The Italian masses that flowed into the North End on the heels of the departing Irish and at the apex of the Jewish settlement found a neighborhood in dire physical condition; a rundown, overcrowded slum of deteriorating tenement buildings.

Like their predecessors, these newly-arrived Italian immigrants also had to contend with Bostonians’ disdain for foreigners. As historian Samuel Adams Drake opined (in 1871) about living conditions in North Square:

The Genoese were followed by the Campanians, who were followed by the Sicilians, the Avellinese, the Neopolitans, and the Abruzzesians. Each group settled in their own area within the North End, creating their own enclave within the greater North End neighborhood.

The North End had also changed in a number of other significant ways over the preceding decades. Formerly Protestant churches were acquired by the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston – reflecting the ascendancy of Irish Catholicism throughout the neighborhood. The Seamen’s Bethel became the Sacred Heart Church in 1871 after Rev. Edward Taylor’s death. The Bulfinch-designed New North Congregational Society became St. Stephen’s Church. In 1873 a new Italian-Portuguese Catholic church, St. John the Baptist, was dedicated, and in the same year St. Leonard’s Church was founded. St. Leonard’s, at the corner of Hanover and Prince Streets, was completed in 1899, becoming the first Italian church in New England and the second oldest in America.>

During this same period, a new Settlement House Movement swept through Boston’s North End. It took several forms. Some settlement houses were established to assist immigrants in adjusting to their new life in America. For example, the North End Union provided food and aid to several generations of immigrants. In the 1880s, it housed the Children’s Mission which developed “The Boston Sand Garden Project”, the city’s first public playground.

A North Bennet Street Industrial School was also founded in 1881 by Pauline Agassiz Shaw to teach Italian and Jewish immigrants skills needed to obtain employment. And eight years later, Lina Hecht set up her Hebrew Industrial School next door to teach needlework skills to Jewish women.

Then there was the “Saturday Evening Girls” library club. It was founded in 1899 by Edith Guerrier, a 21-year-old librarian who maintained a reading room at the North Bennet Street School. She came up with a novel approach to keeping Jewish and Italian young women “off the streets” while at the same time advancing their education and well-being. Her library club held meetings on Saturday evenings at which literary scholars, writers, historians and social reformers would present talks.

Eastern European Jews began settling in the North End as early as 1870. By the early 1900s they comprised 6,300 or almost one-third of the entire neighborhood population. They settled in a modest enclave comprising several blocks along Salem Street.

Many arriving Jews had skills related to the needle trades and were able to find work in the burgeoning clothing industries in Boston’s North and West Ends. Others opened up food, clothing and retail shops. Salem Street and the adjacent blocks around it soon became one of Boston’s most active shopping districts, filled with Kosher butchers, bakers, delicatessens, clothiers, tailors and food markets.Solomon and Jennie Rubinowitz (later known as Rabinovich and then as Rabb) opened a grocery shop – called the “Greenie Store” – at 134 Salem Street in 1892. This was the very first of many Rabb family grocery stores and it survived at this location through 1908. The Rabb family chain of groceries would eventually culminate in New England’s largest grocery chain, Stop & Shop. The initial Greenie Store location is today occupied by A. Bova & Sons Bakery.

Jewish immigrant consumers also provided a ready-made market for Kosher chickens and meats. One of the companies that was formed to satisfy growing poultry demands was the Menorah Products, Inc., which built its own “schlachthaus” (Yiddish for slaughterhouse) building at 112-114 Fulton Street. This building has been subsequently subdivided into residential condominiums.

These businesses and the entrepreneurial spirit behind them reflect the importance of Jewish immigrant enterprise and some of the lasting contributions of Jews to the heritage of Boston’s historic North End. Another example is the zeal with which the Jews relished and seized new opportunities in North End real estate.

With the departure of the Irish to South Boston, Jewish newcomers were able to acquire many of the run-down neighborhood tenement buildings from the 1870s and earlier periods.

In North End retailing, Saturday was the most profitable commercial day of the week and Boston’s Sunday “Blue Laws” were, with a few exceptions, still in effect during this period. Thus, Jewish retailers were confronted with a variety of choices among open-for-business hours and/or personal/family Saturday Shabbat celebrations. Some merchants practiced observance or partial observance, while others simply did not choose to observe the Shabbat by closing their doors on this busy market day. And yet, despite these different practices, it was surely their common faith that bound the co-religionist members of the Jewish community together.

