Dorchester Boston: JFK Heritage and the City's Most Diverse Community

Dorchester is Boston's largest and most diverse neighbourhood — an expansive district stretching from South Boston's border to the Neponset River that encompasses a remarkable range of communities, architectural styles and cultural institutions within a single administrative boundary. The neighbourhood's demographic history is a compressed version of Boston's broader story: first the Puritan settlement (Governor John Winthrop's house was here), then successive waves of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Caribbean and Vietnamese immigration, each transforming specific blocks and corridors while the neighbourhood as a whole sustained a working-class, family-oriented character that the inner-city gentrification waves have reached only gradually.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, perched on Columbia Point overlooking Boston Harbor with views of the harbor islands and the Boston skyline, is among the finest presidential libraries in the country — a building by I.M. Pei of calm geometric authority that houses a comprehensive narrative of Kennedy's presidency, his political development and the assassination that ended his term. The museum's exhibits include original materials from the Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations that provide the most direct public access available to the decision-making process of a nuclear crisis, and the library's garden and harbor views make it a setting of unusual beauty for an encounter with American political history.

Dorchester's Vietnamese-American community, concentrated along Dot Ave (Dorchester Avenue) in the Fields Corner neighbourhood, has created one of the finest pho and banh mi scenes outside of Vietnam — a cluster of family-owned restaurants whose quality reflects the community's three-decade history of culinary practice in Boston. The Dorchester Day Parade in June and the community festivals centred on Ronan Park and Moakley Park sustain the neighbourhood's community character across its many cultural constituencies. The Ashmont neighbourhood at the southern end of the Red Line provides the district's most comfortable café and restaurant concentration, and the neighbourhood's proximity to Franklin Park — Frederick Law Olmsted's masterwork of Boston's Emerald Necklace park system — gives Dorchester access to 527 acres of parkland with a golf course, zoo and Jamaica Pond within the system.