At first, the battle was widely regarded as a British victory, but both sides came to recognize how dearly the “victors” had paid for the hill—226 killed and 828 wounded compared to 138 killed and 276 wounded for the defenders. Moreover, “Bunker Hill” demonstrated how wrong the British had been in assuming the Americans wouldn’t stand and fight. “Damn the rebels,” wrote one lieutenant, “that they did not flinch.”
Charlestown, too, paid a heavy price—the virtual razing of the town. When the Royal Navy in the harbor and British artillery on Copp’s Hill laid down incendiary fire, the meetinghouse with its slim steeple, the two ministers’ houses, the principal inn, and dozens of trim, clapboard houses crumbled in the inferno. “Beneath prodigious unextinguished fires,” wrote a contemporary poet, “ill-fated Charlestown welters and expires.”
But not quite. Armed now with a new myth to accompany Winthrop’s old vision of community, Charlestown soon adopted as its motto: “Liberty, a Trust to Be Transmitted to Posterity.”
Far from expiring, Charlestown grew faster than ever: in 1810, with nearly 5,000 residents, it was Massachusetts’ third-largest town. Once more it benefited from its strategic location. Enfolded by two navigable rivers and Boston Bay, with the Lowell Railroad and the Newburyport Turnpike funneling goods in from north and west, Charlestown became a “vestibule” through which New England’s produce was shunted into Boston’s spacious mansion. The Charles River Bridge poured goods and vehicles into the capital. In 1800, the infant United States Navy had opened a shipyard in the bustling Charlestown harbor, which produced virtually all the Navy’s rope on its giant rope walk and where many a fighting vessel was shaped from New England oak and yellow pine. Clustering around the shipyard were wharves and warehouses, tanneries and brickyards, banks and insurance companies.
The Navy Yard and ancillary industries drew laborers from rural Massachusetts as well as Irish immigrants who, by the 1820s, were trickling into Boston. Before long, Charlestown housed a thousand Catholics—most of them Irish—who found it difficult to attend Mass miles away at the Boston Cathedral. Bishop Benedict Fenwick resolved to build Charlestown a separate church. When the cornerstone was laid in October 1828, overwhelmingly Protestant Charlestown witnessed the novel spectacle of a Catholic procession winding through its narrow streets led by a bishop in full regalia. For a town once indistinguishable from its church, the opening of St. Mary’s Church, and later of a Catholic cemetery on Bunker Hill, must indeed have been disturbing. Soon religious tensions erupted into violence. After townsmen insulted a group of Irishmen coming home from a dance at Roger McGowan’s restaurant, fighting broke out in which one Protestant was killed. The next night a gang of Protestants destroyed McGowan’s house.
Another symbol of Catholic encroachment in Charlestown was the Ursuline Convent, established in 1826. From the start, the convent’s presence had inflamed the Puritan imagination with wild images of torture and immoral practices. As stories spread, placards went up in town exhorting the people of Charlestown: “To arms!! Ye brave and free, the Avenging Sword Unshield!” On August 12, 1834, a mob of the “brave and free”—mostly bricklayers, apprentices, and sailors—laid siege to the convent and, after nuns and students had fled, burned it to the ground.
The Ursuline Convent affair grew only in part out of Catholic-Protestant contention. Most of the convent’s forty-four students weren’t Catholics at all, but Unitarians, daughters of Boston’s aristocracy. To working-class Congregationalists, it seemed as if upper-class Unitarians and “foreign” Catholics had joined hands to undermine what they still regarded as their civil religion. Instinctively, the indigenous mob lashed out at this “unholy alliance.”
Soon the Irish emerged as the principal threat to Charlestown’s homogeneity. The great wave of Irish immigration began with the potato famine of the 1840s, during which millions of impoverished peasants were driven from the land. Between 1846 and 1856, some 130,000 Irish disembarked at the port of Boston. By the end of the Civil War, more than a third of Charlestown’s residents were first- and second-generation Irish. Most of the newcomers settled along Warren Avenue, soon called “Dublin Row,” where the town’s old residents were horrified to find “any quantity of filth, rubbish, misery, and degradation.”
