Historic Boston Incorporated 1999 Preservation Revolving Fund Casebook : Property Entries Online
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Promote a pre-development feasibility study to position the owner or its successors to preserve and redevelop the site.

Hibernian Hall is one of the last of six fraternal clubs and dancehalls around Dudley Square that served Roxbury's Irish community in the first half of the twentieth century. (Palladio Hall also survives.) The Hibernian Building Association of Boston Highlands built Hibernian Hall in 1913 to serve as a meeting lodge for fourteen local chapters of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) and to function generally as a community center and dancehall. It is a large paneled brick building that stands one block east of Dudley Square. The American branch of the AOH began in 1836 in reaction to widespread discrimination against Irish immigrants, but, by the turn of the century, had shifted its focus to charitable activities, community service, and the preservation of Irish culture. Hibernian Hall contained seven meeting halls as well as a large ballroom, commercial space on the ground floor, and bowling alleys and billiard tables in the basement. As many Irish families began to move out of Roxbury in the 1940s and 1950s, the Irish clubs lost much of their patronage. The Hibernian Building Association lost ownership of the building to foreclosure in 1960.

Hibernian Hall has long been vacant and boarded up. The Boston Housing Authority has expressed an interest in acquiring the building through eminent domain. BHA would then allow the building to be demolished for use of the land as a parking lot for the adjacent fire station, in exchange for land owned by the Fire Department. In February 1999, BHA demolished the nearby Intercontinental Club, another Dudley Street social club and dancehall of the same era located on the Orchard Park property.

Hibernian Hall is on the edge of the Dudley Square area, situated between a modern fire station and the large expanse of vacant land slated for development by BHA. It is outside the Dudley Station National Register Historic District, but it is most likely eligible for individual listing. A number of long-vacant historic buildings in and around Dudley Square--Dearborn School, Ferdinand’s Department Store, Palladio Hall, and the former Boys and Girls Club of Roxbury--are currently the focus of a great deal of public and private investment that could be a catalyst for preservation of other historic buildings in the area, including Hibernian Hall.

MHC inventory form

Entry Completed: 05/14/1999