Interior House Painter
Hyde Park MA

Hyde Park
Neighborhood of Boston
The First Congregational Church of Hyde Park
Seal
Nickname(s):  A Small Town in the City
Motto(s):  Si Tentas Perfice (Latin) “If you begin, finish”
Country	United States
State	Massachusetts
County	Suffolk
Neighborhood of	Boston
Incorporated	April 22, 1868
Annexed by Boston	January 1, 1912
Time zone	UTC−5 (Eastern)
ZIP Code	02136
Area code	617/857
Website	Official website

Hyde Park is the southernmost neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Situated 7.9 miles south of downtown Boston, it is home to a diverse range of people, housing types and social groups. It is an urban location with suburban characteristics.

Hyde Park is covered by Boston Police Department District E-18 located in Cleary Square, and the Boston Fire Department station on Fairmount Avenue is the quarters of Ladder Company 28 & Engine Company 48. Boston EMS Ambulance Station 18 is located on Dana Avenue. Hyde Park also has a branch of the Boston Public Library.

The George Wright Golf Course, named for Baseball Hall of Fame and Boston Red Stockings shortstop George Wright, is in Hyde Park and Roslindale. It is a Donald Ross-designed course and is considered one of his finest designs.

Hyde Park has taken the motto “A Small Town in the City” because of its suburban feel. It was the only town annexed by majority vote of the residents into the City of Boston. The area was established in the 1660s and grew into a hub of paper and cotton manufacturing in the eighteenth century. The extension of rail lines from Boston in the 1850s spurred the area’s residential development. The Readville section of Hyde Park contained a large manufacturing base housing the massive operations of the B. F. Sturtevant Company and the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad Locomotive and Car Shops.

Hyde Park and some of its residents have been important part of societal change in the United States. It was once home to the first all African-American army unit, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. The regiment was made famous in the movie Glory. Hyde Park was home to the prominent abolitionists the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, as well as Theodore Dwight Weld, for whom Weld Hall in Hyde Park is named.

History

In 1845, retired businessman Henry Grew took his family on vacation to an area south of the City of Boston, in what was then the western section of Dorchester, and came to a spot in the Neponset River valley with an unexpectedly pleasant view of the nearby Blue Hills. He purchased several hundred acres of land there (which later became known as “Grew’s Woods”, partially preserved today as the Stony Brook Reservation and the George Wright Golf Course) and moved to the area in 1847. (Grew later served as chairman of the new Town of Hyde Park’s first Board of Selectmen and was one of its most prominent citizens.) During the next few years, a group called the Hyde Park Land Company bought about 200 acres of land in the area and began building houses around a small and unofficial passenger stop on the Boston and Providence Railroad that had developed at Kenny’s Bridge, located on the road from Dedham to Milton Lower Mills (the road was River Street, and the station today is Hyde Park Station). At that time, the closest actual station was in the manufacturing district of Readville (formerly Low Plains) in Dedham.

Alpheus Perley Blake is considered the founder of Hyde Park. He was the organizer in 1856 of the Fairmount Land Company and the Twenty Associates, which developed the Fairmount Hill on the western side of Brush Hill Road in Milton. This led to the establishment of a bridge over the Neponset River and a new station on the New York and New England Railroad, which is today’s Fairmount Station. In addition to Blake, The Twenty Associates included William E. Abbot, Amos Angell, Ira L. Benton, Enoch Blake, John Newton Brown, George W. Currier, Hypolitus Fisk, John C. French, David Higgins, John S. Hobbs, Samuel Salmon Mooney, William Nightingale, J. Wentworth Payson, Dwight B. Rich, Alphonso Robinson, William H. Seavey, Daniel Warren, and John Williams. Within a few years, the two land companies had merged and growth in the area accelerated. By 1867, the settlements had grown to the point where there were 6 railroad stations in the area. A formal petition was made to the General Court of the Commonwealth and, after settling land and boundary disputes with Dedham and Milton, the Town of Hyde Park was incorporated on April 22, 1868 in Norfolk County from the settled land in Dorchester (Grew’s Woods and the Hyde Park Land Company development), Milton (Fairmount) and Dedham (Readville). It remained a part of Norfolk County until 1912, when the town voted in favor of annexation to the City of Boston in Suffolk County.

The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, one of the first official African-American units in the United States Army and which was commanded by Col. Robert G. Shaw and served during the Civil War, was assembled and trained at Camp Meigs in Readville.

In the 1960s, Hyde Park threatened to secede from Boston over plans to build a Southwest Expressway (Interstate 95) through the town along the route of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, which would bifurcate the neighborhood and displace many residents, as had happened in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. Hyde Park has also faced other challenges along with its fellow Boston neighborhoods, such as the busing crisis of the 1970s.

Hyde Park has had an active industrial history. For over 100 years, it was the main base of the Westinghouse Sturtevant Corporation. The Readville area was home to the Stop & Shop warehouse, until it was moved to Assonet in the early 2000s.

Hyde Park is home to many churches, most notably the Most Precious Blood, Saint Adalbert’s and Saint Anne’s Roman Catholic churches, and the Episcopal Parish of Christ Church (the oldest parish in Hyde Park, now Iglesia de San Juan), the latter of which was designed by the architectural form of Cram Wentworth & Goodhue and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Hyde Park is also the original home of the Boston Crusaders, a world class drum and bugle corps founded in 1940 at the Most Precious Blood Parish.

Transportation

The MBTA Commuter Rail’s Fairmount shuttle to Readville is Hyde Park’s most direct connection with downtown Boston, servicing both the Fairmount and Readville stations. The Providence/Stoughton branch also stops at Hyde Park station in Cleary Square, and the Franklin branch has scheduled stops at all three stations, while servicing mainly the one at Readville. Additionally, several MBTA bus routes (numbers 24, 32, 33 and 50) through Cleary and Logan Squares provide connections to the Orange and Red Lines, at Forest Hills station in Jamaica Plain and Mattapan station in Mattapan respectively. Hyde Park has no subway stations.