By midcentury, the Protestants of the Native American Party were ready to launch an open assault on the alien influx. In 1845, the Bunker Hill Aurora warned that foreigners were landing at the rate of “13,400 a month!!! 466 a day!!! 19 an hour!!!” Three years later, the same paper declared: “Our country is literally being overrun with the miserable, vicious, and unclean paupers of the old country.” Within days, the city fathers voted to expel illegal paupers—an echo of colonial Charlestown’s “warning out” of undesirables.
But the influx continued, helping to trigger the greatest assault yet on Charlestown’s autonomy—the movement for annexation to Boston. As Boston’s Irish swelled toward a majority, a union with predominantly Protestant Charlestown appealed to many Bostonians as a means of containing “the foreign element.” In Charlestown, the Protestant establishment sought a comforting alliance with State Street’s bankers. In both cities, the Irish welcomed the merger as a way to pool their growing strength. Not surprisingly, the most virulent opposition came from Charlestown’s Congregationalist artisans, who once more detected an unholy alliance among the Irish, the upper classes, and “outsiders” of all kinds. Opponents invoked nostalgia for ancient New England towns, “the best nurseries of freedom, independence, and personal individuality.” But it was too late. Irredeemably riven now by conflicting interests and mutual fears, Charlestown was swallowed up by Boston in 1874.
Almost before the sealing wax was dry on the annexation papers, Charlestown was blaming its woes on the misconceived union. The Charlestown Enterprise called the town “ignored, neglected, and despised ever since she threw herself into Boston’s arms.” Later, the Businessman’s Association of Charlestown said, “Since Annexation we have gone backwards. We certainly have gained nothing. When there is a big snow storm the teams and men of the street department assigned to this district are at once hustled over to the city proper and we can’t get a cross-walk cleared.”
Once a stately “vestibule” to the city, Charlestown was now a drab, utilitarian corridor through which goods and suburban commuters poured in and out of Boston. The traffic had intensified in 1858 with the horse-drawn street railway, which, for the first time, enabled laborers to work in Boston and live in Charlestown. By the time electric cars started on the Charlestown run in 1892, many of the passengers were from outlying suburbs who often filled the inbound cars, leaving no seats for Charlestown residents.
Then, in 1901, came the Elevated Railway, which not only quadrupled the traffic passing through Charlestown but put much of the town in shadow. From the West End, the El screeched across the bridge to Charlestown’s City Square, then up Main Street toward the suburbs. For long-range commuters, it was a blessing, providing convenient service to downtown Boston. For Charlestown, it was a curse, a hissing monster which brought noise, dirt, and darkness to much of the town. Like the black dust which sifted through the tracks onto the streets below, blight gradually blanketed the route. Within ten years of the El’s completion, a municipal commission called for its dismantling, but suburban commuters and downtown business interests had more political clout than increasingly working-class Charlestown. The El became an emblem of the exploitation which every Townie felt at the hands of the outside world.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Charlestown’s “native” population had begun to depart in greater numbers. As the Irish moved from their enclaves along the docks, creeping slowly up the slopes of Breed’s and Bunker hills, the Protestants either left altogether, retreated up the peninsula toward Somerville, or withdrew to the Yankee precinct at the top of Breed’s Hill, which—in the words of one historian—“like a shrinking dowager, kept lifting its skirts to avoid the mud below.”
With the nat
ives entrenched on the heights and the Irish on the slopes, the peripheral shorelands, expanded by landfills, were gobbled up by industry, commerce, and institutions unwanted elsewhere. On the Mystic River side, two sugar factories and a Schraflft’s candy plant belched black smoke. On the Charles River shore, freight cars banged all night in the Boston & Maine railyards. Elsewhere, the great gray hulks of the State Prison, the Sailor’s Haven, and the Navy Yard walled off the water views which had once refreshed the townsmen’s eyes and spirits. The peninsula, largely surrounded by water, was only one square mile, yet soon it housed 40,000 people. All but the middle class on the hilltops were wedged into cramped three-deckers which fought for what little polluted air or dusky light filtered through the El or past the smokestacks.
But if Charlestown had become an industrial slum, at least it was an Irish slum. By the turn of the century it was Boston’s most Irish neighborhood. Just as the Puritans had once sought to build an exclusive fellowship of saints on that peninsula, so now the inheritors of that myth sought refuge in an ethnic haven sealed off from the hostile world. When the most aggressive or luckiest among them joined the flight to the suburbs, those who remained were deeply ambivalent. Much as they might envy a relative or friend his tract house on a half acre in Everett or Malden, and his chance to raise his children in a world of broader opportunities, they dismissed the suburban life as a betrayal of the Irish-American heritage, treason to “the Town.”
