Two- and three-story wood-frame houses line the streets around you, the same neighborhood the world later came to know through the films Good Will Hunting and The Departed. South Boston — Southie — was settled in the seventeenth century and developed as a working-class residential neighborhood through the nineteenth, its streets of two- and three-story wood-frame houses filling the peninsula south of the Fort Point Channel. Irish immigrants poured into South Boston after the Famine, and by the early twentieth century it was the most Irish Catholic neighborhood in the country, with a civic culture built around the church, the ward politics of the Democratic Party, and the Boston neighborhoods' annual St. Patrick's Day parade.
The 1974 federal court order to desegregate Boston's schools through busing produced some of the most violent resistance in any American city, centered in South Boston, where white residents attacked school buses carrying Black children and the confrontations lasted for years. Castle Island, at the far end of the peninsula, holds Fort Independence, a granite fort that has guarded the harbor since 1634 in successive versions; the current structure was built between 1801 and 1851. Edgar Allan Poe was stationed here as an Army private in 1827 under the name Edgar Perry, and the fort inspired The Cask of Amontillado.