Common Ground (31 page)

What the job did require was firmness and understanding. Although barely five feet ten inches tall and thin as a barber pole, Danny was expected to keep the peace, which meant shutting off drinkers who’d had too much, ejecting troublemakers, and making certain that nothing too egregiously illegal went
on. Only once did he get in trouble himself. A new bookie was working one of the bars, someone unknown either to the management or to the cops. Since he hadn’t struck a deal with the authorities, he got himself pinched and Danny was picked up with him. But Danny didn’t even know the guy. Tony Scalli, an old friend from the coffee shop who’d become Charlestown’s state representative, quickly got him out.

Through high school and the Army, Danny himself had drunk very little, but serving drinks day after day to his friends and neighbors, he developed a taste for the stuff. After work he often stopped by the Horseshoe Tavern, another neighborhood spot, which had once been Jack Kennedy’s favorite bar in Charlestown. The place had lapsed into decrepitude, becoming known as the “Wax Museum” because the figures at the bar never seemed to move. Danny could often be found among them, quietly sipping Old Thompson’s.

With his friends, Danny was lively and gregarious. Fanatical hockey fans, he and his pals had season tickets to the Bruins and attended virtually every home game. Occasionally they saw the Celtics and the Red Sox as well. Late at night, coming back from a game, Danny would unloose his gorgeous tenor voice, breaking into a chorus of “Danny Boy” or “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” On nights like that, life seemed worth living.

The early sixties were hard years for Alice, who already had four young children to raise. The Polk Street flat was cramped, badly maintained, desperately cold in winter. The heat never seemed to percolate through the ancient radiators. She and the children often had to wrap themselves in blankets to keep warm.

One night in November 1961, Alice went into the tub room to put some clothes in her old wringer washing machine. When she turned on the light, there was a rat the size of a small cat sitting on the machine. Alice screamed, grabbed three-year-old Danny and one-year-old Lisa, and dashed into the street. Telephoning her mother, she cried, “Ma, I just saw this huge, awful rat! I’ve got to get out of that place!”

Months before, she’d tried to get into the Bunker Hill project, but apartments there were scarce, the application process heavily bureaucratic, and she’d been told to wait her turn. Now her aunt Mary called the new state representative, Jerry Doherty, who intervened with the Housing Authority. In January 1962, the McGoffs moved to a six-room apartment at 74 Decatur Street. The project was no longer so desirable as when Danny’s parents had moved there twenty-one years before. Trees, shrubs, and grass had long since given way to acres of bleak macadam; benches and playground equipment had been destroyed; hallways and basements were scarred by years of vandalism. But the prewar construction was still structurally sound, the apartments relatively spacious. It was a vast improvement over the rat-infested cold-water flat on Polk Street.

As the family went on growing, Danny started looking around for something that paid better than bartending, and in 1967 he took a job with the city Parks Department. Three minutes’ walk from the McGoffs’ new apartment
was the William J. Barry Playground, popularly known as the “Oilies,” after the thick sludge from the oil barges which washed up on its makeshift beach. The small park was largely devoted to a regulation-size baseball diamond, used every night during warm weather by Charlestown’s two softball leagues. As the Oilies’ new custodian, Danny was charged with watering and cutting the outfield grass, rolling the dirt infield, chalking the foul lines, replacing bulbs in the light stanchions, picking up trash and bottles. In winter he flooded the infield to make an informal ice-skating rink. He still had time at night to fill in occasionally at the Point Tavern, now renamed the Shamrock Pub.

Meanwhile, Alice went back to work: first at the Schrafft’s candy factory; later at the Golden Egg, a diner on Mystic Avenue; then at a doughnut shop called Handy Andy’s. In 1965, her mother suffered a serious heart attack which required open-heart surgery and kept her away from her job at the Officers Club. Alice took over, working three nights a week in the kitchen, Friday and Saturday nights in the cloakroom.

With this extra income, the family was more comfortable. But something was nagging relentlessly at Danny, and it seemed to grow worse the older he got. It seemed to be connected with his uncle Dan, who had died at age thirty-five. As a young man, Danny often said, “I’ll never live past thirty-five.” Now, as he closed in on that symbolic birthday, he fell into periods of morbid gloom. Always slim, he grew painfully thin, almost emaciated. At night he often retired to his bedroom for hours on end to watch television, eat quahogs, and sip Old Thompson’s.

