On June 29, a neighbor told the women that down at the Blue Mirror Cafe he had overheard someone say he was going to firebomb the house to “teach people not to rent to nigger lovers.” On June 30, the three young women left Charlestown for good.
That night, down on Bunker Hill Street, the Green Store Gang celebrated its defense of the Town’s integrity. Once more, Charlestown had repelled an alien invader.
11
Diver
On steamy summer evenings in 1968, Colin played third base for the Mayor’s office softball team, who, bristling with pride in their bold new administration, called themselves Kevin’s Krusaders. Once a week, the Krusaders assembled to play teams fielded by the Police Department, the Globe, the distinguished Yankee law firm of Hale and Dorr, or the Association for Protecting the Constitutional Rights of the Spanish-Speaking. Dressed in white T-shirts, with “Boston Parks and Recreation” stitched across them in blue, their wives and children cheering on the sidelines, a case of beer cooling in a trash can filled with ice, they played a combative, knuckles-in-the-dirt brand of ball.
One August afternoon, Colin and Budget Director Dave Davis left City Hall early to pick up the Krusaders’ bats, balls, and other gear, which Davis stowed at home. In the Budget Director’s car, they drove past the Public Gardens, where white swan boats cruised the blue lagoon; along Newbury Street with its sidewalk cafes and expensive boutiques; through the Back Bay to spacious Copley Square, where the granite façade of the Boston Public Library confronted the Romanesque splendors of Trinity Church. Turning there, and crossing the railroad tracks, they entered a shabbier, scruffier part of the city which Colin had never visited before—the South End.
Not to be confused with remote South Boston, the South End was downtown’s backyard, a largely neglected swath of the inner city, extending from Chinatown on the north to Roxbury’s black heartland on the south, from the Back Bay on the west to the rushing traffic of the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway on the east. Colin had heard about the South End for years—idle boasts from high school classmates about their visits to sleazy bars or bordellos there or, later, from his friends at law school, tales of the great blues belted out at the quarter’s black nightclubs. But, attracted by neither jazz nor sin, and largely unaware of its other assets, Colin had never set foot there before that afternoon.
As Davis’ car crept through the crowded streets, dodging pushcart peddlers, skid-row bums, stickball players, and children scampering in the overflowing hydrants, Colin was intrigued by the animation around him. What he noticed first was the varied colors of the children—black, white, brown, even a scattering of yellow. He had seen enough of Boston’s neighborhoods by then to know how rare this was. Most of the city was divided into ethnic enclaves, jealously guarded turfs where intruders of other nationalities, much less different races, were not welcome. Yet here, five months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, blacks and whites were throwing baseballs, not rocks, at each other. It was exactly the kind of racial harmony which Colin was trying to foster in his work for the Mayor.
Next he was struck by the bow-front brick houses lining those narrow streets. Ever since his first summer working for the Cambridge Historical Commission, Colin had been charmed by Victorian architecture, and he quickly noted that behind the grime and disrepair and misconceived alterations, many of these buildings were fine examples of mid-nineteenth-century domestic architecture. And when Dave Davis pulled up in front of his four-story town house on West Brookline Street and ushered him inside, Colin was struck by how comfortable, even elegant, the renovated building was. On their way to the ball field, he questioned Dave about the South End—about its history, its recent redevelopment, its surprising variety and racial integration.
Boston was still foreign terrain to Colin. During his first year at the Mayor’s office, he and Joan lived in suburban Watertown. That was hardly unusual. Most of Kevin White’s aides lived in the suburbs, a situation which was causing the Mayor increasing embarrassment. Hostile City Councilmen lost no opportunity to remind the voters that the Mayor’s Whiz Kids had sought out sanctuaries comfortably remote from Boston’s problems.
The second year, Colin and Joan moved just across the city line to Brighton, but that leafy, quasi-suburban neighborhood still seemed too detached from the pressing issues with which Colin grappled at work. Having committed himself to the war on urban poverty and injustice, he felt he should be living closer to the front line.
