A great village in the city
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6/21/2007
When a great job opportunity moved me to Boston from New York (with a 5-year layover in New Haven for graduate work at Yale), my wife and I spent a lot of time choosing the right neighborhood. We settled on Charlestown; the fact that we're still there 17 years later says a lot. The town has a wide range of housing and people, ranging from $2.5 million townhouses to cheap (by Boston standards) apartments, condos, and houses. We can walk to stores, a good supermarket, excellent restaurants, churches, the city tennis and pool facilities, the Navy Yard and its marinas, or stroll over the Charles to the North End. Excellent bus service into the financial district is heavily used and much cheaper than driving and parking. Charlestown is also very handy to Logan Airport.
Charlestown is more urbanized than, say, Jamaica Plain or West Roxbury -- lovely neighborhoods, but with much longer commutes. It is more of a distinct community than the central Boston areas (Beacon Hill, Back Bay, South End), which have a high proportion of students and other transients. Consequently, there is a lot of community spirit and activities: a very active Charlestown Mothers Association, Knights of Columbus, etc. Parents have won back the town schools from the Boston bureaucracy, making the K-8 Warren-Prescott School a surprisingly good choice, which you can follow up with Boston Latin High School, one of the top HSs in the country, to give your kids a very good education, free.
Charlestown is not immune to some of the urban woes that come with being part of a major city. There are two, large housing projects that flank the center of the town, and these are conduits for a higher level of drugs and crimes against property than I would like. Boston is building a new police center at the epicenter of this problem, so I'm hopeful that this will be addressed.
If you're moving to Boston and like living in the city, Charlestown definitely deserves a close look!
Robert | Boston, MA