Jamaica Plain: Boston's Most Diverse and Progressive Neighbourhood

Jamaica Plain — universally abbreviated to JP — is the neighbourhood that Boston's progressive community claims as its own: a diverse, politically active area in the city's southwest where the Latino community (primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican, with significant Central American representation) has coexisted with the LGBTQ community, artists, and young professionals in a density of coexistence that the city's more segregated neighbourhoods cannot match. The neighbourhood's commercial centre on Centre Street and South Street holds a mix of Puerto Rican bodegas and bakeries, craft beer bars, independent bookshops, and the kind of co-operative businesses and community organizations that reflect a neighbourhood whose political culture takes seriously the idea that economics and community are connected rather than separate spheres.

Jamaica Pond is the neighbourhood's natural anchor: a 68-acre kettle pond of glacial origin whose circuit path (approximately 1.5 miles) is one of Boston's most used walking and running routes, the pond's clear water and wooded shore providing a level of natural quality within a dense urban neighbourhood that the city's park system rarely achieves. The boathouse at the pond's edge rents rowboats and sailboats in season, and the Friday evening sailboat races draw spectators to the shoreline path in a tradition that captures the neighbourhood's character: organized leisure that is open to participation rather than observation, and that takes for granted the value of public access to a natural resource. The Loring-Greenough House, a 1760 colonial mansion on South Street preserved as a museum and events venue, testifies to JP's pre-urban history as a summer retreat for Boston's colonial elite.

The Arnold Arboretum, at Jamaica Plain's southern end along the Emerald Necklace park system that connects Boston's major green spaces from the Fens to Franklin Park, is a 281-acre collection of trees, shrubs, and vines maintained by Harvard University as a public garden and botanical research institution since 1872. The Arboretum's lilac collection — over 200 varieties representing the world's most diverse lilac planting — produces a Lilac Sunday in May that draws tens of thousands of visitors to a neighbourhood normally outside the tourist circuit, and the experience of walking the Arboretum's wooded paths in any season, past labeled specimens from every temperate biome, is one of New England's finest botanical pleasures available without admission charge. Jamaica Plain's combination of the Arboretum, Jamaica Pond, the neighbourhood's social diversity, and its independent commercial culture makes it the area of Boston that most consistently rewards the visitor willing to leave the Freedom Trail behind.