Fort Independence, Castle Island, South Boston, 1884. Source: Boston Public Library, Digital Commonwealth, Creative Commons.
A huge explosion rocked South Boston in the early afternoon of December 6, 1898, shaking homes and breaking windows in the City Point area. In April of that year, the federal government had re-taken control of Castle Island (much of which is occupied by Fort Independence) from the Boston Park Department due to the Spanish-American War. This involved the U.S. military’s using of the island as a mine depot.
The imperial war had a geographically extensive and long-term impact—it was through the war that the United States colonized the Philippines, for example, Puerto Rico became a U.S. semi-colony, and Guantánamo a U.S. military base. However, the war as a whole was fairly brief: with the important exception of hostilities in the Philippines, which endured for over a decade, it only lasted three and a half months. So soon after deploying 256 mines to Castle Island, the Army began to decommission them. In the process of doing so, one of the mines exploded, killing four men.
The history of Castle Island and the series of forts (eight in number, the first one built in 1634) that have dominated it over time is a complicated one. One of the oldest fortified sites in what was Britain’s empire in North America, the 22-acre island is today a venue for recreation and relaxation. For much of its history, however, it played a significant role in militarily maintaining relationships of domination and subordination at home and abroad—from its use by British forces to control a rebellious population in colonial-era Boston to the deployment of troops from Fort Independence to enforce the return of at least one fugitive slave and the putting down of anti-draft riots during the Civil War in the North End. Perhaps the most famous solider ever stationed at Fort Independence was an 18-year-old named Edgar Allan Poe; in 1827, he spent five months on Castle Island. For a twenty-year period (1785-1805), the fort also served as a Massachusetts state prison.
Since 1892, Castle Island has been linked to South Boston proper—first by a wooden bridge and today a landfill. During the summer months, free tours of the fort take place on a regular basis during the day.
Fort Independence, on Castle Island, in the harbor approaches to Boston. Copyright (c) 2006 Chris Wood, Creative Commons.
Getting there:
Red Line to Andrew Station or Broadway Station. MBTA buses to Marine Park in the City Point neighborhood are available. Walk across Marine Park and around the lagoon to the fort.
To learn more:
Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
William J. Reid, Castle Island and Fort Independence, Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 1995.
Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.
For five days in March 1981, seventy-three physicians from the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union met in Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., to launch International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). In the preceding year, a trio of physicians affiliated with Harvard Medical School had begun conversations with medical counterparts in the Soviet Union. Despite their professional credentials, they were acutely away of their relative marginality in the context of a growing U.S. military buildup, Cold War tensions, and the election to the U.S. presidency of Ronald Reagan, which promised even steeper military spending. In this context, Bernard Lown, a cardiologist, and his colleagues carefully crafted a message based on their competency as physicians: “we must stick unswervingly to the medical facts about nuclear war,” they stated.
Lown and his colleagues first met in Geneva with a group of Soviet medical practitioners in December 1980. After a difficult start, their deliberations concluded with a call for the 1981 meeting. Although intimidated by the prospects of organizing an international gathering in just three months, the doctors set up shop in the Longwood area of the Fenway, in a small, 2nd floor office above Sparr’s Drug, a provider of medical supplies and equipment and an old-style drugstore with soda fountains. There they turned to a volunteer corps of a dozen Harvard Medical School students and raised over $250,000 to pull off the Virginia conference.
The gathering ended with appeals to fellow physicians, leaders of the United Nations, and the Soviet and U.S. leaderships, each premised in the “abiding faith in the concept that what humanity creates, humanity can control.” Arguing against the Reagan Administration’s perspective, they stated the nuclear war was unwinnable and catastrophic, and further, that international cooperation was needed to reduce nuclear stockpiles. IPPNW’s influence continued to grow alongside that era’s burgeoning anti-nuclear movement. The organization won international recognition, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.
Parker Brothers is a well-known game company established in Salem in 1883, by siblings George, Charles, and Edward Parker. As the company grew, it purchased the property at 190 Bridge Street where it eventually built a 35,000-square-foot facility that housed its factory and offices.
