Authors: J. Anthony Lukas
But when the Boston Redevelopment Authority first proposed Charlestown’s renewal, the plan met with profound skepticism. The only model most Townies had was the disastrous West End project of the fifties, in which one of Boston’s functioning, if deteriorated, Italian neighborhoods was literally erased to make way for a phalanx of luxury apartment buildings. Ed Logue, the expert Mayor Collins imported to head the BRA, had taken no part in the West End fiasco; indeed, he rejected such wholesale clearance, favoring rehabilitation of existing housing wherever possible. But once he took a hard look at Charlestown, Logue realized that some demolition was inevitable. “What has happened to this historic neighborhood was a shock to me,” he told one Charlestown audience. “Not the Monument, not the Square, but just a few blocks away on the slopes of this hill are slums as bad as any I have ever seen.” The first plan, devised before Logue took office, called for demolishing as much as 60 percent of the Town’s housing. Logue reduced that to 11.
But Charlestown feared something more than mere demolition. While thousands of upwardly mobile Townies had moved on to the suburbs after World War II, those who stayed behind grounded their sense of self-worth in an affirmation of Charlestown’s traditional working-class culture. Now renewal
seemed to call into question that stable, homogeneous world of church, home, tavern, and corner gang. For Ed Logue and his planners, architects, and social workers, there was something un-American about people who didn’t move, strive, compete, improve. But that was precisely what many wouldn’t—couldn’t—do. Logue’s sophisticated arguments only fed the anger which seethed on Bunker Hill. Led by a group of determined opponents who called themselves the Self-Help Organization-Charlestown (SHOC), a thousand aroused Townies flooded a public hearing in January 1963 and shouted down the plan.
Logue spent the next two years assembling a coalition of his own: the Longshoremen’s Union, the Teamsters, the Knights of Columbus, and, most importantly, the Catholic Church. The three monsignori who headed Charlestown’s triad of parishes were concerned that a further exodus of Charlestown’s stable households would destroy the Church’s financial base there (“Salvation is free,” one of them explained, “but religion costs money”). The prelates spoke out from their pulpits. Logue repeatedly explained what renewal would bring to the Town: new schools, playgrounds, a shopping center, a community college, low-interest loans for rehabilitation of existing housing, and—perhaps most important—demolition of the despised El. SHOC fought back, its sound trucks crisscrossing the Town, blaring its slogan, “Save Our Homes.”
Finally, on a blustery afternoon in March 1965, some 2,800 Townies filled the armory atop Bunker Hill for a final hearing. Feelings ran so high that fifty Boston policemen, armed with Mace and truncheons, ringed the walls to maintain order, but even so the proceedings frequently threatened to get out of hand. As Monsignor Gerald Shea compared Charlestown to Dodge City in the TV serial
Gunsmoke
, a man leaped from the audience and landed a glancing blow on the priest’s shoulder. Later, an ex-longshoreman shouted at Ed Logue, “This place is called Hell’s Kitchen because the city made it that way. But it’s my home, I fought for it, and that’s all I want. So you can stick your money up your ass!” After three hours, one of the monsignori abruptly announced, “All those in favor of a renewal plan for Charlestown, please stand!” Something like half the crowd lurched to its feet. “All against!” About half stood again. When the chairman declared the resolution passed, a wild wail of protest rose from the hall. Part of the crowd surged forward and would have knocked Ed Logue off a table from which he’d been counting heads if six policemen hadn’t pushed them back. Several weeks later, 350 SHOC activists—only half in jest—signed a petition to the state legislature seeking to “dissolve the ties between the City of Boston and the District of Charlestown and to authorize the citizens of Charlestown to form a government completely independent of the City.”
Charlestown, which had long cherished its insularity, now veered toward outright xenophobia, reminiscent of the fierce Puritan distaste for alien intrusions. Nowhere was this more evident than in the enmity between Irish-American Townies and the Italian-Americans who had taken their place across the bridge in the “Dear Old North End.” For years it was unsafe for a North
Ender to venture into the Town, and vice versa. Once detected, an intruder’s best hope was to make for the bridge and try to outrun his pursuers to home ground. Some encounters on the bridge involved hundreds of antagonists and dragged on for hours at a time—you could go home for lunch and return to find the battle still underway. Fists, bottles, two-by-fours, and slingshots might be brought to bear, but the classic attack involved wrestling your opponent to the railing and heaving him into the polluted waters of the Charles River basin.
