Bay Village
The Bay Village neighborhood is built on land fill over what used to be the southern part of the Back Bay (the Bay itself, not the neighborhood that now bears its name). This portion of the Back Bay was filled in during the 1820s by speculative real estate developer Ephraim Marsh. The smallest neighborhood in Boston, Bay Village is home to around 2,500 residents. The majority of the houses in this neighborhood are small row houses that closely resemble the larger Federalist row houses on Beacon Hill. The resemblance is no accident - the first residents of the area were the builders and craftsmen who constructed many of the structures on Beacon Hill. Several developers built large luxury residential hotels, most of which have been converted to condominiums.
The filling of the remainder of the Back Bay during the mid-1800s created a massive drainage problem - all of the run off from the Back Bay neighborhood puddled in Bay Village. Most of the streets and buildings in Bay Village were raised 12 to 18 feet to solve the problem, in one of the largest such undertakings in the US.
Bay Village was originally known as the Church Street District (and is occasionally refered to as "South Cove" and "Kerry Village" in older documents). The name was deemed too confusing in the early 20th century, and Bay Village was the new name chosen by its residents.
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