Hyde Park: Then & Now

I am currently working on a "Then & Now" book on Hyde Park, Massachusetts that will be published this fall by Arcadia Publications. Interestingly, this will be my 59th book on Boston and its neighborhoods.

The following is an exerpt from the introduction to the book:

Hyde Park was the last town to be annexed to the city of Boston, becoming the southernmost neighborhood of the city located between Milton and Dedham, Massachusetts. Named by the Reverend Henry Lyman after the aristocratic borough of Hyde Park in London, England it was incorporated as an independent town on April 26, 1868 from sections of the towns of Dorchester, Milton and Dedham, Massachusetts.

Hyde Park has evolved as a bucolic suburb located just seven miles from downtown Boston. Located on the Neponset River with panoramic vistas of the Blue Hills, the town began prior to the Civil War when a group of land investors and developers known as the “Twenty Associates” purchased one hundred acres of land at $200.00 per acre in Milton’s Fairmount section; they laid out Fairmount Avenue, flanked by Warren and Williams Avenues, that connected Brush Hill Road and Water Street (now Truman Highway,) which paralleled the river. Here the associates, headed by Alpheus Perley Blake (1832-1916,) who is considered the founder of Hyde Park, began to build twenty identical wood framed houses that were typical of the middle class dwellings being built throughout the Boston area at the time. The associates included William E. Abbot, Amos Angell, Ira L. Benton, Enoch Blake, John Newton Brown, George W. Currier, Hypolitus Fisk, John C. French, David Higgins, John S. Hobbs, Samuel Salmon Mooney, William Nightingale, J. Wentworth Payson, Dwight B. Rich, Alphonso Robinson, William H. Seavey, Daniel Warren, and John Williams.

Do you have any photographs or postcards of Hyde Park or Readville that you might be willing to loan to illustrate the book? As it says, this is a comparison of older photographs (prior to 1950) and what the scene is today. It can be remarkable as to how much some neighborhoods have changed, and these photographic books are fascinating to both new residents as well as to those whose families have been in town for decades.I can be reached at asammarco@msn.com

Thanks!