Join your neighbors for the 4th Annual North End PRIDE in the PRADO. Enjoy an evening filled with joy and celebration for our LGBTQIA+ community and allies as we uplift and honor love in all its beautiful forms. Special performances by the North End Music and Performing Arts Center.

We Were Here Too by Roberto Mighty, in partnership with the Freedom Trail® Foundation and Old North Illuminated, revives the memory of Boston’s colonial African-Americans, many of whom lived and worked in what is today’s North End. The project can be experienced worldwide via an online multimedia website, and locally via augmented reality in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground

Please join us for an artist talk on Wednesday May 28, 2025 at 5:30pm at the historic Old North Church, hosted by Old North Illuminated. Events are free, but accommodations are limited, so please sign up as soon as possible with the links above. Light refreshments will be provided. This project is funded by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture’s Un-Monument Initiative and The Mellon Foundation. 

This innovative project honors the lives of colonial-era African Americans in Boston’s North End—many of whom were interred, or are believed to have been buried, at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, established in 1659 and recognized as Boston’s largest colonial cemetery.

This project honors historical figures, including Phillis Wheatley Peters, in 1773 the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry; Prince Hall, an abolitionist who fought in the Revolutionary War and founded Prince Hall Masonry; and Onesimus, an African who was instrumental in bringing knowledge of smallpox inoculation to America.

Blending history with technology, We Were Here Too invites the public to engage with a layered storytelling experience. The project features augmented reality, video interviews with historians and community voices, digital illustrations, archival images, voice performances, and historical content drawn from museum collections and archives around the world.

Roberto says, “I hope folks will experience this exhibit and learn that African Americans – free and enslaved – were living and working in Boston at the same time as Paul Revere, Abigail Adams and John Hancock. We were here, too.”

Funded by the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture through a grant from the Mellon Foundation, “We Were Here Too” is presented in partnership with the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, The Historic Burying Grounds Initiative, the Freedom Trail® Foundation and Old North Illuminated.

The purpose of this meeting is to get community input and listen to the resident's positions on this proposal. This is a virtual meeting via Zoom. 

Meeting ID: 810 4946 8469

Please note, the City does not represent the occupant(s)/developer(s)/attorney(s)/applicant(s).