Yet by the early 1920s, all but a few signs of this very strong Jewish presence in the North End had faded away as the Jewish population moved out of the neighborhood and on through Boston’s West and South Ends to Roxbury, Dorchester, Brookline and Newton, as well as to Chelsea and Revere. What remains to this day is one barely visible Mogen (Star of) David high on a building at Baldwin Place and the barely discernable block letters of “Hebrew School” over an arched doorway on Jerusalem Place off Salem Street. Thus, the North End’s Jewish heritage has been subsumed within the overpowering embrace of today’s Little Italy.

Yet, the fact remains that over the 40-year period, from 1815 to 1855, over 1 million Irish emigrated to America. Boston was a major destination, the North End neighborhood its poor haven.

In an almost arithmetic progression: 2000 Irish were living in Boston in 1820, 5000 in 1825, 7000 in 1830, and between 1846 and 1855, 37,000 more Irish had fled Ireland for Boston. In 1847 alone 13,235 Irish emigrated to Boston. This was the year known as “Black 47″ and was the most deadly year of Ireland’s Great Potato Famine or, as it was called in Gaelic, An Górta Mor or “The Great Hunger.”

By 1850, the Irish comprised over half of the North End population of 23,000 and five years later 14,000 of the 26,000 North Enders were Irish born. Families were packed together in one-room decrepit apartments and run-down boarding houses – all in a neighborhood comprising less than 70 acres traditionally used for housing (the remaining 30 acres comprised waterfront warehouses and wharves).

Moreover, as Thomas H. O’Connor has written: “Native Bostonians might have been willing to send money and food to aid the starving Irish as long as they remained in Ireland, but they certainly didn’t want them coming to America.” Thus began the long saga of incessant suffering and discrimination.

Unlike the subsequent waves of immigrants that followed over the next half-century – the Portuguese, European Jews and the Italians – the Irish had neither the resources nor the competitive skills to adjust easily. Employment opportunities were limited and anti-Irish job discrimination was rampant: “No Irish Need Apply” signs seemed to be everywhere. The Irish were forced to take only the lowliest, most menial jobs – as domestics, laborers and unskilled factory workers. And most of these jobs were outside the North End. Much of the work force employed for Boston’s land reclamation projects, such as the filling in of the City’s Back Bay, were Irish laborers from the North End. They also helped build Boston’s transit system and the bridges and highways to the suburbs.

It was the American Civil War (1861-65) that provided an opportunity for the Irish to demonstrate their national loyalty and in so doing help Boston’s Brahmins to temper their “Nativist” sentiments. Over 10,000 Irishmen from Massachusetts served in the seven Irish regiments, including Col. Thomas Cass’s “Fighting Ninth” 9th regiment that distinguished itself at the Battle of Malvern Hill.

What is perhaps most telling, however, is how the sheer number of Irish immigrants to Boston came to re-shape electoral politics in the city and hence, over time, the socio-economic conditions of Irish men and women at the dawn of the 20th century. By 1880, more than 70,000 Irish lived in Boston. A decade later, Boston had become the only city in the United States (with populations in excess of 200,000) where the Irish represented more than half of the foreign-born population.

Efforts redoubled to organize these newly-arrived Irish voters as a new and potent force for political change.

In 1882, Patrick Collins became the first Irish-born Congressman from Boston. Two years later Hugh O’Brien was elected the City’s first Irish Catholic Mayor. He was succeeded in turn by Collins in 1902. And, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, who lived on Moon Street in the North End, became the first American-born Irish Mayor in United States history in 1906. He was also the first Boston mayor without a beard or mustache. His daughter, Rose, who later married Joseph P. Kennedy, was born in 1890 at 4 Garden Court just off North Square.

With the election of David Ignatius Walsh as the first Irish Catholic Governor of Massachusetts in 1914 and James Michael Curley’s mayoral victory in the same year, there began a succession of Irish-American mayors that would span the next three decades to 1993, when Thomas M. Menino would become Boston’s first Italian-American mayor.

Yet despite these political developments, the North End remained relatively isolated and certainly impoverished. The Irish immigrant population that had peaked in the late 1870s began a swift decline as European Jews and Italians moved in. By the turn of the century, the Irish population had dwindled to less than 3,000 (from a high of over 14,000 just two decades earlier). South Boston replaced both the North End as the area of the majority of Irish settlement.