Online Walking Tours

We hope you will enjoy a self-guided tour using the options below or come along on one of the 2024 guided tours - visit the schedule here: https://www.jphs.org/2024-walking-tours

MOnument Square

Explore the heart of JP on a tour that includes a National Historic District. View architecture that spans three centuries; the oldest community theater company in the United States; and an elegant eighteenth century mansion that once served as the country’s first military hospital. Visit a house that once served as a tavern, the Eliot School, the home of the first woman to graduate from MIT and the First Church Burial Ground. 

Stony Brook

Explore a fascinating industrial area at the geographic heart of Boston that includes 19th-century tannery and brewery buildings, the homes of early German settlers, and today’s Boston Beer Company, the brewers of Samuel Adams. In the 1970s, a coalition of community groups joined together to block construction of the SW Expressway through JP and other Boston neighborhoods. Today, the SW Corridor Park stands as a testament to the power of community activism.

Woodbourne

This lovely enclave in Jamaica Plain was originally farmland. As the 20th century dawned it developed from 19th-century summer estates into a model suburban district. It is a National Historic District that contains fine representative examples of New England architecture with designs by local architects and builders. It also contains an unusual Garden City model housing development. The plan for which came from the Boston Dwelling House Company (founded in 1912).

Hyde Square (EN ESPAÑOL)

Aprende sobre la plaza Hyde en la década de 1840 cuando los inmigrantes alemanes e irlandeses transformaron el vecindario con sus negocios, escuelas e instituciones. Veremos cómo a principios de la década de 1960, Hyde Square volvió a cambiar cuando los inmigrantes cubanos, puertorriqueños y dominicanos convirtieron el vecindario en el primero predominantemente hispano de Boston.

Green Street

Laid out in 1836, the street played a key role in JP’s development, functioning as a residential, commercial, and transportation conduit in the lives of the district’s residents. Although Green Street was subdivided as early as 1851 for stores, factories and houses, it was not extensively developed until the late 1870s. The Bowditch School was completed in 1892 and early in the 20th century the United States Post Office moved to its new location at the corner of Green and Cheshire Streets.

Jamaica Pond

Once a district that only included the houses of Boston’s elite, the Pond later was put to industrial use as tons of ice were harvested there each winter. Learn about the movers and shakers such as Francis Parkman, Pauline Agassiz Shaw and James Michael Curley who made their homes on the Pond’s shores. Discover how the Pond was transformed from private estates and storehouses into the parkland we know today.

Sumner Hill

This area of Jamaica Plain was developed as a suburb by General William Hyslop Sumner in the mid-nineteenth century. Sumner Hill is a National Historic District and includes one of the finest collections of Victorian houses in the area. The tour includes the ancestral home of the Dole Pineapple Company founder as well as the homes of progressives who were active as abolitionists and women suffragists.

Hyde Square

Learn about the Hyde Square area of Jamaica Plain which saw an influx of German and Irish immigrants in the mid 19th century. These groups transformed the neighborhood with their businesses, schools, and institutions. Then in the early 1960s, Hyde Square changed again when Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican immigrants transformed it into Boston’s first predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. It’s now officially designated ‘Boston’s Latin Quarter.’ [Tour in Spanish is above]

Stony Brook (EN ESPAÑOL)

Explore un área industrial fascinante en el corazón de Boston. Veremos edificios que fueron cutidurías y cervecerías en el siglo XIX, las casas de los primeros colonos alemanes y la Boston Beer Company, la cervecería de Samuel Adams. Hablaremos de la década de 1970, en la que una coalición de grupos comunitarios se unió para bloquear la construcción de la autopista Southwest Expressway que iba a atravesar Jamaica Plain y otros vecindarios de Boston. Y pasearemos por lo que es hoy, el Southwest Corridor Park que atraviesa el vecindario de Stony Brook, un testimonio del poder del activismo comunitario.

WoMEN OF Jamaica PLAIN

This tour highlights the many women who made history in Jamaica Plain and beyond. Educational reformers, musicologists, scientists, doctors, and suffragists — the contributions of these women are enormous and their stories are wonderful. Some names are quite well known (Sylvia Plath) while others are lesser known but no less astounding (Emily Greene Balch). Plan to learn about a collection of really amazing women all of whom called JP home.