The struggle was less ethnic than territorial. Ultimately, as Irish and Italians began to intermarry, a few such couples settled in Charlestown. The Champas, Saccos, and Castranovas were “our Italians” or “white Italians” to distinguish them from “the goddamned Italians” across the bridge.
So long as they posed no threat, Charlestown could assimilate a limited number of aliens. For years, Jerry Yee Woo operated a hand laundry on Bunker Hill Street near the housing project; Charlestown’s only Chinaman, Woo gradually evolved into a kind of Townie mascot. And at one time the Town had harbored a small but vigorous black community, whose founders had been slaves—Bacchus, Cato, and Jupiter—brought by the early colonists. After slavery was abolished, their descendants stayed on, settling near the Town wharves. As late as 1930, some two hundred Negroes remained, living in relative peace and security. Then, in October 1931, a longshoreman’s strike threatened to paralyze the port. The shipping companies responded by trucking hundreds of black strikebreakers in from the South End. Charlestown’s dockers responded with fury, showering the interlopers with bricks, stones, and two-by-fours. In the hostile racial climate that followed, most of Charlestown’s own blacks fled across the river.
Not until the mid-sixties did they return in any number, this time as a result of deliberate government policy. When Boston began building low-income housing in the 1930s, all blacks were automatically assigned to a single project: Lenox Street in the South End. Only after civil rights organizations challenged such segregation in 1963 did the Housing Authority seek to integrate the all-white projects of Charlestown and South Boston. Beginning in 1964, the authority filled vacancies in the Bunker Hill project with black applicants, and soon there were nearly a dozen families there. White response was surprisingly mild. A rash of graffiti daubed on walls and doorsteps and a few rocks heaved through windows testified to some neighbors’ disapproval, but on balance the blacks were grudgingly accepted. It was a time when “white backlash” still meant Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond, while most Northerners paid at least lip service to integration.
When Nettie Young and her two children moved into the apartment directly above the McGoffs, Alice was apprehensive, but she did what she could to make them feel at home. Later, the young McGoffs played with the seven children of David and Joyce Williams on nearby Corey Street. One day, when Danny came home for lunch from the Point Tavern, he found young Kenny Williams sitting at the table with his own brood. “Alice,” he quipped, “you better keep that kid out of the sun.”
But relations weren’t always so smooth. For a time, young Danny McGoff ran with a black kid named Constantine Solman. One day the two boys came to blows, Constantine getting the worst of it. Mrs. Marion Solman, a huge, leather-lunged woman, charged down to McCarthy’s Grocery, where she grabbed Alice by the neck before bystanders could intervene.
One night, another black woman from the project showed up at the Point Tavern seeking a drink. Told the tavern didn’t serve women, she went berserk, swinging a bicycle chain in a lethal arc around her head. Ultimately she barricaded herself in her apartment while a crowd of angry whites gathered outside. When the police failed to respond promptly, a black troubleshooter called the Black Panthers, who, waiting until the crowd dispersed at midnight, transported the woman to safety in an unmarked van.
By then, mounting racial tensions in Boston and the nation at large had found their echo in Charlestown. In part, this new discord reflected dislocations which had shrunk the Townies’ economic prospects. For three centuries, Charlestown had drawn its living from the sea, but by the early seventies the port no longer supplied an abundance of jobs. For in 1971 the new Moran Terminal brought “containerization” to Charlestown, its mammoth cranes hoisting metal containers from the ships’ holds directly onto truck beds, unloading in four hours what it had taken a hundred longshoremen forty hours to handle with the old block-and-tackle gear. Meanwhile, the Port of New York negotiated a new contract with its 35,000 longshoremen, for the first time assuring them a guaranteed annual income. With the shipping companies committed to pay New York’s dockers $250 a week whether they worked or not, it served their interest to divert ships there from Boston, which had no such guaranteed wage. As a result, Charlestown’s Local 799, which had six hundred longshoremen in 1941, could count barely a hundred in 1973.
Then, that April, the Defense Department announced that the Charlestown Navy Yard would close the following year after 174 years of service. A Pentagon spokesman insisted that this was part of an economy drive throughout the military establishment, but others noted that Massachusetts—the only state not in Richard Nixon’s victory column the previous November—was slated to lose not only the Navy Yard but two air bases, a military hospital, and sundry other installations. Whatever the motive, the Yard’s closing was a grievous blow to Charlestown. To those like Alice McGoff, whose family had worked there for fifteen years, it would mean a direct loss of livelihood. Only a small percentage of the 5,100 civilian jobs at the Yard had been held by Townies, but the closing would take a heavy toll of the bars, restaurants, variety stores, and newsstands that served Yard employees and sailors temporarily stationed there.
