Common Ground (87 page)

I
like the slant of light at midday on a thousand chimney pots,” intoned the poet David McCord.

“I remember as a small child being shown Boston through the eyes of my grandfather, who was the first Irish Catholic mayor of this city,” said Edward Kennedy in that familiar twang. “Honey Fitz used to go down to the Old North Church and stare at the marvelous steeple there and he would read to me the Paul Revere poem.”

“Boston baked beans start off with beans,” chortled Julia Child. “According to
Mrs. Leland’s Boston Cooking School Book
, copyrighted in 1883, you start off by soaking one quart of pea beans in cold water overnight. In the morning you put them into fresh cold water and simmer them until soft enough to pierce with a pin.”

The voices of Boston poured from quadriphonic speakers while forty slide projectors threw images of the city across the auditorium’s eight screens. In barely an hour, the multimedia production
Where’s Boston?
fashioned a dazzling urban kaleidoscope:

Italian vendors squeezing plump melons on their Haymarket stalls; Seiji Ozawa leading the Boston Symphony in a fanfare from Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique;
Hare Krishna acolytes, their saffron robes splendid against the wintry Common; strings of colored lights at a North End street festival; the jagged geometry of City Hall; the flash of militiamen’s muskets on Patriots’ Day; the slash of silver skates on the Garden ice; a Mozart string quartet in Mrs. Gardner’s museum; the bleak austerity of Dorchester’s triple-deckers; Fred Lynn doubling off the green wall at Fenway Park; the throbbing beat of jazz in a Back Bay nightclub; the great granite façade of the restored Quincy Market; green tam-o’-shanters in the crowd on St. Patrick’s Day; steamed
clams in a harborside restaurant; a runner crossing the finish line in the Boston Marathon.

When the last image had faded from the screen, Joan and Colin Diver turned to their out-of-town guests. “Well,” asked Joan, “what do you think of our town?”

“Oh, Joan,” said Patsy Shillingburg, “it’s got to be the most exciting city in the country!”

The Divers were delighted.
Where’s Boston?
, they knew, had been promoted by City Hall and financed by the Prudential Insurance Company to put the best face on Boston during the Bicentennial year. In focusing on the “urban renaissance,” it embellished the old city a little, glossing over its racial and social problems. But it captured the grandeur of Boston’s past, the diversity of its ethnic neighborhoods. This was the city Joan and Colin were helping to rebuild, and their pride was enhanced by the admiration they now sensed in their out-of-town visitors.

They had begun the evening with drinks at the Divers’ house, then moved on to the
Where’s Boston?
pavilion pitched in the Prudential Center. After a splendid meal at the Cafe Plaza in the Copley Plaza Hotel, they bid each other good night. It was 12:30 a.m.

The Shillingburgs caught a cab back to their hotel, but Colin took Joan by the arm. “It’s such a beautiful evening,” he said. “Let’s walk.”

“It’s awful late to be out in these streets,” said Joan.

“Don’t worry,” Colin joked. “I’ve got my umbrella.”

Under a velvety autumn sky, they strolled down Dartmouth Street. Reaching Columbus Avenue, they turned right into the South End, their footsteps echoing across the deserted boulevard. At Holyoke Street, they could see, a block ahead, the usual cluster of young men lounging around the Soul Center. Exercising the caution which had become second nature to most white South Enders, Colin and Joan cut diagonally across the avenue, putting as much room as possible between themselves and the group on the corner.

Almost simultaneously, two of the black teenagers detached themselves from the crowd, drifting in their direction.

The Divers moved faster, heading toward the safe haven of West Newton Street, but their pursuers kept pace, one of them bouncing along the median strip, the other prowling a few steps behind on the sidewalk.

“Hey, whitey!” cried the first, a runty kid in a blue windbreaker, jeans, and ankle-high boots. “Where you going? You trying to avoid us? Don’t you like us?”

Not answering, Colin and Joan hurried on.