Parker Brothers’ most famous game was, and remains, Monopoly. While many credit Charles Brace Darrow with the game’s invention (Parker Brothers purchased the rights to it from him in 1935), Elizabeth Magie (later Magie Phillips) first devised it.
Magie’s version, which she called “The Landlord’s Game,” grew out of her progressive politics. Indeed, she designed the game as a protest against the monopolistic practices of the likes of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. A student of the writings of the 19th century political-economist Henry George, who argued that natural resources—including land—should belong equally to all, Magie patented the game in 1903, hoping that it would teach people the importance of sharing wealth. Unfortunately for Magie, Darrow’s capitalistic adaptation of the game captured the attention of many more people and it was he who made millions from the game’s purchase by Parker Brothers.
Hasbro bought Parker Brothers in 1991 and closed down the factory soon thereafter, tearing it down in 1994. It is now the site of an apartment complex.
Former site of Parker Brothers Headquarters, as seem from Salem Commuter Rail Station, July 2015.
Getting there:
MBTA Commuter Rail (from North Station) to Salem. MBTA bus from Orient Heights Station on the Blue Line.
The County Club, circa 1910-1915. Library of Congress.
Boston Brahmins were eager to have a private club for racing horses and associated activities, yet free of the gambling which took place at public racetracks and which they found repulsive. So, in 1882, they founded The Country Club on 100 acres of land. Brookline, with its then-open countryside and proximity (in terms of travel by horse coach) to their homes in Boston, was an ideal location.
Horse-related activities dominated The Country Club for only a brief period. By the early 1900s, it was a multipurpose establishment dedicated to a variety of sporting endeavors, but still ones seen as “rural”—such as lawn tennis. Indeed, by this time what had been the racetrack was part of the golf course.
The Country Club, the first such establishment in the United States, both reflected and helped to define what it meant to be a member of Boston’s upper-class establishment. And, by inspiring the founding of other country clubs across the United States, it helped to produce the suburban lifestyle of the affluent and the associated landscape on a national scale. Long a bastion of WASP male privilege, The Country Club reportedly did not admit Jews until the 1970s, women (as full members) until 1989, and its first African American member until the following year.
Today, The Country Club sits on 236 acres of land. The privatized property is Brookline’s largest “green” space. Its membership of approximately 1300 individuals is secret, but it includes some of the Boston area’s most powerful individuals. Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots football team (who lives in an adjacent estate), is reportedly a member. And, until moving to Florida in 2020, so, too, were team quarterback Tom Brady and supermodel Giselle Bundchen, his spouse.
Getting there:
A MBTA bus, which runs between Forest Hill Station (Orange Line) and Reservoir Station (Green Line, D Branch), stops near the club’s entrance.
To learn more:
Richard J. Moss, Golf and the American Country Club, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
In late January 1955, four prisoners, following a botched escape attempt, held hostage five guards and numerous fellow inmates in the “Cherry Hill” section of the Charlestown State Prison. With the prison surrounded by police and National Guard troops, the armed prisoners surrendered after three-and-a-half days. However, they succeeded in having their grievances about the institution’s inhumane conditions and the state-wide penal system heard by a “citizens committee” charged with negotiating with them. The committee’s seven members agreed to work to improve prison conditions across the state, thus helping to bring to a peaceful end to what was then the second-longest prison insurrection in U.S. history.
Charlestown State Prison, 1900. Public domain.
In its report on the 85-hour stand-off, Time described Charlestown State Prison as “a cramped compound of blackened granite and dilapidated brick buildings” The newsweekly went on to characterize it as “the oldest, most disreputable prison in the U.S.”—it opened in 1805—and as a place “damned for 80 years as a verminous pesthole, unfit for human habitation.” Condemned by the state in 1876, it had replaced the state’s prison at Fort Independence on South Boston’s Castle Island, standing on a five-acre site in what then known as the Lynde Point section of Charlestown. In 1946-1948, Malcolm Little (later known as Malcolm X) was incarcerated there.
