McKnight, Springfield, Massachusetts (and Mason Square)

The McKnight National Register Historic District in Springfield, Massachusetts is known worldwide to urban-planners as one of the first planned residential neighborhoods in the United States of America. Begun in 1870, to the North of the Old Hill neighborhood, a mixed-use area including homes and a variety of industrial uses, which had already been developed to serve workers at the Springfield Armory, the McKnight was built on land originally considered to be "Un-improvable Pine barrens" when the Armory and the area around it was laid out in the 1780s. Economic conditions had changed drastically by 1868 when the horse-drawn streetcars of the Springfield Street Railway first started to run on State Street, to the south of what became the McKnight District. rdf:langString