Common Ground
Page 27
The two El stations became centers of a garish night life. Three theaters offering vaudeville, popular plays, and operettas “turned night into day” on Dover Street. Around them spread a rash of saloons, all-night restaurants, dime museums, penny arcades, pawnshops, and pool rooms. “When the work of the day is over,” wrote one social worker, “crowds of pleasure seekers fill the sidewalks; hotels and theaters become brilliant with lights; the hurdy-gurdy jingles merrily; and the street is changed for a time into a sort of fair, where evil offers itself in many attractive guises.” Indeed, the innocent pleasures of the boulevard gradually attracted prostitutes, drug traffickers, confidence men, pickpockets, fences, and petty criminals of all varieties. And just as New York’s alcoholics congregated under the city’s elevated tracks along the famed Bowery, so portions of Washington Street, in the latticed gloom of the El, became Boston’s skid row.
Yet, for many, the South End remained a residential quarter. As the Yankees departed, their place was taken first by the Irish, who clustered around the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Washington Street, which in 1875 became the seat of the new Boston Archdiocese. For the next fifty years the Irish ruled the roost in the South End, a tough, contentious breed like John L. Sullivan, the heavyweight champion of the world, who trained at O’Donnell’s gym on East Concord Street; “Pea Jacket” Maguire, the iron-fisted boss of Ward Seventeen; and James Michael Curley, born in a cold-water walk-up on Northampton Street.
It was the arrival of the Jews which pushed the Irish into Roxbury and Dorchester. In 1898, the family of Mary Antin, the future writer, settled on Dover Street, where she found a market teeming with the sounds and smells of Eastern Europe, surrounded by open sewers, filth-strewn alleys, houses of prostitution, raucous saloons. “Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this street,” she remarked. And yet, for Mary Antin, the South End was a door opening on the wonders of America. Long after she left it, she wrote: “I must never forget that I came away from Dover Street with my hands full of riches. I must not fail to testify that in America a child of the slums owns the land and all that is good in it.” Antin’s experience was largely replicated by many of those who followed her to the South End. Well into the twentieth century, the district was a classic port of entry that gave immigrants their first lesson in the American experience.
Easing those rites of passage was an extraordinary array of philanthropies. Edward Everett Hale once said the South End was “the most ‘charitied’ region in Christendom.” From his South Congregational Church, Hale pursued the social gospel, culminating in the establishment of a settlement house in his name. Later, South End House was founded by Robert A. Woods, a staunch moralist who believed in “purifying” such neighborhoods by segregating the tramps, alcoholics, and paupers from the “deserving poor,” a process he called “factoring out the residuum.” Then there were the Lincoln House Association, Harriet Tubman House, Morgan Memorial, the Scots Charitable Society, the Boston Female Asylum, St. Joseph’s Home for Sick and Destitute Servant Girls, and a dozen others. Many of these organizations were staffed by graduates of Boston’s universities—earnest young men and women who hoped thereby to alleviate the glaring inequalities and injustices of industrial society. By the turn of the century, the South End had become Boston’s traditional laboratory for such experiments in altruism.
So long as the “deserving poor” predominated, noblesse oblige thrived in the South End. But as stable working-class families continued to move out (the area’s population declined from 57,218 in 1950 to 22,775 in 1970) to be replaced by ever more roomers and drifters, and as Anglo-Saxons or Middle European immigrants gave way to Slavs, Mediterraneans, Chinese, and ultimately to blacks and Puerto Ricans (who made up 47 percent of its population by 1970), traditional philanthropy seemed futile. Robert Woods was horrified by the Southern Negroes, whom he found “loud and coarse,” “revealing more of the animal qualities than of the spiritual.”