Over its years, the prison was the site of 61 executions, employing, beginning in 1901, the electric chair. Sacco and Vanzetti, who spent their last days in the same Sugar Hill cell block that saw the 1955 insurrection, were its most famous victims, executed on August 23, 1927. On May 9, 1947, the last state executions in Massachusetts took place in Charlestown State Prison: those of Phillip Bellino and Edward Gertso.
Police guarding the entrance to Charlestown State Prison. 22 August 1927, in anticipation of protests of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Source: Boston Public Library/Digital Commonwealth.
In 1955, Massachusetts closed Charlestown State Prison, moving the incarcerated men to facilities in Norfolk and Walpole, and tore it down. Since 1973, the site has been the home of Bunker Hill Community College. There is no visible marker on the campus indicating what once stood in its place.
Getting there:
Take the Orange Line to the Community College station and follow the signs for Bunker Hill Community College.
To learn more:
“Citizens Committee Settles Charlestown Prison Riot,” Daily Boston Globe, January 22, 1955: 5.
“Oldest Prison in U. S., Condemned in 1876,” Daily Boston Globe, January 19, 1955: 11.
“The Siege of Cherry Hill,” Time, Vol. 65, Issue 5, January 31, 1955.
The first woman from Massachusetts to receive a college degree, Lucy Stone (1818-1893) was a leading abolitionist and a pioneer in the struggle for gender equality. She played a key role in the first National Women’s Rights Convention (which took place in 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts), and helped to set up the anti-slavery Woman’s National Loyal League. Along with her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell, she also founded the Women’s Journal, a national weekly newspaper based in Boston, in 1870.
It was that same year when the couple, along with their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (who would become a prominent feminist, suffragette, and humanitarian), moved to the 17-room house on Boutwell Street. Although the house was demolished in 1971, two pillars at the end of the driveway remain from Lucy Stone’s home, one of them adorned with a plaque honoring her.
Lucy Stone’s ashes are interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. There is a statue of her (along with ones of Phillis Wheatley and Abigail Adams) at the Boston Women’s Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue. The first U.S. woman to retain her name after marriage, she once famously said that “A wife should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost.”
Getting there:
Red Line to Ashmont Station. Exit to Dorchester Avenue and go right (north) until Ashmont Street (about 200 feet). Take a right and continue on Ashmont past Adams Street. Take a left on Train Street, and take the third right onto Boutwell. Number 45 is on the left. (0.9 miles, about an 18-minute walk.) A bus from Fields Corner Station also passes nearby.
“A People’s Guide to Greater Boston,” out now from the University of California Press, is a very readable text but one that’s hard to define. A guide book with a historical, left-wing perspective, it is both thoroughly well-researched and pleasing to the eye: a high-production-value text and a far-reaching survey of important sites in and around the city.
I interviewed two of the three authors, Joseph Nevins and Suren Moodliar; Eleni Macrakis, the third co-author, did not join. Nevins, raised in Dorchester, is Professor of Geography at Vassar, author of several books including A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor and Suren Moodliar, resident of Chelsea, coordinates the movement-building space encuentro5 in Boston and edits the journal Socialism and Democracy.
The following has been condensed and edited for clarity.
I’m wondering how you would describe this book because it doesn’t fit a genre that I would be able to easily describe.
JN: Well, the problem you are facing, Max, is a problem we face as well. It doesn’t fit into some sort of easy category. So on one level, it fits within the genre of a guide book, in that it takes you as a visitor or someone who lives in the city to different places, to sites throughout the city of Boston and Greater Boston, and tells you a story about them, and why they’re important or significant.
What distinguishes it as a guidebook, obviously, is the perspective that it takes … what we’re calling, of the people, a perspective from the margins: socioeconomic, ideological, political, economic, and geographic. It takes a stance or a position from below, one allied with those who challenge injustice. And so within the guidebook genre, it stands out.
