Photos and captions excerpted from Historic Photos of Boston by Timothy Orwig (Turner Publishing, 2007).
Photo by Leslie Jones – Boston Public Library, Print Department; courtesy Turner Publishing.
In the winter of 1920, workers unload fish at a South Boston pier. Originally a peninsula off Dorchester, South Boston was annexed to Boston in 1804. Its pastures were overlaid with a regular grid of streets. South Boston became an industrial engine for Boston, with foundries, machine shops, refineries, and shipyards employing a large immigrant workforce.