thousands, closed hundreds of businesses, and provoked a furious backlash, which in turn ensured the survival of many historic neighborhoods.
The term has been adopted in Boston to refer to young people who reside outside of Boston's core neighborhoods of Back Bay, Bay Village, Beacon Hill, Leather District, South End, North End, and the West End. Given Boston's natural and manmade geography, individuals from other neighborhoods in Boston must access the city's social center via one of the various bridges or tunnels that lead into central Boston.
The cathedral is located in the city's South End neighborhood, at 1400 Washington St. Although the South End was initially developed for Boston's emerging Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class, the neighborhood transitioned to new immigrants, especially Irish, as middle class owners moved to the new Back Bay neighborhood.
The Boston Tea Party was a concert venue located first at 53 Berkeley Street in the South End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, and later relocated to 15 Lansdowne Street in the former site of competitor, the Ark, in Boston's Kenmore Square neighborhood, across the street from Fenway Park. It operated from 1967 to the end of 1970. Its closing was due in part to the increasing cost of hiring bands who were playing more and more at large outdoor festivals and arena rock concerts.
The busing plan affected the entire city, though the working-class neighborhoods of the racially divided city—whose children went predominantly to public schools—were most affected: the predominantly Irish-American neighborhoods of West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park, Charlestown, and South Boston and; the predominantly Italian-American neighborhood of the North End; the predominantly black neighborhoods of Roxbury, Mattapan, and the South End; and the mixed but segregated neighborhood of Dorchester.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the city of Butte, Montana has the highest percentage of Irish Americans per capita of any city in the United States, with around one-quarter of the population reporting Irish ancestry. Butte's Irish Catholic population originates from the waves of Irish immigrants who arrived in the city in the late-nineteenth century to work in the industrial mines. By population, however, Boston and Philadelphia have the two largest Irish American populations in the country. There are Irish neighborhoods scattered all throughout Boston, most notably South Boston. Many of Philadelphia's Irish neighborhoods are located in the Northeast Philadelphia section of the city, particularly in the Fishtown, Mayfair, and Kensington neighborhoods, as well as the South Philadelphia section, most notably the Pennsport ("Two Street" to the locals) neighborhood. There are large Irish populations in the Boston and Philadelphia metropolitan areas as well. The South Side of Chicago, Illinois also has a large Irish community, who refer to themselves as the Southside Irish.
By the 1950s, Boston's West End had turned into a working poor residential area with scattered businesses with small meandering roads much like the North End. According to most residents, the West End was a good place to live at this time. The once overcrowded neighborhood was in the process of "deslumming" and the population had dropped to around 7,500 residents. By the end of the 1950s, over half of the neighborhood would be completely leveled to be replaced with residential high rises as part of a large scale urban renewal project.
South End, Boston is a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
South of Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and Dorchester are the neighborhoods of Mattapan, Roslindale, Hyde Park, and West Roxbury. Roslindale is known for its small business district and includes the smaller side of the Arnold Arboretum. Roslindale has also recently become a majority-minority neighborhood. Mattapan remains the neighborhood with Boston's highest concentrations of African Americans. Hyde Park and West Roxbury have a distinct suburban feel, while still being a part of the city of Boston. Both neighborhoods have large areas of wooded parks and recreation land. Hyde Park is populated largely by African Americans and Caribbean Americans, whereas West Roxbury is predominantly white with rapidly growing African American and Latino populations.