Meanwhile, the Town watched yet another of its traditional employment sources dry up. Since the turn of the century, when the Irish seized control of Boston’s City Hall, they had cornered a disproportionate share of municipal jobs, notably in the Police, Fire, and Public Works departments; nearly every Charlestown family had someone serving in at least one of those bailiwicks.
But through the sixties and early seventies a series of legal challenges shook such ethnic monopolies. In 1971, U.S. District Judge Charles Wyzanski ruled in the first of those suits, holding that entrance exams for Boston’s Police Department gave whites a “discriminatory advantage,” and ordered the department to correct such practices and hire fifty-three minority applicants who had failed the last exam. Over the next few years, other federal judges issued similar orders to Boston’s Fire and Public Works departments. Soon all three services launched “affirmative action” programs designed to give preference to qualified black and Hispanic applicants. The numbers involved were comparatively small, but Charlestown’s Irish fervently believed that jobs which had once been theirs by birthright would now go to dark-skinned interlopers across the city.
Such were the grievances alive in the Town on October 2, 1973, when three young blacks accosted René Wagler in Roxbury, doused her with gasoline, and set her afire. Later that week, after the white woman’s death, white youths in the Bunker Hill project wreaked revenge on the black families living there and in the adjacent Charles Newtown development.
On October 5 a bottle was thrown through the window of an apartment occupied by Thomas and Correen Dubose at 27 Old Ironside Way.
On Sunday, October 7, a gang of white youths broke the rear window of a car belonging to Ronald Resca, who lived at 30 Old Ironside Way. Resca, a white man married to a black woman, ran out of his apartment to confront the vandals, who knocked him to the ground and beat him severely.
That same evening, a fire broke out in Marion Solman’s apartment at 66 Medford Street. The Fire Department discovered that a Molotov cocktail—a bottle filled with gasoline and stuffed with a rag—had been thrown through an open third-floor window.
The next morning, Ronald Resca called the Fire Department to report that his car, whose windows had been broken the day before, was now on fire.
Over the next few days, several more firebombs crashed through the windows of other black families in Charlestown. All that winter and spring, as Boston edged closer to racial confrontation, a sour rage was accumulating in Charlestown.
Then on June 16 the Town celebrated Bunker Hill Day with the traditional round of banquets, balls, and house parties, culminating in the grand parade. As the last marchers slogged down Breed’s Hill in a fine rain, gangs of youths roved the Town, swigging beer or wine from brown paper sacks, singing football songs, and accosting passersby. A grocery store owner was knocked unconscious by a beer bottle. A couple from Malden was robbed at knifepoint.
Tommy McGoff and his pals in the Green Store Gang clustered around an oil drum packed with ice and beer near the steps to the Monument grounds. At 3:40 p.m., they noticed two young men—one black and one white—strolling across the square. What the hell was a black guy doing in the Town on Bunker Hill Day? they wondered. Most Charlestown blacks had long since fled, and no dark-skinned outsider who knew the score would dare walk those
streets, especially on the most sacred day in Charlestown’s calendar. It had to be a provocation, a challenge flung in the Town’s face.
In fact, Emil Ward, a black man who worked in Kevin White’s Office of Human Rights, and his friend George Arthur were on their way to a Bunker Hill Day party at 20 Monument Square. The three young women who rented the handsome brick house—Pamela Fairbanks, a colleague of Ward’s at City Hall; Elizabeth de Rham, a nurse; and Sarah Creighton, an artist—had already had some trouble with the young Townies. The women were newcomers to Charlestown, part of a small wave of “young professionals” attracted to the Town by the charm of its narrow old streets and its proximity to downtown. But such newcomers often encountered hostility from neighbors who regarded their cosmopolitan style as a threat to the traditional Charlestown way of life, and these suspicions were made worse by failures in communication. On several occasions that spring, the three women had asked the gang drinking on the Monument steps to quiet down, and when police moved the youths along, they held the women responsible (though, in fact, someone else had called the cops). One night a rock came crashing through the women’s living-room window. A few nights later another window was broken and their cars, parked outside, were vandalized.