Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920

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Summary: Insightful history of this stunning neighborhood's growth
Review: While academic in its approach, von Hoffman tells the colorful story of Boston's political landscape -- shifting away from the independent neighborhoods toward the centralized city government. Von Hoffman focuses on the growth of Jamaica Plain, a city neighborhood which began as a group of country estates on rural Jamaica Pond and transformed by the late 1800s into a dense, vibrant streetcar suburb surrounded by the lush parkland of Frederick Law Olmstead's Emerald Necklace. Most fascinating are the chapters on neighborhood society and the struggle over the construction of the Emerald Necklace. The author ends his analysis in the 1920s, leaving the abandonment of the neighborhood and its late-century revival into a dynamic, ethnicly diverse, family-friendly city neighborhood for a later book. This text is used by Von Hoffman in the class he teaches at Harvard University.