Common Ground (90 page)

West Newton Street, which adjoined Rutland Square on the north, enjoyed a similar vogue in the late sixties and early seventies. In one four-year period, no fewer than twenty-eight middle-class families bought houses on the Divers’ block alone. And, like its neighbor to the south, it was sharply divided on social issues. At a 1974 hearing, one resident of the block cited Anthony Downs’s dictum: “The fundamental problem of cities is that they have too many poor people in them”—while another quoted John Kenneth Galbraith’s judgment: “The problem of the cities is capitalism and the only solution is socialism.” Some residents vehemently supported the South End for South Enders Committee, while 102 residents of West Newton, Pembroke, and West Brookline streets signed a petition backing the Citizens for a Balanced South End in their stand against subsidized housing. David Sprogis, a prominent West Brookline Street realtor, wrote a series of letters to his neighbors angrily denouncing “liberals who do not know anything about city neighborhoods.” A
friend of long standing held a party at which he ceremonially burned the Sprogis letters.

Appalled by the savagery with which their neighbors had turned on one another, Kathleen Crampton, wife of the state’s Commissioner of Community Affairs, Josh Young, and Joan Wood sought to defuse the situation. Forming the South End Citizens’ Association—its name deliberately bland so as to offend no one—they groped for a middle ground to which “all South Enders of goodwill” might repair. But, by then, their constituency had largely fallen apart. After a few stormy meetings, the association disbanded.

Joan and Colin Diver watched the Citizens’ Association experiment with dismay. They had hoped that a credible “middle” might emerge, one with which they could ally themselves, for neither extreme offered much hope of the varied, vital; but livable urban community they sought in the South End. Their Mends were already arrayed on both sides. Whatever the Divers did, they risked alienating people they valued. But it was the opposing extremes which held them paralyzed, unable to enlist in either camp. One summer evening, sitting on their front stoop, Colin remarked sourly, “We’re being asked to choose between the self-righteous and the self-interested. What kind of choice is that?”

He had no difficulty understanding the self-interest which drove Parker, Zeller, and their Balance Committee. Every cent the Divers had was sunk in their house and its costly rehabilitation. South End real estate had risen sharply since they had moved in, but the spread of subsidized housing and its pernicious by-products could threaten their investment. From his experience at City Hall, Colin knew how fierce was the resistance to subsidized housing in many Boston neighborhoods, not to mention the suburbs. Just as some suburbanites still drove their garbage downtown and dumped it on the South End’s streets, so they were happy to have the region’s social problems deposited there. But by taking the path of least resistance and concentrating so much low-income housing in the relatively liberal South End, the city was jeopardizing that neighborhood’s stability.

Many South End projects struck Colin as disastrous failures of public policy, doomed from the start to bankruptcy, destined to spawn social problems. Methunion Manor was a striking example of everything he hated about such projects—mind-numbing ugliness, the social stigma of “poor people’s housing,” litter, noise, and crime. “No more Methunions!” had become a South End rallying cry, a sentiment to which the Divers subscribed.

Methunion wasn’t the only subsidized project which concerned them. Nearby was a four-story building rehabilitated by the Tenants’ Development Corporation, an outgrowth of the South End Tenants’ Council. Intended for low- and moderate-income families, several of its apartments were leased to the Boston Housing Authority as “scatter site” public housing. Most of its tenants were sober and responsible, but one family was involved in all sorts of strange activities. Suspicious characters hung about their apartment day and night, apparently dealing drugs and soliciting for prostitution. Colin wished
the TDC was more conscientious about tenant selection and, to that extent, he welcomed a suit the Balance Committee had brought against the corporation.

Yet he couldn’t give the committee anything like wholehearted support. The argument about a target set seven years before struck him as beside the point. Thousands of poor people had been displaced by government action—the city had a moral obligation to see that they were adequately rehoused, as close as possible to their original homes. Moreover, he was unsettled by the committee’s extremist rhetoric and meat-ax approach. Regarding all projects as slums in the making, it made no distinctions based on design, management, or tenant selection.

