Bordered by I-93, Lower Mills and Mattapan, Ashmont is a small neighborhood located at Dorchester’s southern end. However, unlike most of this multi-ethnic, blue-collar Boston annex, Ashmont residents don’t refer to the area as “coming up.” To them, it’s already there.
For instance, Ashmont Hill’s magnificent mansions originally bore witness to well-to-do dwellers. Boston mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, whose daughter Rose married Joseph Kennedy and raised America’s most noted political family, occupied one huge Italianate/Mansard-style house that burned down in 1938.
At the area’s center is Peabody Square, named for wealthy investment banker Colonel Oliver Peabody, who commissioned the square’s renowned Gothic-revival All Saints church in 1892.
Ashmont’s population includes twenty- and thirty-something transplants, young families and lifelong residents of all ages. In 2009, chef and restaurateur Chris Douglass closed his 30-year-old Boston foodie haunt, Icarus, to concentrate on the Ashmont Grill in Peabody Square as well as Tavolo, located at The Carruth — a new mixed-use, condo-apartment development.
