Common Ground (35 page)

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 hours 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.

The most demanding job of all was the octagonal window—sometimes called “the captain’s bridge” because it looked like a ship’s pilothouse—which jutted out from the mansard roof. Its wooden siding had rotted away, so one weekend Colin tied a rope around his waist, secured it to a radiator, and climbed out the window. Bracing himself like a mountain climber against the roof, he ripped off the old boards and hammered on new ones, then repainted them. Forty feet below, passersby shook their heads in astonishment at the strange new people in 118.

This bemused view of the Divers’ urban homesteading was shared by many of their friends—notably Bill Cowin, Colin’s colleague in the Mayor’s office. A native of Brookline, Cowin had bought a house in nearby Newton and resisted all hints from the Mayor and Barney Frank that he should move into the city. Professionally, he could devote himself to the city’s revival, but he would never subject his family to the rigors of city life and he needled Colin relentlessly about his dedication to “the urban experience.” One summer weekend in 1970, returning from Cape Cod, the Divers and the Cowins drove up West Newton Street to find a noisy crowd gathered around an automobile which had crashed into a house directly across from the Divers’. One of their neighbors, they were told, had drunk too much, staggered into his car, and fishtailed down the street, smashing into one of the brick bow-fronts. Standing on the sidewalk, watching the crowd, Colin sighed, “Well, I see things are normal around here. Home, sweet home!” At which Bill laughed, clapped his friend on the shoulder, and said, “Old buddy, you are absolutely crazy!”

Soon the Divers concluded that if they were crazy, it was “a special kind of craziness,” which many of those around them shared, an outlook which united them with their neighbors in a way they had never experienced before. Their block was still a diverse one, roughly half black, with a heavy sprinkling
of white lodging houses, but every year more young professionals had moved onto the street—engineers, lawyers, teachers, and artists. These early “pioneers,” as they sometimes called themselves, were drawn together in part by shared values and concerns, in part by the very disapproval of their parents, the incomprehension of their friends, the gibes of their professional colleagues. Many had read Jane Jacobs’ paean to urban living,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
. Now they were fleeing suburban “sterility” and “ennui,” discovering for themselves the perils, stimulations, tumults, and delights of city life, and this produced a vital sense of community. When George and Susan Thomas moved onto the block in 1963, they were welcomed in the adjacent alley by Jack and Arlyn Hastings, carrying a bottle of champagne and singing a song which celebrated the rigors of neighborhood life. That was the way it was, a constant shuttling between houses, to borrow an onion, a bike, or a plumber’s wrench. The pioneers helped each other, sympathized with each other’s misfortunes, laughed over the absurdities of South End life.

But it was a constricted community, defined as much by race and class as by geography. Though most of the newcomers had wanted to live in a racially and economically mixed neighborhood, once they were there they had little contact with people very different from themselves. A few middle-class black families eventually moved onto the block and were accepted into the community. But, with a few notable exceptions, the young professionals rarely mixed with the poor—black or white.

One exception was Eldred “Max” Hiscock. Raised in a Maine farming community, Max told of marrying a woman “for whom one man wasn’t enough,” and going with her to Boston, where she promptly ran off with a railroad conductor, leaving him to fend for himself in a city where he felt a stranger. Like many similar men, Max drifted into a South End lodging house, where he lived for nearly thirty years in a basement room, sleeping on a canvas cot, surrounded by piles of newspapers. A woman upstairs cooked his meals and cleaned his room. Then a doctor purchased the house and evicted the roomers. For a while, Max lived in another lodging house, but without his old friend to care for him, his room descended into such squalor that he was evicted again. He took to living on the streets, sleeping in doorways, cadging handouts, which he used to buy cafeteria meals and to support a serious drinking habit.