South End- Springfield, MA Historic Italian Community

The South End has long been home to Springfield’s Italian community since the late 19th century and continues to hosts  numerous Italian restaurants and pastry shops, most famously the La Fiorentina Pastry Shop. More recently it has become famous for housing the National Basketball Hall of Fame. From an urban perspective the South End is a solid neighborhood with a great sense of community, a fairly vibrant Main Street, and walkable access to the heart of Downtown Springfield. For this to become a top tier urban district it needs a lot of quality urban in-fill along Main Street and filling in vacant parcels along the eastern edge of the district, better schools and ideally the abandonment of I-91 so the neighborhood can connect much more seamlessly to the Connecticut River.

Click here to view my South End Album on Flickr

URBAN STRENGTHS:

• Walkable access to Dwtn and plenty of restaurants (esp Italian), bars, smaller ethnic groceries, boutiques located along Main Street.
• generally a solid business district along Main St with pretty good urban form and a variety of businesses. Becomes more autocentric towards the southern end of the neighborhood.
• Pretty affordable place to buy a home generally btwn 200K-350K. Decent # of rentals as well.

URBAN WEAKNESSES:

• Other than the recreation trail running along the river, really not bike infrastructure.
• The historic residential isn’t very attractive as its mostly turn of the century worker housing.
• So so density for an urban neighborhood but a bit underwhelming for an inner City East Coast City. Same thing with public transit access.
• Some walkable schools located here but generally not well rated.
• Highway 91 unfortunately is a major barrier between the neighborhood and the Connecticut River.”