Broadly, the book tells a story about how Boston and the larger region came to be, over more than 400 years of time. And does so by pointing to, and illuminating connections and divisions between places, institutions and people, the nature of the relationships between different sites and how those divisions and ties … reflect and give rise to a city of both deep connections and profound socioeconomic and political inequalities.
SM: I [would] just add: what we’ve produced is a text that matches the lived experience of the city. It is a text made for the city.
So when I wake up in the morning and step out of my apartment in Chelsea, I’m leaving a building that was once a Jewish school and targeted by the right because of its ethnic origins. And then I walk across the road and I see an empty parking lot, once home to the Labor Lyceum. So I encounter the history of the city in so many diverse ways and not with any particular order, except for the geographical experience of it.
And so this book could be literally opened to any page, and that’s where your city could begin. To be sure there are framing essays and tours, but even those things correspond to the way we experience the city… As such it’s more than a guidebook, so I’d want to define it as a text that matches the experience of the city itself.
I’m also wondering if there’s a theoretical apparatus that you use, either implicitly or explicitly that helps determine what you include what you don’t include?
SM:. So perhaps walking back a little bit of what I said earlier, about encountering the city has this mass of unorganized experiences, I do think there’s definitely a perspective in the book, before we get to theory, and that perspective is certainly one that corresponds to prioritizing the oppressed and the exploited. And when we say that, definitely then the affinity with Howard Zinn’s project [A People’s History of the United States] comes through.
I would say that certainly implicitly in the book is that the different forms of agency emerge out of the oppression and exploitation, it’s not something random. There is a definite sense that our world is structured by a certain way of organizing the economy, a certain way of organizing power relations … Work has to be done to organize those facts of history.
JN: I guess the short answer is that we don’t have some sort of simple theoretical framework that we’re applying, but … we see different manifestations of power and different theories of power, if you will, at work throughout the book, that say something about how we’re approaching the subject matter…
But at the same time, even while we see power manifest in … unjust ways, we do not see power, and how it is organized, in a crudely deterministic fashion… It helps shape and limit what people can do, but people have agency and they’re exercising that agency in all sorts of ways over the long course of the region’s history.
Regarding inclusion vs. exclusion, for example, you have a section on Lawrence, but you don’t have a section on Brookline. How did you make those decisions?
SM: I’m a former Brookline resident. I would just say this, I don’t think there was an a priori theory that led to us excluding Brookline. … At the same time, they were very strongly interesting stories that immediately at the outset of the project demanded our attention, such as the Bread and Roses strike at Lawrence. And so that helped a little bit.
We cannot say that we went into it with a theory that allowed us to determine which places. We actually had to work with what people who we spoke with–activists and other people engaging in the city. So there’s a big human element, an un-theorized portion, that allowed us to choose these different towns.
JN: In the case of Brookline, we actually really struggled about that one… We generated about 250 entries and we could only put in about 165… It’s a lengthy book already, especially given well over 150 photos plus a dozen or so maps. As such, we had to make difficult decisions. We had a lot of back-and-forth as co-authors on particular sites and, by extension, municipalities about what to include and not include. The decision to omit Brookline came very late in the project.
I’m interested in the research process because you have those sources at the end of each entry. [Each entry has a brief “To Learn More” section, though there is an even more extensive bibliography.] How did you find and decide what research to include?
JN: We started the research process in 2014 … it really took off in 2015, but we began in summer 2014. None of us are trained as scholars of Boston. I myself had not done any research in a formal sense or publishing on Boston before this project. We’re all people with long associations with Greater Boston and studied it by living here and reading about it over the years. And so we had a lot of digging to do: We had to identify, for example, what the important texts on Boston are (and there are many of them!) And we pooled our knowledge regarding the moments and the movements that matter.
And then we went out and we talked to a lot of people, people that we knew had written about and studied the city, lived through important periods, and helped to shape it as activists and organizers…. In talking with all these people and encountering these different texts, we got new leads, new ideas.
One of the things that we decided very early on is that we couldn’t and didn’t want to write a book that would go through every ethnic group that’s ever resided in Boston. That would be unwieldy. It just wouldn’t be very interesting. At the same time, we knew we couldn’t ignore that type of diversity over time and space.