On Sunday, June 11, 1972, the Oilies was the site of a day-long festival sponsored by the Charlestown Militia Company, a quasi-military outfit which commemorated the Town’s revolutionary past by donning colonial garb and drilling with flintlock muskets. Far into the evening, hundreds of Townies trampled the baseball field, guzzling beer, munching hot dogs, and leaving the diamond ankle deep in debris. The Parks Department had promised to send a special cleanup crew that Monday morning, but it never arrived. Danny, who’d been drinking the night before, complained to his supervisor, who told him to clean up the park himself. Seething with anger, he went down to the Oilies, accompanied by two of his sons—Billy, thirteen, and Tommy, ten—and another Parks employee. It was blisteringly hot. Toward noon, Danny went over to a cement water fountain for a drink. As he leaned over, he staggered and toppled to the ground. Tommy saw him lying there, shaking uncontrollably. Someone called an ambulance, which sped him to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he remained in intensive care for eleven days. At 8:00 a.m. on June 23, he died. The death certificate listed the immediate cause of death as “right lumbar pneumonia.” Danny was thirty-seven years old.

Hundreds of friends and neighbors showed up for the wake at Sawyer’s Funeral Home and the Mass at St. Catherine’s. None of the McGoff children attended. The oldest was then fourteen. Alice didn’t want them to remember their father lying in a box.

Alice missed Danny dreadfully. Despite his faults, she had loved him
deeply; he would live in her memory as a good man, a conscientious husband and father who’d done his best to provide for his family. Now, at the age of thirty-five, Alice found herself a widow with seven young children to support. Somehow she’d have to get by on Danny’s pension and whatever she could take home in salary and tips from the Navy Yard. Moreover, by 1972, the Bunker Hill project was scarcely the place she would have chosen to raise seven impressionable youngsters. In the decade since they’d moved in, the project had become even shabbier, and socially less stable.

Once, years before, the project had teemed with social activities: a Men’s Club, a Women’s Club, Boy Scouts, Brownies, movies, softball and football teams, a sewing club, a boys’ airplane group, victory gardens, boxing and hopscotch tournaments, dances and block parties. In woodworking classes, the men made white picket fences, which they proudly installed around their neat front yards. Public housing in that era was regarded as a temporary haven for ambitious working-class families who might stay five years or so before moving on to the suburbs. Rigorous screening sought to exclude all but the most stable applicants, while strict enforcement ensured that disruptive tenants were promptly evicted.

Then, in the 1960s, several currents eroded that discipline. Extensive redevelopment of Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods displaced thousands of poor tenants, who were dumped in public housing because there was no other place to put them. For the first time, these projects were designated as permanent homes for the poor and dispossessed. Meanwhile, 1960s reform movements undercut the autocratic power of project managers to screen out or evict “undesirables.” As the courts imposed stringent limits on their authority, many managers and their staffs simply gave up. Through the late sixties, supervision and maintenance in projects across the city fell off sharply.

This decline was exacerbated in Charlestown because, more than anywhere else in Boston, “the project” was seen as distinct from the community. The mass expulsion of families from the site had given it a bad name at the start, while the tenants imported from South Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and the West End were never regarded as true Townies. Increasingly, the middle-class residents of Breed’s and Bunker hills viewed the project as an alien appendage which they would gladly lop off if they could. Those who lived there were dismissed as “riffraff,” “project mugs,” and—most explicitly—“project rats.” Indeed, the project’s population had changed markedly. In 1943, 15.5 percent of its families were without a father, 16.1 percent on some form of public assistance. By 1973, 68 percent were without a father and roughly 80 percent on welfare, while 66.3 percent had incomes under the $4,000 “poverty line.”

If the project was now a dismal wasteland of crumbling brick and cracked macadam, its most grievous wounds were self-inflicted, for it had spawned a tribe of alienated youths who, turning early to drugs and alcohol, vented their frustrations on government property. When night fell, they pried open mailboxes, burned laundry on the lines, smashed light fixtures, shattered windows, broke down doors, harassed and intimidated elderly tenants, and stole cars,
stripping them of all valuables, then dousing them with gasoline and setting them afire, Tenants, afraid of their own children, dubbed half the project “the Combat Zone,” half “the Jungle.”

