Common Ground (34 page)

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 apartment 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.

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.