The North End Community School is housed in a one-story brick building that stands opposite an abandoned lot on a busy street in the neighborhood of North End. Like many predominantly minority residential neighborhoods in core sections of older American cities, North End was once home to industrial plants that provided relatively stable, union-wage jobs for its then working-class residents. But the majority of these have long since closed. The “postindustrial revolution” that transformed American cities beginning in the 1920s and intensifying after World War II drove manufacturing jobs in North End, as in similarly situated urban neighborhoods, to the new suburbs and to the growth regions of the American South, West, and Southwest, while draining inner-city communities of their working-class residents.

These shifts, heightened by global economic restructuring in the 1970s and 1980s, were driven in part by federal and local government intervention. Disproportionate military and industrial investment in the new metropolitan areas during and after World War II, federal investment in the interstate highway system beginning in 1956, tax policies (such as the favorable treatment of interest payments for home mortgages), housing policies (such as the veterans mortgage programs), and large-scale local demolition and clearance projects under urban renewal contributed – along with private investment practices – to the uneven development of the city vis-à-vis its suburbs, and to core urban residential neighborhoods like North End vis-à-vis downtown business, government, and “third sector” economies.