The Kirks’ first years in Charlestown were difficult ones. In January 1894, Catherine bore her first child, christened Patrick Joseph Kirk after his late grandfather. But it was as if a curse attached to that name, for eight months later young Patrick died of the croup. Bernard Kirk must have been terribly poor, for he paid his son’s $33.80 burial costs in installments of $2.00 and $5.00, spread over seven years. Eventually he found a job driving a horse-drawn trolley for the Boston Elevated. A stocky man with a handlebar mustache, Bernard cut an impressive figure in his blue uniform with its shiny brass buttons. Now that he was earning steady wages, the Kirks moved to Rutherford Avenue, where they remained for nearly three decades. Gradually he and Catherine built a family: three daughters and two sons, one of whom was named Bernard Jr., quickly dubbed Bernie by his father.
Coming of age in the 1930s, Bernie Kirk juggled multiple identities. From his father he inherited a dogged allegiance to the Irish rebel tradition, passed down from Whiteboys and Ribbonmen to Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Army. Yet his father had been an American citizen since 1894 and Bernie proudly regarded himself as a second-generation Irish-American. His parents’ sojourn in the North End gave him a Dearo’s lineage, but his birth in Charlestown made him a full-fledged Townie. As a resident of Rutherford Avenue he was a “valley dweller,” but his first loyalty was to the Arrows, a teenage gang which hung out in Thompson Square. Later, he graduated to a successor organization called the Indians.
Embodying Townie allegiance to tribe and turf, the Indians extended a boyhood association well into mid-life. Founded in 1926 by alumni of the Arrows, Wildcats, Bearcats, and other valley gangs, it established a clubhouse in the old Owls Hall on Warren Street, holding regular dinners and card nights there. Each spring it gave a dance at Roughan’s Hall, every fall a “Pow-Wow” at a Reading farm, featuring baseball, nail-driving, balloon-blowing, and a turkey dinner washed down with foaming kegs of beer. All through the twenties and thirties, Bernie Kirk was a leading Indian, serving on the Hall and Pow-Wow committees.
His father wanted to get him a job at the Boston Elevated—a position much prized among Boston’s Irish—but Bernie preferred to strike off on his own. He found a job mixing ink for the George Morrill Ink Company in the South End, where he remained for twenty-five years. It was good, steady work, but the pay was meager: $17.50 a week until Franklin Roosevelt came along to push through a minimum wage bill.
In many respects Bernie was a conventional Townie, but he made a most unconventional marriage. Gertrude Wolfberg had been born to Eugene Wolfberg, a German-Jewish shoe clerk, and Mary Connors Talbot, an Irish factory worker. After a second daughter, Winifred, followed in 1912, the marriage broke up, and in 1914, Mary married William Frawley, a Medford laborer. Barely three months later she died of tuberculosis. Feeling little responsibility for his two stepdaughters, Frawley placed them with his late wife’s cousins in Charlestown. The girls’ “Jewish name” was an embarrassment in xenophobic Charlestown, so much so that Winifred began spelling it with two f’s “to show it was German,” while Gertrude used her mother’s first married name, Talbot. Yet none of that bothered Bernie Kirk, who’d grown up around the corner from Gertrude.
Children came quickly: two boys and four girls, the third of whom was Alice. As the family grew, it moved from rented quarters to a three-story brick house at 31 Monument Avenue. From their parlor window, the Kirks could see the Charlestown prison looming by the river. Sometimes on dark mornings, rising early for his job at the ink factory, Bernie Kirk swore he could see the bare bulb over the kitchen table dim for a few seconds. Prison officials insisted that executions didn’t drain Charlestown’s power supply, but old Townies maintained they could tell whenever the switch was pulled on a cop killer or rapist or even Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who went to the electric chair there.
