Jamaica Plain Spoken was a video/interview project that JP musician Rick Berlin started with his friend Todd Drogy in 2004. It consists of over sixty interviews with people of all genders, beliefs, ages and ethnicities. Just a bunch of local characters describing their lives and offering their opinions about Jamaica Plain. The project was stopped due to a lack of funding, so the YouTube clips are all that remain. Those links are gathered here.
Read MoreA brief biography of Christopher Jackson Spenceley, a Boston businessman of the latter half of the 19th century who constructed the C.J. Spenceley Block in 1888. The yellow brick building that stands at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and West Walnut Park.
Read MoreLearn about the Glennon family living in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury from 1880-1940. Employment in the Thomas G. Plant Shoe Factory and the Burton Brewery provided the family with both opportunity and hardship.
Read MoreOn the crest of Milton Hill, the highest drumlin in Forest Hills Cemetery, lie two recumbent stone lions shaded by upright Japanese yews, part of a monument honoring the artisan Pietro Caproni.
Read MoreA collection of 956 film negatives that document James Michael Curley during the years 1934-1958.
Read MoreThis story of the last practicing blacksmith in JP is based both on personal observation of Lovett’s McBride Street blacksmith shop in the 1940s and 1950s, and on an April 2017 interview with John R. Lovett, the last farrier’s son.
Read MoreLife for this busy man, who created more than 180 pieces of sculpture in less than fifty hears, circled around his home in Jamaica Plain MA, his studio, his professorship as head of the Sculpture Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Read MoreA serendipitous journey of discovery kicked off by an Ebay offering of “three journals about Jamaica Plains, Mass.”
Read MoreMaud Cuney Hare was a multi-talented genius: pianist-lecturer, composer, playwright, biographer, poetry editor, folklorist, Black music historian and collector, founder and director of The Allied Arts Centre in Boston.
Read MoreIn the early 1950s a group of returning veterans who had grown up together as the Rosemary Rosebuds, from Rosemary and South Streets, decided to form an association to expand their social activities which until then were spontaneous outings to the movies, day-trips to the beach, and various sports events and parties.
Read MoreIn 1845, Daniel Bacon, a retired China trade captain from Barnstable, bought some of Prince's land and the next year built a mansion behind the present 156 Prince Street.
Read MoreBenjamin Franklin Sturtevant (1833-1890) was a Jamaica Plain inventor and industrialist who filed more than 60 U.S. patents.
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