Moreover, both Colin and Joan yearned for the racial, ethnic, and class mix to be found only in the inner city. Weary of the long bus ride to and from City Hall, Colin wanted to be near enough to walk or cycle to work; they wanted to take more advantage of the city’s theaters, concert halls, and restaurants. Finally, there was the prospect of restoring their own Victorian town house.
In the winter of 1969–70, they started looking in earnest—consulting real estate agents, scouring the Globe’s classified ads, or simply touring the city in their blue Dodge, surveying prospective neighborhoods. They looked at Federal town houses on the steep slopes of Beacon Hill and French Academic brownstones along the boulevards of the Back Bay, but soon concluded that such elegant surroundings were beyond their means.
Some Greek Revival houses around Charlestown’s Monument Square were well within their price range. Indeed, Charlestown had many of the attributes they were seeking. But, overwhelmingly white and working class, it lacked the critical element of diversity. Moreover, its special sense of grievance, nursed over the centuries, had left Charlestown an insular community unlikely to welcome outsiders of any kind, much less Harvard-educated lawyers. The few Townies they encountered on their visits—longshoremen trudging home from the docks or teenagers lounging outside the taverns on Bunker Hill Street—glared at them suspiciously. Colin and Joan didn’t want to be that far out on the urban frontier.
As they eliminated neighborhood after neighborhood, Colin’s thoughts kept returning to the South End. He tried to communicate his enthusiasm to Joan, and on several occasions drove her through the area, pointing out graceful squares, copper fountains, leafy parks, a particularly fine doorway or roof line. But Joan was skeptical. So much of what she glimpsed from the car’s windows was drab, deteriorated, or destroyed. Burnt-out shells violated the Victorian landscape. The alleys were heaped with trash. Drunks and derelicts lounged on street corners. The pedestrians seemed mostly black and Puerto Rican. Joan wanted to live in the city, she wanted diversity and integration, but how could she raise her children in a place like this? This was going too far. So, for a time, Colin stopped talking about the South End.
Then one day in February 1970, Joan fell into conversation with a friend. Linda MacGregor and her husband, Jim, had lived in the South End since 1965 and were enthusiastic advocates of its brand of city living. Joan began firing questions at her: What was it like? Was it safe? What did she do with her children all day? Linda bubbled with reassurance. Her two girls hop-scotched and jumped rope on the sidewalk, rode their bicycles to the Charles River, flew kites in the park, made friends with Italian butchers, Irish bartenders, proprietors of Spanish bodegas. Most important, Linda told Joan about the John Winthrop Nursery School on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay, where many of the newer South End families sent their children. Linda raved about the Winthrop, its attention to the individual child, its concern with fostering independence, resourcefulness, and initiative; it sounded perfect, just the sort of school the Divers had been looking for. That evening, Joan excitedly told Colin what she’d learned, and with her doubts assuaged, she agreed to look for a house in the South End.
At first it seemed hopeless. Much of what the Divers saw fell into one of three categories: already rehabilitated town houses in the heart of the zone favored by the “young professionals” and thus priced at $50,000 or more; buildings which still needed lots of work, selling at $18,000 to $25,000 but well outside the rehabilitated zone and on the fringes of the black ghetto; or burnt-out shells and virtua
l wrecks which could be had for $5,000 to $10,000. The first category was too expensive, the second too risky, the third too much work.
Those buildings which were habitable, cheap, and appropriately located were invariably rooming houses. Long Boston’s lodging-house district, the South End still had about 235 licensed lodging houses accommodating 14,000 tenants, many of them elderly single people who had occupied the same house, sometimes the same room, for years. (Most were white; the rural Southern blacks who had flooded the district generally arrived in large families, settling in crowded apartments.) The lodging houses ranged from shabby but neat premises kept by gruff, demanding Irish landladies to sordid, crumbling warrens neglected by absentee landlords. One after another, they were snapped up by eager “young professionals,” who evicted the tenants and converted the buildings to single-family dwellings.