One evening in late 1974, the Divers’ friend Sandra Perkins, the Balance Committee’s treasurer, invited Colin and Ferd Arenella to meet with the committee’s lawyer at her house. Sandra had begun to feel uneasy with her colleagues’ head-on approach and she wanted Colin and Ferd, as neighborhood lawyers, to review the committee’s lawsuit seeking to block a new project slated for Tremont Street. But from the plans Colin saw that night, Concord Homes struck him as infinitely preferable to Methunion Manor. Instead of trying to block it, he urged the committee to negotiate a deal for lower densities and a guaranteed number of market-level rents.

Whatever differences he had with the Balance Committee, he was even less impressed by the South End for South Enders Committee. After sitting through dozens of neighborhood meetings, he found the radicals’ self-righteousness exasperating. At times, they could be downright demagogic. One week the
People’s News
asked, “Have you seen the rear of the row house on Rutland Square that has a ‘big-assed’ picture window that covers the top two stories?” To Colin that was an open invitation to smash the window, outright incitement to violence. He was irritated, too, by his middle-class neighbors who talked so glibly about halting gentrification. Now that they had theirs, they wanted to be the last middle-class whites allowed in. He didn’t understand how such hypocrisy served their interests, but of course they claimed to represent the “underprivileged.” As time went by, Colin felt more comfortable with those who frankly represented their own interests than with those who spoke on behalf of “the people.”

Joan shared Colin’s irritation with radical rhetoric and liberal hypocrisy, but she remained more committed than he to public altruism. In part, that reflected her natural generosity; she couldn’t parse the respective positions quite so methodically as Colin. In part, it reflected a professional disposition. Her experience at the Hyams Trust left her convinced that if institutional altruism was well conceived, adequately financed, and properly managed, it produced results. She was more sympathetic than Colin to the vast tribe of South End social workers. Though distrusting firebrands like Mel King, she respected many others who labored patiently and quietly on behalf of the poor, and during her tenure Hyams Trust had supported a host of agencies operating in the South End. Largely at Joan’s urging, Hyams had made annual operating grants to the Emergency Tenants’ Council since 1971. Despite her friendship
with Ferd Arenella and her distaste for the way the council had wrested his properties from him, she admired its work in rehabilitating South End tenements for low-income housing. She was even more impressed when it began building a whole new community just across Tremont Street. Villa Victoria’s attractive apartment towers and town houses were ranged around a graceful shopping arcade and plaza. Built primarily for the council’s Hispanic clientele, it also housed blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians, Syrians, and Chinese, carefully selected and supervised by conscientious management. To Joan, Villa Victoria was subsidized housing at its best, tangible evidence that the poor could be housed humanely without injury to the neighborhood.

But the housing struggle cost Joan considerable anguish. She and Colin had settled in the South End so that their personal lives would echo their professional commitments to social justice; now their very presence was perceived as an assault on that ideal. She was reminded of an ecological principle: anytime you make one change in nature’s equilibrium, you risk causing another change quite different from what you intended. They’d been so sure of themselves, so confident that they could help the poor and disadvantaged by living in their midst. Now the very people they’d come into the city to help regarded them with suspicion, if not outright enmity.

On more than one occasion, Joan tried to make human contact with those she was accused of exploiting. She had spearheaded the Bancroft’s effort to make minority parents feel part of the school community, only to find that few blacks were eager to sit down with white mothers. It was even more difficult to make such connections outside the school. When Colin and Joan moved onto West Newton Street in 1970, their block had been at least half black, but as the white influx accelerated, many minority families moved elsewhere. The blacks who remained generally kept to themselves. Somehow, despite the best will on both sides, no social intercourse developed. Joan and Colin could count on the fingers of two hands the times they had been in a black neighbor’s house or had entertained a black in theirs. The Divers and their white friends often reflected on the irony of their situation: they had moved to the South End because they valued racial and economic heterogeneity, but their lives remained disappointingly homogeneous.