Alice McGoff struggled to insulate her seven children from the violence which raged about them. But much depended on where—and with whom—each kid hung out. Billy McGoff, who displayed formidable athletic prowess, spent most of his time with a gang of budding athletes in Hayes Square dunking basketballs through a rusty hoop. Kevin was a wisecracking maverick who refused to cast his lot with any group. Danny hung at the high school with a gang renowned for its fighting ability and, eventually, for some of its members’ criminal exploits. But Tommy ran with the toughest bunch of all, a gang which had started at the steps of the Bunker Hill Monument, gradually working its way down the hill to a variety store at the corner of Monument and Bunker Hill streets.

“Bunker Hill Mini Mart” said the Coca-Cola sign out front—“Cold Cuts Center. Groceries. Sandwiches. Coffee. Film”—but it was widely known as “the Green Store” to distinguish it from the Union National Market on the opposite corner, which was called “the Red Store.” Not surprisingly, Tommy and his colleagues became known as “the Green Store Gang,” an outfit soon to grow legendary as it helped usher in a new stage in the Town’s ongoing war with constituted authority. Nobody seemed to know quite when or how it began, but suddenly in the early seventies bank robbery became Charlestown’s crime of choice. According to the FBI, nearly one-third of all bank jobs committed in the Boston metropolitan area during that decade were the work of young Townies.

For such youths, it seemed, these stickups were what looping had been to their fathers—splashy, public acts, certain to get prominent display in the newspapers, sure to earn their perpetrators instant acceptance from their peers. Like looping, they were an open challenge to the police, who watched banks with special care. Moreover, banks were potent symbols of economic and social power, appropriate targets for those intent on defying authority. The difficulty was that most Townies weren’t very good at robbing banks. Boston police and FBI agents enjoyed regaling each other with tales of the robbers’ ineptitude. There were the three youths who ran from their car, guns drawn, only to find the bank closed that day. On another occasion, two young men were spotted munching candy bars outside a bank; when the wrappers were retrieved after the robbery, they yielded fingerprints that sent the kids to jail. Then there was the time police responded to a robbery and found a stolen car parked outside the bank. While towing it away, they heard a voice from the trunk; inside, they found a Townie youth, a revolver, and a pillowcase full of money.

Soon the police learned to recognize the trademarks of a Charlestown bank job. The holdup men were young, sometimes no more than fifteen or sixteen; they invariably wore basketball sneakers, a windbreaker, and a knitted ski mask, and they loved to vault the tellers’ counters. As soon as the police
spotted those trademarks, they would seal off the bridges leading into Charlestown and, on more than one occasion, picked up the robbers heading home. By 1975, some forty Charlestown youths were in prison for bank robbery—ten or so from the Green Store Gang alone.

At times it seemed as if these young men from the project were acting out a free-floating rage which pervaded the Town. For Charlestown harbored a fierce sense of grievance which clung to the hills and valleys just as the coastal fog wrapped its rotting wharves at dawn. By the turn of the century, the Town had become a convenient site in which to dump prisons, asylums, poorhouses, and other institutions not tolerated in more affluent communities. Soon Boston inflicted the greatest indignity of all, laying the great steel stanchions of the El down Main Street, blanketing much of the Town with noise, dirt, and shadow. Later still, the Massachusetts Port Authority bulldozed dozens of homes to make way for ramps onto the Mystic River Bridge and others onto Interstate I–93, ramps which were often closed during rush hours so Townies wouldn’t compete for space on the crowded highways with commuters from Wenham and Winchester. By the 1960s, the Town was shackled in rails, girders, ramps, stanchions, bridges, and highways, most of them designed to serve outsiders.

To many Townies, the drab and alien Bunker Hill project was sufficient proof of official malevolence toward Charlestown. But then, in the mid-sixties, came urban renewal, another federally subsidized program ostensibly designed to “restore Charlestown to its former glory.” Even the proudest Townies conceded that their community could use some dressing up. Its population, once 40,000, had slipped to barely 18,000. Many of those who remained were old and poor; the Town’s median income was $2,700, among the lowest in Boston. Except for the Bunker Hill project, virtually no new housing or public accommodations had been built in the Town since 1890.