Every weekend that winter, the Divers looked at rooming houses. When tenants reluctantly opened their doors to these visitors from a foreign realm, they revealed terrible scenes of squalor, desperation, and loneliness. Most rooms were dark and gloomy, drapes pulled tight against cold, light, and the outside world. A dank, musty smell—mixed of cooking oil, sweat, and garbage—hung in the air. Often a piece of cardboard was tacked over a broken windowpane. Chunks of ceiling plaster littered the floor. Gas burners roared perpetually to ward off the chill as the roomers huddled in ragged sweaters and overcoats. Some tenants, particularly the older men, were exquisitely polite as they showed the potential buyers around their cramped quarters. Others, knowing they might be on the street within weeks, regarded the Divers with sullen resentment.
But roomers were cowed, beaten people, not accustomed to challenging their fate. Only once did the Divers encounter open hostility. In one house with several tiny apartments, a young white couple glared ferociously at them. Then the husband hissed through clenched teeth, “I just want you to know that if you buy this house, we’re staying. You aren’t pushing us out!” It was particularly unsettling because the couple looked uncannily like the Divers—only a bit more bedraggled and desperate.
After weeks of this sort of thing, Colin and Joan decided not to buy a rooming house. They couldn’t reconcile themselves to the prospect of evicting tenants, particularly old, helpless people, and they told the brokers they wanted a house from which only the previous owner would be displaced. The Divers realized that their stand contained an element of self-delusion. If they were to buy an empty house, they wouldn’t inquire too closely as to how many tenants had been removed to make way for the sale. And even if they displaced nobody themselves, they knew they were part of a movement which was forcing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people out of the South End.
If they hadn’t fully recognized that before, it was brought home to them with some force on May 2, 1970, when they took the Fourth Annual South End House Tour. Sponsored by the South End Historical Society, the tour sought to attract families like the Divers into the neighborhood by displaying impressive examples of earlier restoration. One of the showplaces was the Brookline Street town house of Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Pinkney. Colin and Joan lingered there for half an hour, admiring the handsome marble fireplaces, the parquet floors, and the twelve-foot ceilings decorated with elaborate plasterwork. But when they emerged onto the high stoop, they found fifty demonstrators parading on the sidewalk below with signs reading: “Pioneers Out—Take Your Victoriana with You,” and “The Historical Society Is a Lackey of the Real Estate Agents.” From the bed of a pickup truck parked in the street, a man with a bullhorn harangued the crowd: “History isn’t old houses. History is people!”
But who were the South End’s people? For more than a century, wave after wave of immigration had broken over the district, each inundation washing away at least part of the previous one. The South End had been called “a nursery of democracy,” because, in succession, Yankees, Irish, Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Lebanese, Chinese, Russian and German Jews, blacks, and Hispanics had learned there the ways of urban America. If middle-class professionals were now “discovering” the area, it had been discovered and rediscovered many times before, each group of settlers making it over in its own image.
Indeed, the South End had literally been “made” to accommodate its first inhabitants. When John Winthrop arrived from Charlestown in 1630, he found the hilly Shawmut peninsula almost completely surrounded by water and connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, or “neck.” Not until the early nineteenth century, with the town rapidly running out of building lots, did Boston construct sea walls so that a network of streets could be laid out on the neck, the future South End. And only in the 1850s did the city fathers seriously attempt to develop the district. Fearing that central Boston would soon be an Irish ghetto, officials determined to build a fashionable new residential community in the South End which might serve as a magnet to the departing middle class.
It was an era of enthusiasm for nature; cities were regarded as sinks of squalor and corruption. To counter the lure of the countryside, the South End’s planners studded their new district with grassy residential squares, parks, fountains, statues, and tree-lined avenues. Its architecture was distinctive too—red brick or brownstone town houses with mansard roofs, bulging bow fronts, and high stoops, the kitchens and dining rooms tucked under the stoops at street level, while the formal parlors opened from the top of the steep flight of stairs. Ranged in long rows down the avenues or in ovals around the parks, their russet façades gave the district a pleasing, restful symmetry.
In size and opulence, the dwellings varied according to the income of their occupants. The South End attracted few of Boston’s genuine aristocrats; the old shipping and mercantile families preferred Beacon Hill or the emerging suburbs. But it drew much of the new wealth, the prosperous merchants in shoes, leather, liquor, and grain who built spacious houses ringing Blackstone, Franklin and Chester squares, high-shouldered mansions, often with more than twenty-five rooms and costing up to $30,000.