So when Colin and Joan stumbled into a relationship with one low-income South Ender, they had special reason to value her friendship. Half Irish, half Penobscot Indian, Nicky Nickerson had lived for a while with a black gambling man, who had fathered her only child, Andrea. For nearly fifteen years, Nicky and Andrea shuttled back and forth across the South End, moving from one cold-water flat to another, a step ahead of the wrecker’s ball and the gentrifier’s paintbrush. Nicky drew Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and other welfare grants, but, uncomfortable with her own dependency, she enlisted in every cause that came her way—demonstrating with the American Indian Movement, sitting in at the State House to demand welfare rights, squatting in slumlords’ apartments to seek better housing, picketing with the South End for South Enders Committee at the Victorian
Champagne Ball, helping to publish the
South End People’s News
. In her formidable capacity to protest, she personified the grievance of the minority poor against those who had suddenly “discovered” the neighborhood they had known all their lives.

By 1973, Nicky worked for a South End day-care center while living in a subsidized apartment on Columbus Avenue. Andrea, then fourteen, had begun babysitting for the Divers and other young professionals. One November evening on West Newton Street, Joan ran into Nicky, whom she knew only as Andrea’s mother. Anxiously, Nicky reported that Andrea had dropped out of her “experimental” school, seemed unmotivated and needed a more formal structure. Touched by her distress, Joan promised to do what she could. The only mid-year opening in the public schools was in South Boston, which hardly seemed the place for a half-black child. Eventually, Joan found Manter Hall, a private school in Cambridge. Manter cost $1,700, far beyond Nicky’s resources, so Joan raised the money from friends, neighbors, and several trust funds. Andrea entered Manter that February, compiling an impressive record of A’s and B’s.

From that beginning grew a remarkable friendship. To a casual observer, Joan and Nicky would have seemed unlikely intimates. Then in her late forties, Nicky was nearly twice Joan’s age. A high school dropout who took college courses at night, she couldn’t match Joan’s educational credentials. While Nicky eked out a meager living, Joan enjoyed the solid comforts of the urban bourgeoisie. An avowed socialist, Nicky had little in common with Joan’s temperate liberalism. Yet those very contradictions, like poles of a battery, set up an electrical current, a spark which illuminated their relationship.

In the evenings or on lazy weekend afternoons, Nicky would wander by and they’d sit for hours in Joan’s kitchen, sipping coffee and talking about children, neighbors, crime, politics, books, or movies. Sometimes Colin would join them and the conversation would turn to opera, a subject on which Nicky surprisingly knew more than he. Often she would tell stories—long, spellbinding sagas of double-dealing cops and corrupt landlords. For Joan and Colin those Were compelling moments, rare opportunities to penetrate the daunting barriers of race and class.

For Nicky, they were curious encounters. It seemed strange to be sitting there in that gorgeous house, surrounded by all those beautiful things, talking with the very people she’d been protesting against all those years. They often disagreed on urban development, on gentrification, on the respective rights of tenants and homeowners, but there was something about the Divers which transcended politics, which made everything else okay. They were
involved
—in the fate of their city, in the condition of their neighborhood, in the lives of people around them. When her radical friends asked why she spent so much time with those “rich honkies,” she said, “I don’t care whether they march with us or not. Their hearts are with us. They care.”

“If something bugs Colin and me,” Joan once told a friend, “we’re the kind
of people who have to do something about it.” That, of course, was in the New England tradition. “If you know of any scandalous disorders in town,” Cotton Mather admonished his parishioners, “do all you can to suppress them and redress them.” Temperamentally, the Divers were Puritans, driven to right wrongs, to redress disorders. Practically, they had begun to shun the broader ideological issues, concentrating on concrete problems closer to home.

The first to engage them was traffic. Most South End streets dead-ended at the railroad, discouraging motorists; but West Newton rode a bridge over the tracks, creating a natural thoroughfare from the South End into the Back Bay. Each weekday, the street outside the Divers’ home was clogged with some 4,000 cars, buses, and trucks, their engines shattering the calm, spewing noxious fumes, rattling windowpanes, cracking plaster, tormenting parents of small children.