Bow-front row houses fill the South End, the largest intact Victorian residential neighborhood in the United States. The South End was developed in the 1840s and 50s on filled land south of the original city, laid out on a grid of streets with oval parks — Blackstone Square, Franklin Square, Union Park — modeled on the London squares of Mayfair and Belgravia. The brick bow-front row houses with their steep stoops, ornate iron railings, and English basement kitchens were built for the middle-class families that the developers expected to occupy them permanently.
Instead, the fashionable address shifted west to Back Bay almost immediately after the South End was built, and the neighborhood declined through the latter nineteenth century into a district of lodging houses, immigrants, and working-class families. The twentieth century brought further decline, and by the 1960s the South End was one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Then artists, gay residents, and eventually the broader professional class discovered the Victorian architecture in the 1970s and 80s, and gentrification transformed the neighborhood over the following decades.
Today the South End has the highest concentration of restaurants per capita of any Boston neighborhood, and the row house blocks are among the finest Victorian streetscapes in the country.