The question facing Charlestown residents is whether Monument Square should become Charlestown’s first local historic district while other parts of the neighborhood face the greatest and most immediate threats of redevelopment, demolition, loss of public views, and irreversible change.
The Bunker Hill Monument Association (BHMA) was created to build the Bunker Hill Monument and to preserve as much of the battlefield as possible. Its purpose was to keep that land as a public commemorative ground, open to all, for posterity.
In the 1820s, the Association acquired approximately fifteen acres of the battlefield. In the 1830s, facing severe financial hardship, it confronted a difficult choice: retain the battlefield land as open public space or complete the Monument. Reluctantly, it sold and subdivided a substantial portion of its property. Those sales were a financial necessity, not a plan to turn the area around the Monument into an exclusive architectural enclave.
The Association did, however, impose deed covenants on the lots it sold. Houses were required to be constructed of brick or stone, generally three or four stories high, and set back from the street. Many of those covenants remain in force and have long protected the scale, masonry character, and open setting associated with the Monument.
The BHMA auction catalogue invited purchasers to select lots according to “his taste and his means.” That was the Association’s vision for the neighborhood: individual homes built by different people, with different resources and different ideas, not a single, fixed vision frozen in time.
The Association’s original plan did more than shape the Monument’s immediate surroundings: it established Monument Street as the defining ceremonial and visual axis of the historic landscape. Monument Street was the direct route, the central approach linking Bunker Hill Street and the battlefield to the Monument grounds. Concord and Lexington Streets framed this processional route, their names deliberately recalling the Revolution’s opening engagements. This was not an accidental street pattern. It was a carefully designed historic landscape, organized around Monument Street and intended to preserve the Monument’s visible, physical, and symbolic connection to the battle and the ground on which it was fought.
Yet, despite the significance of this broader historic landscape, the Study Committee excludes Monument, Concord, and Lexington Streets, as well as the Bunker Hill Housing Development, from the proposed district, while giving special protection to Monument Avenue, a much later addition to the landscape, for its visual relationship to the Monument and its history as a desirable residential address. The contrast is difficult to ignore.
The proposal does not simply draw a line around the Monument; it draws a line through Charlestown, dividing the neighborhood into two very different categories of protection. The proposed boundaries exclude not only Bunker Hill Housing, but also two subsidized-housing developments and the portion of the neighborhood facing the greatest redevelopment, rezoning, and development pressure.
An historic district is an official civic statement about what the City believes is historically significant, visually important, and worthy of long-term protection. Those boundaries therefore raise serious questions of fairness in a neighborhood already shaped by gentrification and widening economic division. According to the September 27, 2026 Boston Sunday Globe, Greater Boston is among the nation’s most income-segregated metropolitan areas, and recent research finds that neighborhood-level income segregation has increased more in Massachusetts than in any other state since 2020. In a community of only one square mile, Boston should be especially cautious about adopting a preservation policy that directs added prestige, attention, and regulatory protection toward Charlestown’s most affluent and visually favored section while leaving other historically significant, lower-income, and more vulnerable areas outside the district.
This proposal is not a coherent preservation strategy. Monument Square is not facing demolition, high-rise construction, or the loss of the Monument’s essential setting. The most immediate risks lie outside the proposed district: redevelopment along Medford Street and the former industrial waterfront; the Whole Foods Plaza; Sullivan Square; the Lost Village; Bunker Hill Housing; and Charlestown Heights where Olmsted’s sweeping public view toward the Mystic is at risk of being reduced to a narrow corridor between new buildings.
BHMA does not oppose preservation. We support a more targeted approach: individual landmark designation for historically significant buildings, sites, landscapes, and archaeological resources that face genuine vulnerability; protection of key public views through planning and development review; and exploration of a National Register Historic District recognizing the Battle of Bunker Hill and Siege of Boston landscape. These tools would protect threatened resources and the broader Revolutionary-era landscape without imposing blanket local design controls on Charlestown homeowners within an arbitrarily drawn district.
If Boston chooses to protect a carefully managed hill while allowing the historic town beyond it to become thinner, taller, less affordable, and less recognizable, it will have preserved an image of Charlestown.
It will not have preserved Charlestown.
