So you think you know all about the West End—how perfectly good brick buildings were leveled, how thousands of people were expelled, how streets were plowed away and the Rappaports made a killing.

But that’s not the West End’s only story. There’s a little museum on Lomasney Way just a few steps northeast of the intersection of Staniford, Merrimac and Causeway streets that draws a fuller picture. It has one permanent exhibit, “The Last Tenement,” which debuted at the Bostonian Society, and that is definitely about the West End’s destruction.

But in the temporary exhibit space, which changes three times a year, is the story of Dr. George Parkman’s murder and the trial and execution of Professor John Webster, who, some say, did not do the evil deed.

The museum is interested in more than just gloom and doom. It tackles the way the West End was created by filling in shallow marshes of the Charles River, it has the scale model of the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge and it displays a couple of seats from the Boston Garden. It presents lectures, has an on-line presence and has hosted several book publishing parties. Continue reading →