“What’s the matter?” said the other, a tall, wiry fellow in sweat pants and running shoes. “You folks afraid of us poor niggers?”

By then, the pair was blocking the sidewalk, cutting off their escape route.

“How come you don’t say anything?” the tall kid said. “You too good to talk to us? Or you afraid we’re going to steal your money?”

Colin was getting angry, but Joan kept her cool.

“We’re not afraid of anything,” she said lightly. “We live over here. Right around that corner.”

“Is that right?” the boy said with a little grin. “Then you won’t mind shaking hands with a nigger.” He held out a long, snaky arm.

Was it a trick? Joan wondered. If she shook hands, would he assault her? Was he simply mocking her, calling her bluff? Or was it barely possible that he was making some awkward gesture, trying in his own hostile way to bridge the gulf of Columbus Avenue?

On an impulse, she stuck out her hand.

But Colin was taking no chances. Raising his furled umbrella, he shouted, “Don’t you touch my wife!”

The boy wheeled on Colin. “You really think that umbrella’s going to protect you?” he sneered. “If you point that damn thing at me again I’m going to take it away from you.”

Now it was Joan’s turn. Jumping between them, she hissed, “Don’t you dare hurt my husband! Don’t even put a hand on him. Just leave him alone.”

For a moment, the four of them stood glowering at each other, frozen in a terrible tableau, until Colin noticed a car with a white driver moving in their direction. Grabbing Joan’s arm, he leapt into the roadway, brandishing his umbrella over his head, shouting at the driver to stop. Alarmed by the strange group in the street, the motorist swerved to avoid them. Another car rushed past in the opposite direction as Colin shouted vainly at it too.

By now the blacks were getting jumpy, afraid that a motorist might actually stop and intervene. With a parting gibe or two, they edged toward Methunion Manor.

Colin half pushed, half pulled Joan down West Newton Street and through the basement door under their stoop. Not until the door was double-locked behind them and they were sitting in their kitchen with a stiff drink did they start breathing regularly again. Yet the two of them reacted very differently to the confrontation on Columbus Avenue. So long as it lasted, Joan had been terror-stricken. But once it was over she felt almost exhilarated. After all, they’d stood up to the danger, faced down their pursuers, and emerged unscathed. To her, the incident demonstrated that with a little will and character you could survive the South End’s perils. Henceforth, she walked those streets with greater confidence.

Colin drew almost the opposite conclusion. While admiring Joan’s composure, he was dismayed at his own reaction. He knew one should keep one’s cool in such situations, but he’d felt a terrible anger welling up within him. Why should he have to stand there, a block from his own house, and take this shit from these kids? His instinct was to strike out and, if Joan hadn’t intervened, he might well have hit one of them. God knows what mayhem might have ensued; they could have been seriously hurt, perhaps even killed. Yet precisely because he felt such anger himself, he could imagine the rage which
boiled within Methunion Manor’s young blacks. Columbus Avenue had become a no-man’s-land, he realized—a frontier between two embattled communities whose interests were increasingly pitted against each other. For the first time, Colin began to wonder whether he really wanted to raise his family in the heart of a war zone.

For something had happened to the South End in the preceding decade. Despite its racial and ethnic diversity, the neighborhood had long enjoyed a rough social harmony. Even when young professionals began settling there during the sixties, they were rarely at odds with their less advantaged neighbors. Committed to equality and heterogeneity, often strapped for cash themselves, struggling to rehabilitate a gutted shell or shabby rooming house, those first “pioneers” generally felt a community of interest with blacks, Puerto Ricans, and poor whites.

