Brighton Marine

Brighton Marine provides a convenient, friendly, attractive campus in the greater Boston community for our various clinical and social service tenants. Our mission is to serve Uniformed Service Members, Retirees, Veterans and their Families through leadership of a nationally recognized health management program providing campus based services, and developing and managing mixed income housing along with various veteran support services. The roots of BMHC extend back to 1798, when John Adams was president and Congress was meeting for only the fifth time. The new nation’s leaders recognized that foreign trade was necessary to grow the economy and that healthy merchant seamen were needed to enable that commerce. So Congress passed “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen,” which provided funding for the Marine Hospital Service. Over time the Boston-area marine hospital moved from Boston Harbor, to Charlestown to Chelsea, before its final stop in Brighton in 1940. By then the Seamen and Sailors Act, had expanded to include funding for a greater array of community services and the Marine Hospital Service had evolved into the Public Health Service which included a network of public hospitals under its umbrella. In 1980 the Reagan Administration decided to close many of the hospitals around the country within the public hospital system, including Brighton Marine. But the service veterans who lived in the Allston-Brighton area were not ready to let it go. They formed an organization called the Allston-Brighton Aid and Health Group and successfully petitioned the federal government to allow them to take over the property and continue medical services for veterans. That led to a new business entity in 1981 called Brighton Marine Health Center. Veterans’ care continued to be a priority, but BMHC also became a landlord on the grounds -- operating the facility and managing the property for a burgeoning list of community-oriented health care tenants.