When Scollay Square and the West End were demolished in the late fifties and early sixties, many of their denizens migrated to skid row, which, by 1963, provided refuge to 7,000 homeless men, eleven poolrooms, twenty-four liquor stores, and forty-one saloons. More than ever, the South End became the principal haunt of the city’s “night people,” notably the “white hunters,” suburban men who prowled the avenues of “Momma-land” in their late-model cars, looking for black prostitutes. A prominent Republican politician, running for lieutenant governor, had to drop out of the race after police picked him up not far from the 411 Lounge on Columbus Avenue with a black prostitute in his car. Increasingly, respectable people declined to cross the New Haven Railroad tracks into the South End. On warm spring evenings, the poet Robert Lowell felt a frisson of terror when he threw open his Back Bay windows to “hear the South End / the razor’s edge / of Boston’s negro culture.” For most white Bostonians, the South End had simply ceased to exist.
But to some who stumbled on it accidentally, the district was a revelation; one visitor called it “the most beautiful slum in the world.” The very suddenness of its decline had been its architectural salvation. A few buildings had gone through bizarre transformations: the magnificent Deacon House, once the South End’s finest mansion, had become an art school, a dance hall, a hardware store; Edward Everett Hale’s church became a Catholic cathedral, the Columbia Theater, then a burlesque house before it was demolished in 1957. But most private owners did not have the resources for extensive renovation. As town houses became rooming houses, sinks were merely moved into parlors. Architecturally, most of the South End remained frozen in a mid-nineteenth-century tableau.
From time to time, a few middle-class families made a stab at rehabilitating sections of the South End, but nothing came of it, probably because the neighborhood was too remote from the downtown business, shopping, and entertainment districts. Then, in 1965, the New Haven Railroad yards, just across the tracks in the Back Bay, were transformed into the Prudential Center—a fifty-two-story office tower, the 1,000-room Sheraton-Boston Hotel, a huge shopping mall, and three twenty-four-story apartment buildings. In effect, downtown had been extended a mile to the south and, suddenly, the South End was infinitely more attractive as an in-town residential district.
The first wave in the middle-class resettlement of the South End consisted of gays. An old real estate maxim advised, “Follow the fairies”; for, not welcome in many conventional neighborhoods, gays often gravitated to “fringe” communities where houses could be picked up for a song and later sold for a symphony. As they scrubbed and redecorated the old bow-fronts, word of the astonishing results spread to straight members of the artistic community—painters, sculptors, and, particularly, architects—who became the second wave of immigrants to “the new South End.”
Then came others, more conventional young people, some of them drawn by the bargain prices on Victorian bow-fronts, some by the neighborhood’s convenience to downtown, still others by the racial and social integration, the opportunity to participate in “a great urban adventure.” It was the start of a phenomenon later labeled “gentrification,” a British term for the resettlement of working-class neighborhoods by more affluent young families. The American model was Georgetown, Washington’s charming enclave of Federal brick town houses, where private rehabilitation had begun as early as the 1930s. But soon the movement spread to Philadelphia’s Society Hill, Baltimore’s Bolton Hill, Park Slope in Brooklyn, the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and San Francisco’s Mission District. And by 1963, several hundred middle-class families had established themselves in the South End, particularly on Union Park and other streets nearest downtown.
At first it wasn’t easy. Mortgages were difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. Applications came back stamped “unstable neighborhood.” The banks began to relent only after the city assigned the South End a high priority for urban renewal. In their 1960 development program, John Collins and Ed Logue lumped the South End with Charlestown as “gray” areas in need of
immediate attention. But Logue sensed the neighborhood’s exquisite ambiguity, describing it as “too promising to ignore, too near the edge of disaster for remedial action to be delayed.” The South End was trembling on the edge of something. The question was: what?
Planning for renewal in the South End and Charlestown began almost simultaneously, but the fierce resistance which Logue met in Charlestown, culminating in the tumultuous hearings of January 1963, made him tread more carefully in the South End. The initial plan, calling for a grassy “common way” running the full length of the community, encountered some difficulty, so he quickly scrapped it. Logue realized that, unlike Charlestown, which was dominated by Irish Catholics, the South End had no single group with which one could bargain. The 606-acre renewal area was the country’s largest, and probably its most diverse, so negotiations were opened with sixteen distinct interest groups. Even those with the least political clout—rooming-house tenants, skid-row alcoholics, black Southern migrants, and the “night people”—were loosely represented in the process by United South End Settlements. After two years of negotiations, the final plan was overwhelmingly endorsed at a South End hearing in August 1965 and later that year by the City Council.
