As The Boston Globe reported, Tom Damigella stands in the front window of 3 Prince Street and points to a small, imperfect photograph. It shows his mother, Santia, cropped close and slightly off-center, standing near Queen Elizabeth during the monarch's 1976 visit to Boston. "My mother often said she was waving to me," Damigella says. It is not the kind of image that would run on the front page of anything. It is exactly the kind of image that explains why the North End Historical Museum feels less like an institution and more like someone's photo album, opened up and hung on the wall for the neighborhood to walk through.
The museum opened on July 21 at 3 Prince Street, on the short stretch between Hanover Street and North Square that locals call Little Prince. It took Damigella and the North End Historical Society, a nonprofit he has led since 2010, sixteen years to find a permanent home. It took restaurateur Frank DePasquale about a year to hand them one. DePasquale bought the ground-floor condo, gutted at the time down to brick and exposed wiring, and covered the first five years of lease and construction costs. In exchange, the Society pays him a dollar a month.
Four blocks away, on Cross Street, DePasquale is also building a much larger project, one that has drawn a wide range of opinions this fall.
Prince Street: a museum built inside an existing storefront
The North End Historical Museum occupies an existing storefront, on a stretch of Freedom Trail sidewalk that already carries foot traffic toward the Paul Revere House and Old North Church a few minutes' walk away. Nothing about the building's footprint or height changed. The work was interior: touchscreen timelines running from 1630 through today, a "Flavors of the North End" projection wall, and artifacts Damigella spent years pulling from city archives and his own family boxes, including boxer Tony DeMarco's autographed glove.
Admission runs $10 for adults, with discounts for seniors and students, and the museum is open Tuesday through Sunday. The design firm behind the interior, Trivium Interactive, has worked with the Museum of Science and the Museum of African American History, and the North End got the same level of production for a space smaller than most restaurants on the block.
The museum works within an existing footprint. A vacant condo became a museum. The street looks the same from the outside. The Boston Globe reported that Massachusetts State Representative Aaron Michlewitz, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, called it decades in the making when he posted about the opening.
Cross Street: a gateway with a larger footprint
The 60-80 Cross Street project is a different kind of intervention. According to Hoodline, DePasquale bought the parcel, long vacant and formerly home to Martignetti Liquors, for $8 million in 2023. Unlike the museum, this site sat empty for years before he touched it, and unlike the museum, turning it into something required Boston's Zoning Board of Appeal to sign off. On November 19, 2024, the board granted variances for building height, floor area ratio, a roof deck, and rear property line setbacks.
The anchor tenant is La Scuola, a culinary school run in partnership with Dolce & Salato, an institute based in Maddaloni, Italy. Around the school, the block is filling in with a mix that reads less like a neighborhood corner and more like a curated storefront program:
- An Italian jewelry store
- A women's handbag and shoe shop
- A baby clothing store
- A Neapolitan café
- A travel agency
- A new restaurant with a view onto the Greenway
DePasquale set a target of June 2026 for completion, timed to land ahead of FIFA World Cup matches at Gillette Stadium and the country's Semiquincentennial celebrations. That target has come and gone, and this fall, as the block's finished facade becomes visible for the first time, neighbors are weighing in with a range of views on how it reads as a new entrance to the North End from the Greenway. Michlewitz has backed the project publicly, calling DePasquale the right person to restore a blighted parcel.
| North End Historical Museum | Cross Street Gateway | |
|---|---|---|
| What was there before | Vacant, gutted condo | Vacant lot, former Martignetti Liquors |
| Physical footprint | Unchanged | Height, FAR, and setback variances required |
| Approval process | No variances reported | Zoning Board of Appeal, Nov. 2024 |
| DePasquale's role | Covered lease and construction, $1/month rent from nonprofit | Owner-developer, $8M purchase |
| Opened | July 21, 2026 | Original target June 2026, still unresolved this fall |
| Neighborhood reaction | Support from longtime residents reported | A range of views this fall |
The two projects differ in scale. A museum behind an old storefront window works within the existing shape of the street. A building that received variances for height, floor area ratio, a roof deck, and rear setbacks is a larger change to its block, and larger changes tend to draw a wider range of opinions.
The same instinct, playing out at street level
DePasquale's fingerprints are on smaller interventions too, and they follow the same logic as the museum rather than the Cross Street build. He added a fence and lighting to All Saints Way, the small alley on Battery Street where framed photographs of Catholic saints have hung for years in memory of the man who started the tradition, Peter Baldassari. That was preservation, not construction, and it drew no pushback.
The restaurant floor is turning over in the same spirit this fall, mostly without controversy, because most of it is addition rather than alteration. Taranta, the Peruvian-Italian restaurant that ran for twenty years on Hanover Street before closing in 2020, sat empty long enough that a different name, Maria Forno, was floated and dropped before the current concept, Pinsa Piazza, settled in. Owner Charles Terrill is bringing Roman-style pinsa made with a 72-hour fermentation process to 210 Hanover Street, along with a still-unnamed breakfast concept that will serve baked ziti specials rather than the all-day breakfast menu once rumored. It is a new name in an old space, which is the same shape the museum took.
Sunny Girl, the deli-style breakfast counter near the waterfront, is doing something rarer: expanding outward into South Boston while keeping its North End location intact. For decades the pattern ran the other way, with operators proving a concept somewhere else before bringing it into the North End. Sunny Girl is reversing that, which says something about how confident long-tenured North End businesses feel about their footing here right now.
What this means for anyone walking these streets this fall
Feast season wrapped with Saint Anthony's Feast in late August, which means this is the first quiet stretch of the year where residents can actually walk Prince Street and Cross Street without a procession or a food cart in the way. The museum is easy to fold into an existing walk. It sits a few minutes from the Paul Revere House, keeps regular Tuesday through Sunday hours, and rewards a slow look more than a quick photo, given how much of the story lives in touchscreens and QR codes rather than wall text.
Cross Street rewards a different kind of attention. The scaffolding is down or coming down, the facade is visible, and whatever opinion a resident forms this fall about height and setback and what an "entrance to the neighborhood" ought to look like will likely be the opinion that sticks once La Scuola and its retail neighbors are fully open. Worth forming that opinion in person rather than off a rendering, since the finished building reads differently at street level than it does on a construction fence.
Both projects trace back to the same person, though they followed different paths. The museum opened inside an existing storefront on Prince Street, and the Cross Street block went through a zoning review for its height, floor area, roof deck, and setbacks before its first tenants arrive.
If you're weighing what a home near either block is actually worth this fall, or want a clearer read on how projects like these tend to move value on specific streets rather than across the neighborhood as a whole, Samantha Berdinka can walk you through it block by block.
