Charlestown, settled in 1629, sits on a peninsula across the inner harbor from the North End and is the oldest neighborhood in Boston. Charlestown was actually settled before Boston itself — a group of colonists established a settlement here in 1629 and moved to the Shawmut Peninsula when they found it had better water — and the town prospered as a farming and shipping community for a century and a half. On June 17, 1775, the day of the Battle of Bunker Hill, British artillery and naval ships bombarded the town and set it on fire; Charlestown burned to the ground while the battle raged on the hills above.
Virtually every building in the town was destroyed. The town was rebuilt after the war in the Federal and Greek Revival styles of the early republic, and much of that building stock survives today in the neighborhood's residential streets. The Charlestown Navy Yard, established in 1800 as one of the first naval shipyards in the United States, built warships for 174 years before closing in 1974.
USS Constitution is berthed there today, along with the destroyer USS Cassin Young, now a museum ship. The neighborhood around the Navy Yard was heavily Irish for most of the twentieth century; its demographics have shifted significantly in the last two decades as Boston's real estate prices have risen across all neighborhoods.