It was a heavily political plan, with something for everyone. Demolition would be concentrated on the heavily trafficked, badly deteriorated avenues, displacing 3,550, or 19 percent, of the South End’s households. Nearly 3,000 structures, most of them along the tree-shaded, still shabbily genteel side streets, would be rehabilitated. New construction would provide up to 2,500 federally subsidized low- and moderate-income rental units; 800 low-income public housing units; four schools and seven playgrounds. Forty-six of the community’s 116 liquor licenses would be removed, which, it was hoped, would sharply reduce skid row and discourage the “night people.” The sleaziest of the rooming houses were slated for demolition, but efforts would be made to refurbish the better ones.
There remained one acute, unresolved tension. Although the plan committed the redevelopment authority to provide “an economically, socially and racially integrated community” and to ensure “the availability of standard housing at rentals that all displaced low-income residents wishing to remain in the South End could afford,” there were those who doubted that such objectives could be achieved. Already by 1970, the South End had changed markedly. In the decade since 1960, its median income had risen from $4,542 to $6,122; its proportion of professionals and technicians had increased 10 percent, while its laborers and service people had declined 15 percent. To some, this was a sign that renewal was working, that the shabby old slum was regaining some of its past grandeur, that—as the Boston Herald put it—the South End was “blossoming out as the ‘in’ place for affluent upper-middle-class, well-educated people to live.” To others, it was a warning that the middle-class young professionals were inexorably squeezing out the poor, the old, and the black, and that the very racial, social, and ethnic mix which had attracted some of the newcomers was now being threatened by their presence. It was a tension that would sharpen in years to come.
The Divers almost gave up. In the month after they told their real estate agents they didn’t want to buy a rooming house, not a single suitable house came on the market. They were about ready to forget the South End and look elsewhere when, in mid-May, one of the agents called to say she had “a really good deal.” A Greek couple had bought a house on West Newton Street, had done some rehabilitation, but were in over their heads and wanted to get out. They were asking $36,000, but were so eager to sell that the agent was certain they would take less.
Late one afternoon, the Divers went down to look at 118 West Newton Street. When she saw it, Joan was dismayed. It was a total disaster, she thought, beyond all hope. The old spruce floors were rotting, the window sashes were splintered, the plaster ornaments had fallen from much of the parlor ceiling. The bottom two floors were livable, but the top two looked as if they had barely survived a hurricane—wooden lath showing through the walls, wire and cables trailing along the halls, two bathrooms with exposed plumbing and uncovered plasterboard.
But Colin’s practiced eyes saw past the disarray to the essential features of the fine brick town house which had been built in 1865 (and first occupied by William S. Hills, a prosperous flour broker). The identical houses lining the block between Columbus Avenue and Tremont Street were fairly typical of that vintage, with their bow-fronts, mansard roofs, and high stoops. What particularly intrigued Colin was the interior detail—the Italianate marble fireplaces, the ornate plasterwork on the high ceilings, the cornice moldings, and the medallions in the center of each parlor from which chandeliers had once been suspended. And there were other attractions too: a large backyard in which the boys could play until they were old enough to go out on the street; a separate apartment on the bottom floor, with its own entrance under the stoop, which would bring in some badly needed income; and the prospect of a reasonable price. The house would take a lot of work, but that was precisely what Colin wanted, a tough job he could get his fingers into. Yes, he decided, this one would do.
