Bow-Front Apartment Buildings on Massachusetts Avenue, Boston

Massachusetts Avenue runs through Boston's South End, a neighborhood developed mostly between the 1850s and 1900 on landfill extending the city's original shoreline. The South End holds the designation of the largest Victorian rowhouse district in the United States and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. Its bow-fronted buildings, a design popularized in Boston during this period, were built to bring more light and air into narrow rowhouse lots than flat facades allowed. Many of the neighborhood's original single-family rowhouses were later subdivided into apartments as the area's population and use shifted through the 20th century.