Boston's South End is one of the largest intact Victorian row house districts in the United States. It also has stylish twenty-first century condo buildings, Modernist housing projects, and award-winning gardens and parks. For centuries, people have come to this densely populated one square mile neighborhood carrying their dreams of a better life and ideas about what constitutes healthy urban living.

The South End has been home to nineteenth century preachers, sixties radicals, and millennial tech entrepreneurs. It welcomed people from Europe, Asia, the southern United States, Caribbean, and Latin America at a time when many other places rejected them. Sheltering poets, crusading journalists, and people of all incomes, the neighborhood was a place where women could pursue ideas and careers that traditional society had closed off to them and LGBTQ people could be themselves and create lives free of prejudice.

This book chronicles how this beautiful neighborhood came into being and the many dramas, triumphs, and tragedies that have happened here.