Short on cash, the Kirks occupied the first floor of their new house and the front of the second, renting the rear of the second and all of the third to a succession of sailors, salesclerks, and ancient pensioners. Gertrude Kirk further supplemented the family’s income by stitching clothes for the Works Progress Administration, waiting tables at the Adams House restaurant, and selling china at Raymond’s before she finally found steady work just over the hill at the Navy Yard Officers Club. Starting in 1958 on the lunchtime cafeteria line, she added the much-sought-after cloakroom job on Friday and Saturday nights. Warm and gregarious, Gertrude easily took home $70 in tips on Friday, $100 on Saturday. At week’s end, the Kirk children gathered at the kitchen table to help count their mother’s satchel of dimes and quarters. This extra income permitted the Kirks a few special pleasures. They bought a 1934 Ford, a green two-door sedan with old-fashioned running boards, in which they took Sunday jaunts into the suburbs. In the summers they rented a cottage, first at Point Shirley, later on New Hampshire’s Beaver Lake.
But there wasn’t anything frivolous about Bernie Kirk. Whatever devilment he may have displayed as an Arrow or Indian had been leached from him by middle age and family responsibilities. Most nights he was content to eat his supper, then retire to his easy chair, where he read the Boston Post and listened to the radio for hours on end without uttering a dozen words. Only one evening a week did he venture out of the house. Every Friday night at seven sharp he put on his tweed cap and went down the street to Sully’s Cafe, where he sat at the bar nursing a beer and talking with friends until eleven. Sometimes when he got home those nights his children caught flashes of puckish humor before his implacable reserve slammed down again.
More lively and fun-loving, Gertrude enjoyed playing beano or whist at St. Mary’s. She and her sister Winnie had season tickets at Fenway Park, and when the Red Sox played the Cardinals in the 1946 World Series they were at every home game. Gertrude’s three heroes were Franklin Roosevelt, James Michael Curley, and Ted Williams. Her children grew up in obeisance to that trinity. They were Americans at last.
Alice Kirk—later Alice McGoff—was a spirited tomboy, matching her male playmates stride for stride. For several years, she and her girlfriends hung out with a gang called the Crusaders down at the old colonial training field. On hot summer afternoons they cooled off by jumping from piers and bridges into the murky waters of the Charles River or the oil-slicked Little Mystic channel. In the evenings they caught a flick at the Thompson Square Theater, where two kids got a candy bar if they shared a single seat. Downtown Boston—with its movie palaces, shooting galleries, and malt shops—was barely a mile away, a short walk across the low bridge. But except to bowl
at Sixteen Lanes in the North End or shop at Filene’s Basement, Alice rarely went into “the city,” as she called it. The Town was sufficient to her needs.
Indeed, her favorite day of the year was June 17, the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the day on which Charlestown celebrated its own unique traditions. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, it had been a genteel ceremony, devoted to florid oratory and refined self-congratulation among Boston’s Yankee elite. But as the Irish advanced ever further up the slopes of Breed’s and Bunker hills, they had gradually appropriated not only the soaring battle monument on the heights but the civic spectacle dedicated in its name. By the time Alice was born, Bunker Hill Day had become a great Irish-American jamboree, a ritualized expression of the Town’s solidarity, an exuberant statement of Charlestown’s independence from the rest of the world.
The night before the big day, the Kirks would join thousands of other Townies at the American Legion and Knights of Columbus halls for prolonged bouts of drink, food, and patriotic rhetoric. Early the next morning, Bernie Kirk would throw open the bay window on the second floor and fix a giant flag to the standard there. Meanwhile, Gertrude cooked up a great batch of hot dogs, which she kept in a pot on the back of the stove, next to a dish of baked beans. The kitchen table was covered with platters of cold cuts, potato salad, and pickles. Beer and soft drinks rattled in ice. All day long, friends and neighbors stopped in to help the family celebrate.
Late in the morning, Alice and the other young Kirks would climb the hill to see the doll carriage procession and collect their free ice cream, lollipops, and miniature American flags. By 2:00 p.m., they were back on their stoop to watch the parade: 5,000 marchers, dozens of floats, military units, state and local politicians, high school bands, drill teams, color guards, Boy Scouts, bagpipers, the Irish American Association, the Knights of Columbus, the Charlestown High School cheerleaders, the Charlestown Militia Company. Along Bunker Hill Street they came, down Main Street, where the crowds stood six and eight deep on the sidewalks, up the steep slope of Monument Avenue, then around Monument Square, where American flags hung from the second-story balconies, past St. Mary’s rectory, where a clutch of priests and nuns stood on the stoop, then down Winthrop Street to the emerald swatch of the training field.
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