Colin’s enthusiasm soon won Joan over, and a few days later they made a bid of $27,000. To their surprise, it was accepted almost immediately. Though most banks were still disinclined to give mortgages in the South End, Suffolk Franklin Savings Bank was beginning to finance the young professionals moving into the neighborhood. The Divers got a twenty-year mortgage at 7 percent, requiring an $8,000 down payment—all they could scrape together. (Getting the house insured was more difficult. Insurance companies wanted nothing at all to do with the South End; they wouldn’t write any theft insurance at all, and fire insurance was available only through a state-sponsored risk-pooling program.)
Their parents were flabbergasted when they learned where Colin and Joan were settling. Ben Diver, who had lived in the South End forty-five years before, associated the area with derelicts and shiftless Southern blacks; he didn’t want any son—or grandson—of his living there. George Makechnie wasn’t pleased either, and he had more recent evidence to support his position. Three years earlier, George had shattered his left arm in an auto accident. Unable to drive back and forth to Lexington, the Makechnies had sold their house there and moved into a Prudential Center apartment. Several days a week, George’s route took him along West Newton Street. On almost every walk, he was solicited by prostitutes and once he saw a police car screech down the street, with policemen firing at an escaping felon. It was a dangerous street and he couldn’t understand why Colin and Joan wanted to live there. As soon as George could drive again, the Makechnies moved back to Lexington, buying a new house there in June 1970, just as their daughter and son-in-law were moving in the opposite direction.
On Saturday, August I, with some friends lending a hand, the Divers moved into their new house. It was a sweltering, humid evening and by the time they were installed they were aching, parched, slippery with perspiration. Out in the clamorous night, bottles shattered on the sidewalks, screams mixed with raucous laughter, while fire engines and police cars wailed up and down the avenues. As Colin and Joan thrashed on the damp sheets, unable to sleep, they asked themselves, what have we done?
But when Sunday dawned gold and green, the sun slanting off the rich brick façade across the street, their enthusiasm came surging back and they started putting their new house in order. For a few weeks, Joan worked at Colin’s side, but soon she found that her two sons kept her so busy she couldn’t be of any real help. So Colin, not unhappily, shouldered the whole job. Every evening when he got back from City Hall, he grabbed a quick supper, then changed into khaki pants and a T-shirt and set to work with his saws and planes and scrapers. He started on the fourth-floor bathroom—attaching the sink and toilet, laying down the tile, painting and wallpapering. Late one night after he had grouted the last tile, he summoned his wife and, for a few glorious moments, they sat cross-legged on the floor, happily admiring their first finished room.
Colin lavished hou
rs on the backyard, once nothing but hardscrabble covered with weeds. He carted in gravel and soil, raising a mound, which he covered with a rock garden. From South End demolition sites, he gathered paving stones and old bricks with which to build a patio and terraced garden. And one day, walking by a water-main excavation, he noticed huge slabs of fir and spruce which had been driven into the ground to buttress the sides of the trench. Colin asked if he could have the wood when the job was done and the foreman said sure, it would save them from hauling it away. Colin took a truckful, enough to build a large deck.
The work he liked best was restoring the ornamental plaster on the parlor ceilings. It was an elaborate Victorian conceit—lacy filigree, scrolls, plumes, rosettes, wreaths, and leafery—but previous owners had covered it all with so much paint that the detail was blurred or obscured. Colin rigged up a platform—a broad plank supported by two ladders—where he would sit beneath the twelve-foot ceiling, squirting water from a Windex bottle, soaking the paint until it came loose, then flicking it off with tiny wooden molding tools. In many places, the decoration had already fallen away in chunks, so Colin made latex molds and cast new pieces to complete the pattern. Restoring the ceiling’s original glory was meticulous, demanding, painfully slow work—a foot an hour, and each parlor had sixty-five feet of ornament. So for two years, Colin spent almost every Saturday afternoon up on the platform, wetting and scraping, scraping and wetting, while the Metropolitan Opera poured from a radio on the floor. His arms ached, his fingers cramped, water soaked his hair and got in his eyes, but it was his favorite time of the week.