Plaza de Boston
The square is named after Boston, capital of Massachusetts, founded in 1630 by Puritan settlers from Lincolnshire, England. The Old English name “Botwulf’s tūn” meant abbot Botolph’s village. The name follows the theme by which CIOHSA and architects Echenique Gómez and Calvo Huedo named the Parque de las Avenidas streets in the 1950s and 60s after cities beginning with “B”.
The Parque de las Avenidas neighbourhood was born from an ordered whim: to name each of its streets after a city beginning with B. Between Bruselas as its axis and a set of names paired by their initial came this Plaza de Boston. The choice was purely urban and graphic.
The neighbourhood grew over forty hectares of market gardens north of the Abroñigal stream. The Urban Planning Commission gave the project the go-ahead on 30 July 1956, and architects Francisco Echenique Gómez and Luis Calvo Huedo laid out the Avenida de Bruselas as its backbone, with blocks of five to ten storeys shaped like H, U and T.
The Boston that names the square is the capital of Massachusetts, founded on 7 September 1630 by Puritan settlers from Lincolnshire. They brought with them the name of their English town, which beats in an older village, that of abbot Botolph, a seventh-century monk whose name crossed the Atlantic centuries later.