As the district was extended west on new land claimed from the bay, its scale declined. Around Concord and Rutland squares, or in the adjacent cobblestoned streets, lesser merchants bought mass-produced houses. And in the alleys behind the squares, clerks and salesmen rented small row houses. Indeed, the city’s original vision of the South End as an elite gold coast faded quickly. As early as 1855, confronted with lagging sales, Mayor Jerome Smith proposed that the South End be opened to “mechanics of limited means.”
Meanwhile, the city began developing still another area of fine homes—the Back Bay. There it abandoned the tradition of intimate squares, modeled on London and Bath, for the more dramatic vistas and grand boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris. Closer to the traditional upper-class enclave of Beacon Hill, the Back Bay immediately caught the fancy of many wealthy families who had resisted the initial enthusiasm for the South End. By 1870, the Back Bay became the place to buy—and the South End, after barely fifteen years in the limelight, was suddenly out of favor.
Socially conscious Bostonians were particularly prey to fears that they had bought in the wrong place. Once convinced of their mistake they did not linger long. John P. Marquand’s George Apley recounts how his father came out on the front steps one day and glimpsed an unspeakable sight next door. “ ‘Thunderation,’ Father said, ‘there is a man in his shirt sleeves on those steps.’ The next day he sold his house for what he had paid for it and we moved to Beacon Street. Your grandfather had sensed the approach of change; a man in his shirt sleeves had told him the days of the South End were numbered.”
Apley acted just in time. It was 1873, the year of “the Great Panic.” The repercussions were felt first along Columbus Avenue, lined with expensive hotels and grand town houses. Hard-pressed owners defaulted on their mortgages, and banks quickly dumped the properties. The sharp drop in values spread to the rest of the South End, which slipped into precipitous decline.
Gradually, its town houses were converted to multiple dwellings—the larger homes to apar
tment buildings and tenements, the smaller ones to lodging houses. The city had been so concerned with retaining the middle class it had glutted the market with expensive homes, while virtually ignoring the needs of the working class, which now poured into the void. At first, the lodging houses catered primarily to young people from New England and the Maritime Provinces who had a “film of glorious prospects before their eyes, to be clerks and salesmen, to enter business college and blossom out as bookkeepers at six dollars a week.”
So long as such young people predominated, the lodging houses were repositories of hope and ambition. But before long those on the threshold of their productive lives were replaced by others who had long since left theirs behind. In 1895, a Boston journalist visited “Gunn’s Lodging House. Friendly Lodging House for Sober Men. Prices 15, 20, 25, 35, 50 cts. No Drunken Men Admitted.” Behind the twenty-cent door was a dark, narrow room. “It contained ten cot beds, five on each long side with an aisle between the fives,” he wrote. “Of two or three beds still vacant, I chose the one nearest the window. It was woven wire on a wooden frame a few inches high, had a grimy mattress, two dirty sheets, a bloodstained pillow and a single comforter with a great rent in the centre.”
By 1900, with 37,000 lodgers, the South End was the nation’s largest rooming-house district—a drab, dismal quarter which one social worker called “the city wilderness.” Its once peaceful squares were now hemmed in by sooty factories, noisy machine shops, dusty brickyards, grim warehouses, and the incessant rumble of trucks and steam engines. As with Charlestown to the north, the South End had become a “vestibule” of the inner city. Through its narrow funnel passed five heavily traveled arteries, two railroads, and the Boston Elevated Street Railway, whose line from Scollay Square to the South End was completed in 1901.
The South End’s deterioration was greatly hastened by the erection of the El along Washington Street. Just as in Charlestown, it blighted everything in its path with soot, noise, and darkness. Nor was it there to serve the immediate population. The El didn’t even stop within the South End, only at its two extremities—Dover and Northampton streets. It had been built to provide the burgeoning suburban middle class with speedy service to and from their offices, and if, by so doing, it had to pass through Charlestown and the South End, then the businessman from Dedham or Wakefield could simply avert his glance and spare himself the bleak vistas which flashed past the windows.
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