Bit of South End history ends

Dover Street had its named changed because it was a nasty area for years. The rebranding had nothing to do with race if that is what you were implying. The area had a bad reputation for years and was a mixed neighborhood racially, though arson destroyed most of the older housing stock along with the NY Streets urban renewal. Peters Park used to be filled with apartment buildings that burned for profit or were removed because no one wanted them.

North Street runs through the easterly parts of the North End, but the part was closest to where the entrance to the Sumner is was once known as Ann Street. Ann Street in the middle 1800's was the local whorehouse area (as was Dover Street in the middle 1900's). The entire street was named North Street in order to remove the unsavoriness associated with the area.

Templeton Street in Dorchester in the 1970's; not the best street, renamed Monsignor Patrick J. Lydon Way. Nothing to do with race, all to do with the unsavory nature (arson, crime, blight) of the street and the negative connotations of Tempy and the area it was in.

Dover Street was so bad that they actually filmed the brothel scene in The Last Detail with young Randy Quaid and Carol Kane on Dover Street. Neighborhoods change. When the British got back from getting their asses kicked 243 years ago yesterday, some I'm sure went to see the sex workers of Mount Whoredom. We know Mount Whoredom today as Beacon Hill. Things change.

I was wracking my brain trying to remember the name.

I bought an overcoat there around 1968. Coat lasted for years and cost next to nothing. Main defect was a small bullet-like hole in the upper back.

St. Eligius was a fictional hospital in a TV show. The Franklin Square House Apartments, formerly known as the St. James Hotel and located next to Franklin and Blackstone Squares, were used for exterior shots of the hospital during the opening sequence, and they are still there, next to Franklin and Blackstone Squares.

I always assumed that Dover Street was named after Dover, New York like the other streets in the New York Streets area. There was an effort to change the name back to Dover Street a few years ago, but there was opposition and it was determined to be too disruptive or confusing. (Someone else might know the more precise reasons why the name change idea did not go through.)