One of the things that’s striking about the city of Boston: the Jewish population in the city itself is not very large. That’s very different from New York, for instance… but at one time, the population of Jews was quite substantial in Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan. So what happened? And how do you tell that story?
And as someone who grew up in Dorchester … you often encounter former Jewish temples and community buildings. And so we picked one that was very prominent–Temple Beth Hillel on Morton Street– as a way of telling a story of neighborhood transformation and the Jewish community in Boston.
SM: When I first arrived in Boston, many activist friends would tell me about: “Oh, you know that Malcom X used to work at this or that place.” And so a lot of things assumed the status of an urban legend for us…
So part of what we did then was to uncover, almost, but not quite, catalog, these topics we’d encounter which seemed interesting from a left-wing point of view… Then we had to find the facts behind the stories, that is, the historical material that speaks to these stories. And that’s why we could go to the Omni Parker and learn more about Malcolm X’s involvement there, as well as the fact that Ho Chi Minh actually worked there as well as a pastry chef… and more generally, of the rise of a dining-out culture which the restaurant part of that hotel embodied.
So when you talk with people in the city, their sense of Boston as a profoundly historical city comes out.
I’ll add one other anecdote: one project that I worked on from the early 2000s onwards concerns the human right to water in the city of Boston. Studying the question reveals a difficult social fact – if you’re a resident to black Boston, you’re 10 times more likely to have your water threatened with being shut off, than if you’re in white Boston.
So in doing research for that prior to this book, I came to uncover how the MWRA was constructed and then the physical infrastructure associated with that on Deer Island … So in studying struggles over the City’s environment or over its public health infrastructure with an eye to changing things, I came to understand the impact on the city’s race and class structure, as well as to recognize how these have been structured historically…
What is a site that still sticks with you or something exciting that you found?
SM: I think all three of us have our favorites and often they overlap, … a site that I find is a favorite is close to the corner of Bromfield and Washington in downtown Boston. And for me, this was a really interesting site because it embodies in some ways one of the best features of our social movements.
So this was called the Marlborough Hotel and Chapel which operated from 1838 to 1852 and was home to the abolitionist movement, but also it was in some ways the formative place for women who would go on to lead the Suffragette Movement, the first wave of feminism. It was also a place where anti-war activists, often overlapping with the same individuals, opposed the Mexican-American War in 1848. It was a place where the transcendentalist movement sort of re-launched itself when Reverend Theodore Parker returned from his exile in England. And then it was also a place where the Temperance Movement operated out of – indeed it was the first temperance hotel in the United States, and in those days, the Temperance Movement and the left were very much identified with one another.
JN: Another site that stands out is Fenway Park in 1919, you have the biggest gathering in Fenway Park’s history–over 50,000 people–, and it’s one to protest against British colonialism in Ireland.
One of the most interesting things about it is that, the previous year, the Red Sox won the World Series. However, the crowd that showed up in favor of Irish nationalism in 1919 was three times the size of the crowd that saw the World Series victory.
…
Boston is a city with a real sense of itself. It’s a city that works hard to cultivate its history and make it known. In the city of Lynn, the situation is different. There you don’t [yet] see history memorialized on its streets. Lynn is where Frederick Douglass wrote his famous autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. However, it is not known exactly where he lived when he wrote the book, only that he lived on a particular street. …. that’s sort of tragic. A lot of the important historic sites in Lynn are simply gone. But some are still there.
SM: Yes, there is some historical awareness, but not to the degree you see in Boston. In some ways this sense of history is officially cultivated. There is a political economy of re-development in which cities are forced to discover their “comparative advantage.” Lowell becomes a city that gets the sponsorship of the National Park Service. And so, ironically, it gets to trade on its history of class struggle. Lawrence also gets to do so, but as a State Park rather than as a National Park… whereas I don’t think Lynn has either of those benefits at this stage.
