A rendering shown during a public meeting earlier this year shows the proposed Little House hotel as envisioned by architects for the project.
KDI Architecture
By John McColgan
In July, the BPDA Board approved Cornerstone Realty’s six-story mixed-use development, featuring hotel suites, a rooftop terrace café, and ground-floor restaurant space, demolishing the Little House, which until 2021 had served the community in one way or another for 117 years.
Founded as a “settlement house” in South Boston by local women in 1906, its primary mission was to aid immigrants and working-class families adapting to life in urban Boston, offering services like baby clinics, kindergartens, community gardens, and vocational classes.
In 1948, outgrowing its South Boston facility, the organization purchased the church at 275 East Cottage Street from the recently disbanded Channing Unitarian congregation. Erected in 1904, the church stood as an architectural and social anchor for the local Protestant community as the surrounding neighborhood rapidly grew and transitioned into a denser residential area. Now both community center and a building, the new owners adapted the space for its services, now to include programs for day care, senior citizens, and public health.
Thus, the “Little House” youth and community center provided neighborhood social services for well over a century from 1906 to 2021. Its new building housed those services for 73 years from 1948 to 2021. For the better part of 50 years, it was also used as the monthly meeting venue of the Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Association.
The Little House operated under its own board as an independent community center until 1965, when it merged with other local settlement houses—Denison House, Dorchester House, and the Columbia Point Neighborhood Center—to form the Federated Dorchester Neighborhood Houses (FDNH).
In 2010 FDNH morphed into “College Bound Dorchester,” a non-profit aimed at reducing gun violence and gang involvement and marking a strategic pivot toward education, college readiness, and youth empowerment. In 2021 the property was sold to Cornerstone Realty. Upon its exit, College Bound Dorchester rebranded itself “UnCornered.”
This project, apart from physical harm to the neighborhood, will also yield ruinous loss to Dorchester’s long, complex history. The developer, aware of Dorchester’s attachment to the legacy of its past, claims it will “honor its history as part of hotel design” by naming the hotel “Inn at the Little House” and displaying interpretative signage.
That history would be better honored by such a display in a restored Little House, holding memories treasured by generations of Dorchester residents.
The City’s justification of the project appears based upon the volume of supporting letters and emails from abutters. Of 61 scanned letters, all with identical language, sixty supported the project and one opposed. Of 102 emails, 64 supported, 33 opposed, five might be deemed “neutral.”
Yet, a more granular analysis allows for a more accurate picture of support and opposition. Several names appear more than once. How frequently did supporters vote? Had all 60 letter supporters really “met extensively with the developer, reviewed [development] plans, and feel that this … project would be an improvement to the immediate neighborhood?”
How many were actual “abutters?” How many were real estate developers with a stake in the project? Were there questionable steps to stage a mirage of neighborhood support? Has the developer addressed project opponents’ concerns? Traffic impact and lack of parking? Incompatible use? Noise? Inappropriate scale and density?
The outrageous, arrogant proposal for a hotel and restaurant complex is situated on East Cottage Street, of all places, a narrow, one-way street, with zero parking in a dense neighborhood. Is it still possible to topple this classic case of collusion between developers and City Hall? Launch a forceful opposition campaign, lobbying elected officials and getting the message out to the media? Petition the Landmarks Commission to study the Little House and its history for potential designation as a Boston Landmark?
This lamentable development, concocted by a capital-flushed realty firm and supported by bureaucrats and their politician overlords, signals the death of a residential neighborhood and robs Dorchester of an important and beloved relic of its history. Neither the time-honored family-centered character of East Cottage Street, nor the historic Little House, should be sacrificed to private business profiteering or political campaigns.
A community effort to thwart this baneful project will itself go down in Dorchester history.
John McColgan is a longtime resident and civic activist in Columbia-Savin Hill.
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