Charlestown Homes & Real Estate
Included below are homes for sale and real estate in Charlestown.
Charlestown Massachusetts is a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts and is located on a peninsula north of downtown Boston. Charlestown was originally a separate town and the first capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It became a city in 1847 and was annexed by Boston on January 5, 1874. While it has had a substantial Irish American population since the migration of Irish during the Irish famine of the 1840s.
Throughout the 1960s until the middle 1990s, Charlestown was infamous for its Irish Mob presence. Charlestown's McLaughlin Brothers were involved in a gang war with neighboring Somerville's Winter Hill Gang, during the Irish Mob Wars of the 1960s. In the late 1980s, however, Charlestown underwent a massive gentrification process similar to that of the South End. Drawn to its proximity to downtown and its colonial, red-brick, row-house housing stock, similar to that of Beacon Hill, many upper-middle class professionals moved to the neighborhood. In the late 1990s, additional gentrification took place, similar to that in neighboring Somerville.
Today the neighborhood is a mix of upper-middle and middle-class residences, housing projects, and a large working class Irish-American demographic and culture that is still predominant. Charlestown was the setting for the 2010 action thriller "The Town", directed by and starring Ben Affleck, which follows the lives of a group of Boston bank robbers and the law enforcement personnel attempting to stop them.