So it does show you that we get to uncover such history to the extent that we actually invest in the study of history. Hopefully, this book makes the case for those cities that we haven’t written about as well, by virtue of their omission: that we want much more investment into the past so that we can understand the present and in order to therefore change the future.
I had a question about the tours at the end. [There are a series of tours at the end that put together the sites in thematic ways.] In the “Nature” tour, you start at a site related to Logan airport, Neptune Road Edge Buffer Park (near Wood Island Station on the Blue Line) , which commemorates a neighborhood that was destroyed to make way for the airport’s expansion. ,. Would you recommend these for somebody who’s lived in Boston for a long time, and how should one approach the tours at the end?
JN: Yes, we would recommend the tours for people who are visiting Boston, or are from Boston. If we look at the Malcolm and Martin tour, for example … it gives you a unique sense of the geography of African American Boston. Malcolm worked, among other places, in Chinatown at Walker’s Auto Park (near where the Chinatown Gate is located), at South Station, and at the Roseland State Ballroom, a jazz club that stood across the street from the Christian Science Center sits today.
In uncovering these sites, I think one of the things we discovered, rediscovered was the joys of wandering and walking through the city, and the tours facilitate that in various ways.
SM: The other day, I was engaged in a conversation with some friends online about monuments and monuments that must come down, must go up. That kind of thing.
And one topic was how are we to represent the Italian-American experience? And why is it that Columbus is seen as this representative of the Italian-American experience? In our book, among the tours that we suggest is a Sacco and Vanzetti tour. And in some ways, I think the Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists that they were, better represent the Italian-American experience than, say, Columbus who has at best a fictional relationship to the Italian-American heritage.
And so in that sense, these tours help us uncover an experience of the city that challenges the unreflective acceptance of dominant narratives – these tours allow us to literally, by walking these tours, understand that 200,000 people lined the streets of Tremont Street, for the funeral of Sacco and Vanzetti …in August 1927, likely a very hot day. And that shows you both the sense of solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti also with the broader Italian-American immigrant and working-class experience.
To purchase A People’s Guide to Greater Boston, go to bostonbook.org.
Max is a PhD student in English and American literature at BU. Previously, he worked at the NGO GiveDirectly, an organization that sends cash transfers, no strings attached, directly to extremely poor families. In 2014, he studied and wrote poetry in Wellington, NZ on a Fulbright scholarship.
A radical roadmap, new medical memoir, and grants and fellowships awarded
By Nina MacLaughlin Globe Correspondent,Updated July 3, 2020, 12:41 p.m.
A new people’s guide to greater Boston shows children on Neptune Road with Logan Airport at the end of the street; many of their parents were involved in efforts to halt airport expansion.Michael Philip Manheim. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives
Radical roadmap
“A People’s Guide to Greater Boston” (University of California) is not a glossy pit of tired tourist pap. It’s a history lesson with a point of view, shining light on the city’s radical past, highlighting protests and movements and the power people of Boston have had in shaping the place they live. Authors Joseph Nevins, who grew up in Dorchester; Suren Moodilar, an activist and editor who lives in Chelsea; and Cambridge native and Harvard grad Eleni Macrakis write of sites like Grove Hall in Dorchester, where in June 1967, 50 protestors locked themselves in to demand welfare reform and were pulled out violently by police, leading to three days of rioting. Or of the Middle East Nightclub in Cambridge, which used to be home to “Old Mole,” an underground newspaper that called itself “a radical biweekly.” The book is a comprehensive exploration of Boston, its neighborhoods, and its nearby towns—Waltham, Lynn, Concord, the North and South Shores. The book pulls the curtain back on the city’s history of furthering the inequality of a capitalist world economy and perpetrating violence against natural resources. “A people’s perspective privileges the desires, hopes, and struggles of those on the receiving end of unjust forms of power and those who work to challenge such inequalities” aiming for a place “that is radically inclusive and democratic and that centers on social and environmental justice.” It’s a timely, intelligent, and necessary guide, one that deepens our understanding of where we live now and reminds us of the power that regular citizens have to work against powers and systems that are, now as then, in urgent need of change.
