The neighborhood is also home to the city's Puerto Rican-Afro Caribbean Cultural Center, the Carlos Vega and Valley Arena Parks, as well as the Holyoke Turner Hall, one of the last remaining turnvereines in New England, and the William G. Morgan Elementary School.

[5] In the mid-19th century the area was predominantly open land with some factories and brickyards,[6] and was originally known as Tigertown, as it hosted a number of baseball teams with one Boston Globe writer later attributing the name to the fact that "local baseball men played for blood and showed such tigerish propensities toward rival teams if the game did not go to their liking".

[8] By the 1890s these baseball fields had largely disappeared and the area became characterized by factories and worker housing, seeing influxes of different immigrant groups from Germany; with industrialist millwrights emigrating from Rhineland and about half of workers from Saxony,[9] by 1875 it had the highest population, per capita, of German immigrants of any neighborhood or ward in New England, representing 88% of residents.

[10][11] In subsequent decades this demographic would Americanize and dissipate, with other immigrant communities settling there from Canada, Greece, and Puerto Rico into the 20th century.

[14] On December 10, 2019, as part of a $72 statewide initiative, Governor Charlie Baker's administration announced a $6.56 million grant to support street, alley, and traffic infrastructure improvement in the neighborhood around Carlos Vega Park.