Interior House Painter
Mattapan MA

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Mattapan
Neighborhood of Boston
The Mattapan-Ashmont Trolley
Country	United States
State	Massachusetts
County	Suffolk
Neighborhood of	Boston
Annexed by Boston	1870
Population  (2010)	36,480
Time zone	UTC-5 (Eastern)
Zip Code	02126
Area code(s)	617 / 857

Mattapan is a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. Historically a section of neighboring Dorchester, Mattapan became a part of Boston when Dorchester was annexed in 1870. Mattapan is the original Native American name for the Dorchester area, possibly meaning “a place to sit.” As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 36,480, with the majority of its population immigrants.

Like other neighborhoods of the late 19th and early 20th century, Mattapan developed, residentially and commercially, as the railroads and streetcars made downtown Boston increasingly accessible. Predominantly residential, Mattapan is a mix of public housing, small apartment buildings, single-family houses, and two- and three-family houses (known locally as “Three-Deckers” or “Triple-Deckers”). Blue Hill Avenue and Mattapan Square, where Blue Hill Avenue, River Street, and Cummins Highway meet, are the commercial heart of the neighborhood, home to banks, law offices, restaurants, and retail shops. The new Mattapan Branch of the Boston Public library opened 2009, at a cost of more than $4 million. Mattapan has a large portion of green space within the neighborhood. The Harambee Park, the Franklin Park Zoo, the Boston Nature Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, Clark-Cooper Community Gardens, and historic Forest Hill Cemetery can all be considered green space within the neighborhood of Mattapan. Mattapan’s demographics are diverse, with a large population of Haitians, Caribbean immigrants, and African Americans. Mattapan has public services such as a recently renovated community health center, and constable services. Mattapan has a trolley running through it, which is accessible via Ashmont.

History

Indigenous

Mattapan was named and first inhabited by Native Americans. Although humans are known to have inhabited eastern North America for at least 15,000 years, the presence of a continental ice sheet extending south to the level of Long Island and Cape Cod would have limited human habitation in Mattapan until the end of the last Ice Age, about 11,700 years ago. Sea level rise since then and disruption of soil layers from urban development in Boston limit the earliest confirmed settlements in the Mattapan area to the Woodland period beginning 2000 years ago, when the archaeological record attests to hunting, fishing, and shellfish gathering around the Neponset River and quarrying for stone points in the Blue Hills.

Mattapan was the name given by Massachusett Native Americans to an area north of the Neponset River, possibly meaning “a sitting down place” related to mattappu or “he sits down.” It fell within the area controlled by the Neponset sachem Chickatawbut at the time of contact with English explorers and settlers in the early seventeenth century. Although the Massachusett practiced a seasonally shifting settlement pattern, they have left a lasting impact on the layout of current day Mattapan in the form of footpaths that were adopted and eventually transformed into roadways by later settlers: Mattapan and Lower Mills were the main fords of the Neponset River prior to contact, and present day Adams St and River St connected Mattapan to fishing weirs at Lower Mills and the Muddy River outlet, while Squantum St and Central Ave in Milton connected it to shell fishing at Moswetuset Hummock and quarrying in the Blue Hills, respectively.

Dorchester was settled by English colonists in 1630 and a source from 1634 lists “Matampan” as the Massachusett name for Dorchester. Virgin soil epidemics ravaged the Massachusett in the early 1600s, with smallpox killing Chickatawbut and a large portion of his 3000 warriors in 1633, after which his brother and successor as sachem, Cutshamekin sold large portions of Massachusett land along the Neponset River. Migration of Massachusett to praying towns in the mid-1600s and forced internment of Native Americans during King Philip’s War led to further declines in native influence on Mattapan, though later Massachusett sachems still held and sold title to lands in Dorchester.

Twentieth Century

At the turn of the 20th century, the population of Mattapan was largely Caucasian, but starting in the late 1960s, blockbusting intentionally designed to destabilize the neighborhood drove many long-term residents out of Mattapan. In the 1980s, a significant number of Haitians immigrated to Mattapan, leading to the current demographic population. Mattapan has become an important center for the Haitian cultural, social, and political life in the state of Massachusetts. As of 2015, Mattapan also has a large population of African Americans, Jamaicans, and other Caribbean immigrants.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Mattapan underwent a major change in the makeup of its population. It shifted from a predominantly Jewish neighborhood to one that is now largely African American and Caribbean American having a population of 37,486 that is over 77% African American and Caribbean American.

The period from 1968 to 1970 made up the most dramatic period of ethnic transition in Boston. Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, in their 1991 book The Death of an American Jewish Community, argue that redlining, blockbusting, and fear in neighborhood residents created by real estate agents brought about panic selling and white flight. The banking consortium Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (B-BURG) allegedly drove the Jewish community out of Mattapan and are held partially responsible for the ensuing deterioration of the neighborhood, especially along the Blue Hill Avenue corridor. According to Levine and Harmon, the reason behind this orchestrated attack on the community was to lower market values to buy property, sell the housing with federally guaranteed loans at inflated prices to black families who could not afford it, and to get the white community to buy property owned by the banks in the suburbs. Gerald Gamm disputes these allegations in his 1999 book Urban Exodus, arguing that differences between the Jewish and Catholic communities in Boston constituted the greater contributing factor. As Jewish people moved out of Mattapan, Caribbean Americans and African Americans began to move in.

Transportation