Calle Boston

The street takes its name from the city of Boston, Massachusetts, in keeping with the pattern of international place names established during the development of La Guindalera between 1890 and 1906. No published municipal document sets the exact date of naming or specifies which of the two Bostons⁠—⁠the American one or the English one in Lincolnshire⁠—⁠served as the direct reference.

Calle Boston was born in the full fever of La Guindalera’s development, thrown up in haste from the last years of the 19th century. Beside it grew the Colonia Madrid Moderno (1890-1906), a cluster of terraced villas that its contemporaries came to call “the most European neighbourhood in Madrid.” Among its streets was Calle Roma, proof of the area’s taste for place names brought from afar. In that setting fit Calle Boston and the adjoining Plaza de Boston, though no archive holds the record that named the street. The Boston that lends the name is in Massachusetts and was founded in 1630 by English Puritans who came from Boston, in Lincolnshire. The English name comes from a medieval contraction of Saint Botolph’s town. The buildings that now flank the street are mostly from the 1960s, so the street arrived before the houses that now accompany it.

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