But once the newcomers had established their South End beachhead, they were followed by a different breed of middle-class settlers, more affluent suburbanites with no particular commitment to heterogeneity and little interest in rehabilitating an old rooming house from scratch. Having bought already-restored town houses for $35,000 to $80,000, this second wave felt a greater stake in their investment, a deeper need for insulation from the poor, the black, and the unorthodox. The most mobile members of a mobile society, often with cultivated tastes, a desire for “gracious living” and pocketbooks to match, they were the quintessential urban consumers, prime targets for every “up-market” sales pitch (“Jack and Jill live in Boston. They moved here from someplace else. They’re nice. They’re young and fun. They live a life we understand at Jordan Marsh,” advertised Boston’s largest department store). Gradually, the blocks of restored town houses between Columbus Avenue and Tremont Street became a distinctive enclave, set apart—thanks to the Boston Redevelopment Authority—by brick sidewalks, ornamental streetlights, and ginkgo trees, as well as by its own standards, values, and social proprieties.

As early as October 1971, the
Globe
noted this phenomenon in an article headlined “South End Glows as Suburbanites Move In.” Written by its society reporter, Marjorie Sherman, it announced that the South End was “on the comeback at last,” beginning to rival “hippie-harried” Beacon Hill as “the place to have a townhouse “ And it went on to list some of the latest arrivers. “Dr. and Mrs. Cesare Lombroso came in to Union Park from ‘Pill Hill’ in Brookline. They have done a fantastic job making a contemporary townhouse setting for their treasures out of a Victorian mansion and love the living they have…. University of Massachusetts Chancellor Frank Broderick and his wife; architect Basil Alferieff; Colin Diver of the Mayor’s Office; Polaroid Vice-President Mark Sewall; the Junior League Show House Lamplighter Mrs. Joseph Park, Jr., and her husband … are among the South Enders who love their thirteen-foot ceilings and 23 by 50 foot living rooms. The Roland Crowells, who have a superb townhouse on Union Park, bucked the traffic from Weston into town. ‘Now we live in another world,’ says Mrs. Crowell, whose
duties at Wellesley College, and home in town, mean she can skim out with no traffic. Mr. Crowell nips downtown to Boit, Dalton and Church. No problem.”

But others detected plenty of problems in the arrival of this new urban gentry. At first, the opposition to “gentrification” came principally from the South End’s social work establishment. The neighborhood which Edward Everett Hale had once labeled “the most ‘charitied’ region in Christendom” and which later gave birth to Robert Woods’s South End House continued to harbor an impressive array of social service agencies, settlement houses, missions, refuges, halfway houses, and homes for indigent men, women, and children. By the sixties, few who worked for such institutions regarded themselves as mere custodians for society’s unfortunates; stirred by that era’s activism, they had become advocates of a new social order. Social workers—who were closest to, and most sympathetic with, the South End’s minority poor—were the first to speak out against the growing power of the white middle class. Their criticism may have reflected an element of self-interest. Those, like Mel King, who used social work as a springboard to politics had an interest in preserving their constituency. Those who remained in the “helping professions” could only function if their clientele was there to be helped. Spokesmen for the new gentry went a step further, accusing the settlement houses of “fighting to preserve the South End as an economic ghetto for the poor.”

Before long, the advocate social workers found new allies: the student and ex-student radicals then breeding by the thousands in Boston’s colleges and universities. With a Marxist perspective sharpened by their reading of Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and C. Wright Mills, these young men and women were particularly sensitive to conflict between the professional/technological/managerial bourgeoisie and the black/Puerto Rican/poor white proletariat. Nowhere in Boston did such class conflict seem closer to the surface than along the Columbus Avenue battlefront. Just as Massachusetts university graduates had once found an outlet for their idealism in Robert Woods’s “scientific settlement work,” so graduates of those same universities now enlisted in a struggle against “entrenched interests” in the New South End.

In the late sixties, a small group of radicals began publishing a fighting tabloid called the
South End People’s News
. Frequently lapsing into street rhetoric like “Death to the Pigs!” and “All Power to the People!” the paper launched a heavy barrage against those who profited from gentrification. “There’s a funeral procession slipping silently, a block at a time, through the South End,” it declared: