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United Cooperative Society Store

47 Savin Avenue, Norwood

United Cooperative Society Store, undated photo courtesy of Aira Koski Johnson.

In 1909, INTO (Finnish for “zeal”), a local chapter of the Finnish Workingmen’s Association, opened a retail cooperative store in the Swedeville area of Norwood. The small building had previously served as a chapel for area Swedish Lutherans and Baptists. In 1917, INTO, a socialist organization, tore down the building and replaced it with a larger one.

Its name notwithstanding, Swedeville was the center of Norwood’s Finnish community. The neighborhood emerged as an enclave of Swedish immigrants within Norwood in the 1890s. Finnish immigrants began populating the area in the first decade of the 1900s and soon outnumbered Swedes. By 1914, there were 500 Finnish immigrants in Norwood.

As manifested by the existence of the cooperative, Finnish immigrants to the United States often embraced socialism—in no small part due to their experiences of injustice in their home country, “They joined the Socialist Party of America in greater numbers than any other ethnic group,” writes historian Patricia Fanning, “and were consistently at the forefront of demands for workers’ rights and unionization.” Reflecting these politics, Norwood Finns established INTO in 1904, and the group soon joined the Socialist Party and the Finnish Socialist Federation. Two years later, INTO built Finnish Hall, with volunteer labor, on Chapel Street (37 Chapel Court).

The cooperative was one of many of INTO’s activities in Norwood; they ranged from drama groups and athletic clubs to a choir and a women’s sewing group. Finnish Hall also housed a library and hosted educational and political lectures as well.

As a socialist enterprise, the INTO store returned excess revenues to its customer shareholders. According to one account, the enterprise grossed $200,000 in 1920 (the equivalent of about $3.2 million in 2025). It “provided meat, groceries, dry goods, shoes, and a restaurant.” It also ran a milk bottling and distribution plant in the neighboring town of Walpole.

Initially, the store was a branch of “Turva,” a cooperative store in Quincy that had opened four years earlier. A decade after its founding, the Norwood undertaking (as well as its sister store in Quincy) joined with other Finnish cooperative associations—in Gardner, Fitchburg, Maynard, and Worcester, Massachusetts; and Milford, New Hampshire—and became part of the United Cooperative Society, with its main office in Boston.

The United Cooperative Society effort did not last long. The years 1919-1920 were a time of highly unstable prices as well as political splits among socialists. These factors contributed to modest profits the first year and economic losses the second for the network of cooperatives. As a result, the society decided to give up its office in Boston and for each member store to resume its autonomy, while maintaining the “United Cooperative Society” name but with the location name added on (e.g., United Cooperative Society of Norwood).

The Swedeville store did well in the subsequent decades. However, as supermarket chains expanded into Norwood, the cooperative establishment was at a disadvantage as it could not compete with their prices. In 1953, the store ended its operations.

The building which once housed the United Cooperative Society of Norwood store is now a private home.

47 Savin Avenue, March 2023. Photo by Joseph Nevins.

Getting there:

An MBTA bus that runs between Forest Hills Station (Orange Line) and Walpole passes within a few blocks of the site.

To learn more:

Patricia J. Fanning, Keeping the Past: Norwood at 150, Staunton, Virginia: American History Press, 2021.

Laurie Kerney, “Savin Avenue: The Neighborhood Expands,” blog of the Norwood Historical Society, undated.

Savele Syrjala, The Story of a Cooperative: A Brief History of United Cooperative Society of Fitchburg, Fitchburg: United Cooperative Society, 1947.

H. Haines Turner, Case Studies of Consumers’ Cooperatives: Successful Cooperatives Started by Finnish Groups in the United States Studied in Relation to Their Social and Economic Environment, New York: Columbia University Press, 1941.

William Wolkovich-Valkavicius, “New England Finlandia and Its Finnish Enclave of Norwood, Massachusetts,” Migration-Muuttoliike 25, no. 3, 1998: 17-23.

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Rita Hester Home

21 Park Vale Avenue, Allston

21 Park Vale Avenue, Allston, December 2024. Photo by Joseph Nevins.

Around 5 pm on Saturday, November 28, 1998, Rita Hester, 34, left the Silhouette Cocktail Lounge (200 Brighton Avenue) in Allston after playing pool. She headed to her first-floor apartment on Park Vale Avenue, less than a 5-minute walk away. Later that evening Boston police found her on her apartment floor. She had been stabbed at least 20 times. Rita Hester died soon after arriving at the hospital.

It is not known who killed Rita Hester. A little after 6 pm on the night of the murder, a neighbor called the police after hearing a cry for help coming from her apartment. Police found no signs of forced entry and nothing missing from her home.

The killing attracted a lot of attention, one reason being that Rita Hester was well known in Boston’s gay community. A transgender, Black woman, Hester frequented various clubs and bars in the Allston area and elsewhere. Among them was Jacque’s Cabaret in Boston’s Bay Village neighborhood, where she was both a customer and entertainer. The venue hosted a benefit—with bands and drag acts—on December 13, 1998, to help Hester’s family pay for the funeral expenses.

Rita Hester’s family leading the vigil, December 4, 1998. Photo by K. Gullage for The Boston Phoenix, via Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections.

The benefit concert took place nine days after a more somber gathering. On the evening of December 4, 1998, friends and family as well as activists and supporters assembled outside the Model Café (9 North Beacon Street) to remember Rita Hester. From there, they processioned to 21 Park Vale Avenue where they held a vigil. Many years later, one participant recalled Hester’s mother, Kathleen, and her children kneeling outside the apartment building and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. “I would have gladly died for you, Rita,” Kathleen reportedly said, while speaking to the vigil’s participants. “I would have taken the stabs and told you to run. I loved you.”

(From L to R): Miyako, Rachel Lynn, Alexa, & Sabella at Rita Hester’s vigil, December 4, 1998. Photo by K. Gullage for The Boston Phoenix, via Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections. Additional photos from the vigil are below.

Born as William Hester in Hartford, Connecticut in 1964, Rita moved to Boston when she was in her 20s. According to The Boston Phoenix, Hester “was six foot two and weighed about 200 pounds, but her friends say she was as agile as a tiny dancer. And she lit up a room with her warm, boisterous greetings.”

A year after Rita Hester’s death, activists held the first Transgender Day of Remembrance to honor Hester as well as other trans people who had lost their lives due to violence. Now observed around the world, the Transgender Day of Remembrance is held annually on November 20.

The apartment building where Rita Hester lived at 21 Park Vale Avenue still stands. Less than a half mile away, on the side of a building at 506 Cambridge Street, across the intersection from where the Model Café is located, is a beautiful mural that celebrates Rita Hester.

“Rita’s Spotlight,” installed in July 2022, by Rixy., 506 Cambridge Street, Allston. Commissioned by the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, in collaboration with the Boston Art Commission and Street Theory, the mural is adjacent to the Jackson/Mann K-8 school. Source: Street Art Cities.

Getting there:

Green Line (B Branch) to Harvard Street station. 0.2-mile (4-minute) walk.

To learn more:

Samantha Allen, “The Trans Murder that Started a Movement,” Daily Beast, July 12, 2017.

Samson Amore, “25 Years Ago, Rita Hester Was Brutally Stabbed in Her Apartment. Her Family Is Still Seeking Closure.” The Advocate, December 14, 2023.

Cristela Guerra, “Two Decades After Her Death, Rita Hester’s Family Reflects on Her Spirit,” WBUR.com, July 15, 2020.

Sarah McNaught, “Displaced Anger,” The Boston Phoenix, December 11-17, 1998: 21+.

Daniel Vasquez, “Stabbing Victim a Mystery to Many,” The Boston Globe, November 30, 1998: 17+.

Acknowledgment:

Thanks to Molly Brown of the Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections for her generous assistance.

Brittany (L) and Chyna (R) at Rita Hester’s vigil, December 4, 1998. Photo by K. Gullage for The Boston Phoenix, via Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections.
Rita Hester’s vigil, December 4, 1998. Photo by K. Gullage for The Boston Phoenix, via Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections.
Rita Hester’s vigil, December 4, 1998. Photo by K. Gullage for The Boston Phoenix, via Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections..

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Gordon Riker Ghost Bike Memorial

Huntington Avenue, near Forsyth Street, The Fenway

Gordon Riker was a graphic artist and an avid cyclist. In 2007, at 22 years of age, he was a recent graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, living in Jamaica Plain. That year, on the afternoon of April 4, Riker was riding his bicycle on Huntington Avenue as he regularly did, heading to work in the Back Bay, when a taxi clipped his back wheel. This caused Riker to skid under a moving dump truck, which killed him.

Gordon Riker ghost bike memorial, April 2007. Screenshot of photo by Dominic Chavez (Thompson 2007) on The Boston Globe website.

The following Sunday, Lee Peters, a fellow artist and graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, chained a “ghost bike” to a lamppost on Huntington Avenue in front of the campus of Northeastern University, close to where Gordon Riker had been hit. While Peters did not know Riker, he desired to do something “to honor the person and remind other bikers it’s so scary out there,” he explained. Painted entirely in white, the ghost bike had a small wooden sign that hung on the bar between the seat and handlebars; in blue, block letters, it read: “A BICYCLIST WAS STRUCK HERE.”

Another tribute to Gordon Riker took place online. Kelly Wallace, a friend of his, wrote a message on her MySpace blog: “I can’t even believe this. Gordon was such a safe rider. I even made fun of him for wearing a helmet before, but he laughed at me for NOT wearing one. . . . So to all my friends, all over the country, riding bikes . . . please be careful.”

About one month later, a car struck and killed Wallace as she rode her bike through a crosswalk at the intersection of Cambridge Street and Harvard Avenue in Allston. Near the site, another ghost bike soon appeared, festooned with handwritten notes and flowers.

The first known ghost bike appeared in St. Louis, Missouri in October 2003. Patrick Van Der Tuin, a local bicycle shop worker who had witnessed a car hitting and killing a cyclist got a junk bike, one which he painted white and whose front wheel he smashed up with a sledgehammer for effect. He placed the bike at the site of the collision along with a sign announcing, “Cyclist struck here.”

By 2005, activists in Pittsburgh, New York City and Seattle were erecting similar memorials on the streets of their cities, as reminders of tragedy and assertions of the right of cyclists to safe travel. Soon ghost bike memorials spread to other cities and towns across the United States and to countries around the world.

The ghost bike created in memory of Gordon Riker is thought to be the first one in the Boston area. The memorial remained in place for at least four months. At some point before the fall 2007 semester began at Northeastern, campus facilities workers, reportedly in response to complaints of its location, took it down.

Ghost Bike Boston members install a memorial to Li Dian Wu in Quincy, November 2023. A vehicle and its driver struck and killed the 86-year-old man on September 8, 2023. Photos courtesy of Ghost Bike Boston.

Since 2015, the Boston area has had a dedicated ghost bike group. Founded by local bicycle activist Peter Cheung, Ghost Bike Boston is coordinated as a Facebook group. The group has organized more than 25 ghost bike ceremonies since its establishment.

That a large number of Greater Bostonian cyclists have been killed since Gordon Riker’s death speaks to how car-centric infrastructure is inherently hazardous—“dangerous by design,” often fatally so—particularly to people outside of motor vehicles, the elderly, people with disabilities, people of color, and individuals in lower-income areas. It is also why many refuse to use the word “accident” when motor vehicles strike pedestrians and cyclists.

Yes, people make mistakes that contribute to what are labeled accidents. However, as author and safe streets advocate Jessie Singer writes in relation to such cases, “we can trace all human error back to conditions that are—sometimes obscurely, sometimes obscenely—dangerous.” Accordingly, she insists that we need to “create conditions that anticipate errors and make those mistakes less of a life-or-death equation.”

The pole to which the ghost bike memorial for Gordon Riker was attached is the first lamppost on the righthand side of Huntington Avenue, after Forsyth Street, as one heads eastward (toward Downtown). It is across from a historic plaque* on the side of Northeastern University’s Cabot Physical Education Center.

In August 2022, the City of Boston Transportation Department installed dedicated bus lanes along Huntington Avenue. Bicyclists are also allowed to use them. Had they been in place in 2007, it is likely that Gordon Riker would still be alive.

Getting there:

Green Line (E Branch) to Northeastern University station; the site is across the street from the “inbound” track.

To learn more:

Robert Thomas Dobler, “Ghost Bikes: Memorialization and Protests on City Streets.” in Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sánchez-Carretero (eds), Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, New York: Berghahn Books, 2011: 169–87.

Derek Hawkins, “Cyclist, 22, Killed in Accident on Huntington Avenue,” The Huntington News, April 10, 2007.

Derek Hawkins, “Missing Bike Stirs Mixed Emotions,” The Huntington News, October 21, 2007.

Mike Miliard, “Kelly Wallace, 1983-2007,” The Boston Phoenix, May 24, 2007.

Jessie Singer, There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster: Who Profits and Who Pays the Price. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022.    

Richard Thompson, “A Graphic Reminder for City’s Riders,” The Boston Sunday Globe, April 22, 2007.

Christine Wallgren, “Family Seeks Answers about Crash that Killed Halifax Artist,” The Boston Sunday Globe, April 15, 2007: 3.

Christine Wallgren, “Bicyclist Who Was Killed to be Honored with Service, Benefit,” The Boston Globe, April 19, 2007.

Lisa Wangsness, “Ghost Bikes Emerge as a Boston Ritual,” The Boston Globe, June 30, 2016.

*Dedicated on May 16, 1956, the plaque recalls the former presence on the site of the Huntington Avenue Grounds, the venue where the Boston Americans, today known as the Red Sox, played four games of the first “World Series” in 1903.

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Merchants’ Hall

Northeast corner of Congress Street and Water Street, Downtown Boston

Merchants’ Hall housed the original office of The Liberator, the famed anti-slavery newspaper co-founded and produced by radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Launched on January 1, 1831, the weekly publication remained in the building for almost four years.

Merchants’ Hall, artist unknown. Public domain image. Source: Grimke (1890) by way of Wikimedia Commons.

Oliver Johnson, a fellow abolitionist and close ally of Garrison, described the newspaper’s office on an upper floor of the building as follows: “The dingy walls, the small windows bespattered with printers’ ink, the press standing in one corner, the composing stands opposite, the long editorial and mailing tables covered with newspapers, the bed of the editor and publisher.” Someone working for Harrison Gray Otis sent out by the then-mayor of Boston to learn about The Liberator, had this to say: “His [Garrison’s] office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors.”

The October 4, 1834, edition was the last one produced in Merchants’ Hall. In its October 18, 1834, edition, the newspaper announced: “The office of the Liberator is removed from Merchants’ Hall to No. 31, Cornhill, 3d story, over the Bookstore of Mr. Benjamin B. Mizzy.”

It is not clear when Merchants’ Hall first opened, but the demise of the four-story, brick structure is well established. It was one of the 776 buildings destroyed by the Great Boston Fire of November 9-11, 1872. At least 30 people, including 12 firefighters, lost their lives in the massive blaze that began in the basement of a warehouse at the corner of Summer and Kingston streets.

Economically, the fire was extremely costly. Garrison described the aftermath of the almost 65-acre burned zone in the heart of the city as follows: “All the street lines were completely obliterated by the debris, and many a merchant found it impossible to determine precisely where he had been doing business.” According to author Stephanie Schorow, the destruction constituted “10 to 11 percent of the total assessed value of all Boston real estate and personal property.”

Map (1872) of the burnt area of the Great Boston Fire. Source: Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Click on the image to go to the full-size, online map.

By the time of the fire, The Liberator no longer existed, having published its last issue on December 29, 1865. After leaving Merchants’ Hall, the newspaper spent almost all of its subsequent years at various addresses (numbers 21, 25, and 31) on Cornhill*, a street that was home to some of the city’s most important booksellers and publishers, and a meeting place for leading intellectuals in the 19th century. (A few of the 19th -century Cornhill buildings still exist—most of them were torn down during the razing of Scollay Square in the 1960s—on the southern edge of City Hill Plaza.) In May 1860, the newspaper moved its office from Cornhill to a nearby site, what was then numbered as 221 Washington Street, where it remained until its final issue.

Today, there is a historical marker on the northeast corner of the intersection of Congress Street and Water Street that commemorates the founding of The Liberator and its existence on the site. Erected by the Bostonian Society, the marker speaks of a building, but does not name Merchants’ Hall.

Getting there:

Red Line or Orange Line to Downtown Crossing (0.3 miles, about a 7-minute walk). Blue Line or Orange Line to State (300 feet, a one-minute walk). Green Line or Blue Line to Government Center (0.2. miles, a 6-minute walk).

Related sites:

Rockledge, Garrison’s home from 1864 to the time of his death is 1879, 125 Highland Street, Roxbury.

William Lloyd Garrison birthplace and family home, 3-5 School Street, Newburyport. (We explore the site in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.)

 To learn more:

Archibald H. Grimke, “Anti-Slavery Boston,” The New England Magazine, Vol. 3, No 4, December 1890: 441-459.

Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.

Stephanie Schorow, The Great Boston Fire: The Inferno That Nearly Incinerated the City, Guilford, Connecticut: Globe Pequot, 2024.

*Regarding Cornhill, see our entry on John P. Jewett and Company in the Downtown Boston section of A People’s Guide to Great Boston.

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Hotel Needham

572-576 Essex Street, Lawrence

Hotel Needham, undated postcard. Courtesy of the Lawrence History Center.

In the early hours of May 6, 1919, in the midst of a major strike by textile workers in Lawrence, a group of 15-20 masked men raided Hotel Needham. The hotel was known as a place where out-of-town supporters of the strike stayed. And it was such supporters who were the targets of the right-wing vigilantes who raided the hotel.

The armed men found two Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America organizers—Anthony Capraro and Nathan Kleinman—dragging them out of their hotel rooms and forcing them into cars outside the hotel. The kidnappers left Kleinman outside of Lowell, warning him to stay away from Lawrence and threatening him with death if he returned. Capraro received more violent treatment: at the hotel, kidnappers beat him with blackjacks; they beat him further in the rural outskirts of Andover until allowing him to flee.

The kidnapping took place at a time of heightened tensions surrounding the strike, which began on February 3, 1919. Just days prior to the raid on the Hotel Needham, police in Lawrence deployed a truck-mounted machine gun and patrolled the city’s streets armed with rifles.

Despite such repressive measures, the strike, which involved around 20,000 of Lawrence’s 30,000-35,000 workers, continued. And despite the threats, Kleinman promptly returned to Lawrence to resume his work. Capraro eventually did so as well after recuperating from his injuries. More broadly, the violence seems to have only strengthened the resolve of the strikers and their supporters to continue their struggle. Two weeks after the kidnapping, the strike ended (on May 20), the mill owners having accepted most of the workers’ demands. Key among them was a 48-hour workweek, with the maintenance of the same pay offered at the then-current 54 hours.

Hotel Needham first opened in June 1909. According to a description published in the Lawrence Souvenir while the hotel was in operation, it was “metropolitan in service, modern in every particular and carefully conducted by an experienced hotel man.” The establishment was also, the description gushed, “up-to-date in every respect, having every feature of the best hotels in New England including 51 light and airy rooms with hot and cold running water in every room, finely furnished baths and suites, steam heat, electric and gas lights, a rathskeller and excellent cuisine, private [dining] rooms and elevator service.”

It appears that Hotel Needham ceased to exist, for unknown reasons, shortly after the strike ended. Later in 1919, the building was known as the Hotel Lawrence. And in 1922, it was the Hotel Bristol.

The building first known as Hotel Needham still stands. Today it houses a business on the first floor and residential apartments on the five floors above.

The former Hotel Needham, circa 2023.

Getting there:

From the MBTA Commuter Rail Station in Lawrence, a one-mile (20-minute) walk.

To learn more:

Dexter Arnold, Dexter. ‘“A Row of Bricks”: Worker Activism in the Merrimack Valley Textile Industry, 1912-1922, PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1985.

Anthony Capraro, “How the Lawrence Ku-Klux Gang Taught Me American Democracy,” New York Call, May 27, 1919.

Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Dexter Arnold for his assistance. Thanks as well to Kathy Flynn and Amita Kiley of the Lawrence History Center, and to Jim Beauchesne.

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The Perkins Estate

450 Warren Street, Brookline

Entrance to 450 Warren Street, Brookline, January 2024. Photo by Sayako Aizeki-Nevins.

Thomas H. Perkins (1764-1854) was one of the Boston area’s wealthiest individuals during the 19th century. He and his brother were the namesakes of James and Thomas H. Perkins and Company, a Boston-based trading company established in 1792.*

In 1799, Perkins purchased 53 acres of land on Heath and Warren Streets. Soon the property expanded to 70 acres. This was a time when a number of affluent Boston-area merchants were moving to the “countryside” of Brookline.

Known as “the Merchant Prince,” Thomas H. Perkins originally called his new landholding Brookline Farm. In the early years of Perkins’s ownership, it had domesticated animals, fruit orchards and vegetable gardens, the purpose of which was to provide food for his Boston establishments. Soon, Perkins had the house that already stood on the property torn down and a large, plantation-style summer house built in its place. Over the years, greenhouses and other buildings—including a gardener’s cottage, a guesthouse, and a billiards pavilion—were erected. Perkins had a team of gardeners, reportedly spending more than $10,000 per year (an amount, in 1825, worth about $320,000 today) to build and maintain a beautiful landscape that included ponds, winding paths, huge lawns, and flowers and shrubs from all over world.

What makes Thomas H. Perkins’s estate noteworthy—apart from its size and the wealth it reflects—is how the merchant trader accrued the money that paid for it. (James Perkins built a lavish summer home, which no longer exists, at Pinebank, overlooking Jamaica Pond, in Jamaica Plain.) Prior to the establishment of Perkins and Company, the two founders’ business activities included slave-trading in Haiti. Their new company, with its base of operations along Boston’s waterfront and its fleet of ships that transported goods around the world, gained much of its tremendous wealth from smuggling opium into China. In this fashion, Thomas H. Perkins contributed to widespread drug addiction in China and to the imperialist Opium Wars that devastated the country. At “home,” Perkins employed his wealth in a more beneficent manner to fund key local institutions—from the Boston Athenaeum to the Massachusetts General Hospital. Perkins also donated one of his homes (and his name) to what became known as the Perkins School for the Blind.**

The Perkins family retained the property at 450 Warren Street until the 1950s. What remains of the estate is today a property of about 22 acres that (according to a 1983 inventory) includes 11 buildings. Listed on the National Registry of Historic Places, the property, which is still privately held, has an estimated value (in 2024) of $47 million.

Main residence of the Perkins Estate, circa 1983. Source: Massachusetts Historical Commission 1983.

Getting there:

Green Line (D Branch) to Reservoir station or Green Line (C Branch) to Cleveland Circle. 1.5 mile (35 minute) walk. MBTA buses pass much closer to the site.

To learn more:

Wayne Altree, “Some China Trade Figures in Antebellum Brookline,” Brookline Historical Society Newsletter, Annual reports Issue, 1990: 3-7.

Martha Bebinger, “How Profits from Opium Shaped 19th-Century Boston” WBUR.org, July 31 2017.

John Haddad, America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013.

John Haddad, “New England’s Opium Overlords,” Tablet, November 23, 2022.

Massachusetts Historical Commission, National Register of Historic Places nomination application, May 1983.

Keith N. Morgan, Elizabeth Hope Cushing, and Roger G. Reed, Community by Design: The Olmsted Firm and the Development of Brookline, Massachusetts, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T. H. Perkins, 1764–1854, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

*See the entry for Central Wharf/James and Thomas H. Perkins and Company in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

**Regarding the Perkins School for the Blind, see the entry for South Boston District Courthouse in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

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The Women’s Era

108 Charles Street, Beacon Hill

Inaugural issue of The Women’s Era.

From roughly November 1894 to January 1897, 108 Charles Street was home to The Women’s Era, the first newspaper in the United States produced and funded by Black women. The newspaper played a key role in the holding of the first National Conference of Colored Women (which took place in Boston in 1895) and in the establishment of the National Association of Colored Women.

The newspaper grew out of the Women’s Era Club, an advocacy group for Boston-area Black women founded by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and her daughter Florida Ridley Ruffin, members of a small, but significant Black, upper-class community on the north side of Beacon Hill. The club, which allowed white women to join, had a wide array of interests, but primary were issues affecting the well-being of the Black community and racial equality.

The publication’s first issue came out on March 24, 1894. Soon the newspaper went national and became the leading publication for Black clubwomen across the country.

106-108 Charles Street today. Number 108 is the doorway on the right hand side.

Like the Women’s Era Club, the newspaper championed women’s suffrage, while also focusing on a broader set of issues. They ranged from the activities of local clubs and matters of health and literature to poverty and education. The publication was, according to historian Teresa Blue Holden, one that “broadcast the perspectives of black women nationally and linked their interests with those of white American women who were also contributors to the paper.” Animated by a spirit that rejected divisions of class, race, and religion, the paper advocated for the well-being of all women.

The first few issues of the newspaper listed St. Augustine’s Trade School, an Episcopal Church-related institution at 185 Charles Street, as the home of The Women’s Era. By November 1894, however, presumably because it now had its own office, the building at 108 Charles Street was listed as the publication’s address. This address endured until the paper’s last issue, which was published in January 1897. A combination of declining financial resources and differences with the national club movement (many within perceived the newspaper as too radical) led to the publication’s demise.  

The four-story building (106-108 Charles Street) in which The Women’s Era’s offices were located today houses commercial space on the ground floor and private residences above.

Getting there:

Red Lines to Charles/MGH Station. 0.1-mile (3-minute) walk.

Related site:

The home of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and the meeting place of the Women’s Era Club (founded in 1893, it existed until some point in the first decade of the 1900s), 103 Charles Street; it is diagonally across the street from the former offices of The Women’s Era.

Historical marker outside of 103 Charles Street.

To learn more:

Teresa Blue Holden, “Earnest women can do anything”: The public career of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, 1842–1904, Ph.D. dissertation, Saint Louis University, 2005.

Kaitlin Woods, “’Make the World Better’: The Woman’s Era Club of Boston,” U.S. National Park Service, undated publication.

The Women’s Era, digital repository of all issues of the newspaper.

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Lithuanian Hall

17 St. George Avenue, Norwood

In the late 1800s, a significant Lithuanian population resided in South Boston. By 1900, some of them had moved to Norwood—particularly South Norwood, a part of town with a lot of multifamily, working-class, and tenement-like housing. According to historian Patricia Fanning, heavily immigrant, polyglot South Norwood was “like a foreign country” to Norwood’s more established residents, its inhabitants “increasingly viewed as the source of social problems and political unrest.” One institution that was highly associated with these negative views was Lithuanian Hall.

17 St. George Avenue, the former Lithuanian Hall, March 2023. Photo by Joseph Nevins.

The venue was established due to political differences among Lithuanians in Norwood. In 1905, members of the community formed a mutual aid society, but divisions soon emerged—between individuals who had strong religious (Catholic) beliefs and socialist “freethinkers.” In response, and at a time when Lithuanians on the other side of the ideological divide were discussing the building of a Lithuanian Catholic church in Norwood, freethinkers decided to build a meeting place of their own. Lithuanian Hall, that meeting place, opened in November 1914.

Groups ranging from the Lithuanian Literary Society to the Norwood Lithuanian Men’s Glee Club took advantage of the new site. In March 1915, Lithuanian Hall hosted its first wedding: a Jewish ceremony as Norwood’s small Jewish community did not have a temple. Soon thereafter, socialist and radical political figures began to visit Norwood as part of their lecture tours, with Lithuanian Hall often their location of choice.

In the context of World War I, matters in Norwood took an ugly nativist turn. In February 1917, two months before the U.S. Congress declared war on Germany, the Town of Norwood established a General Committee for Public Safety, a subcommittee of which was known as the Night Riders. Made up of armed young men, the “Riders” patrolled the town to guard against sabotage of public property and the area’s industrial infrastructure. Norwood residents of German descent became targets of harassment. Anti-German sentiment overlapped with efforts to repress leftist and other radical movements, with the immigrant community often the focus of condemnation. Lithuanian Hall, as both “foreign” and leftist, was thus doubly suspect.

The aftermath of the war saw continuing tensions between socialists and non-socialists in Norwood. These tensions dovetailed with the outbreak of a “Red Scare” nationally, one that resulted in raids by federal authorities in immigrant areas across the United States, with South Norwood being one of the targets. Authorities arrested 12 Norwood residents, all of them men of Lithuanian descent. One of the arrests took place in Lithuanian Hall.*

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Lithuanian Hall continued to be an occasional site for radical politics. In 1927, for example, a very large meeting took place in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. At the same time, the venue expanded the types of activities—from athletic events and weddings to movies—that it hosted; it even became the home for a Sons of Italy lodge. In the 1930s and 1940s, the second floor became a music and dance venue known as the Butterfly Ballroom.

Over the decades, many of the most dedicated members of Lithuanian Hall passed on. Relatedly, the radical politics associated with the venue declined. In 1980, Lithuanian Hall was sold and turned into a community residence for adults with Down’s syndrome. Sometime in the 2000s, the building was sold again and redeveloped. It is now home to condominiums.

Getting there:

An MBTA bus that runs between Forest Hills Station (Orange Line) and Walpole passes within one block of the site.

To learn more:

Patricia J. Fanning, “From ‘Bolshevik Hall’ to Butterfly Ballroom: The Assimilation of South Norwood’s Lithuanian Hall,” in Peter Benes (ed.), Life in the Streets and Commons, 1600 to the Present (The Dublin Series for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings 2005), Boston: Boston University, 2005: 109-123.

Patricia J. Fanning, Influenza and Inequality: One Town’s Tragic Response to the Great Epidemic of 1918, Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.

Norwood Historical Society website.

To learn more about South Norwood, see the entry on Morrill Memorial Library, South Norwood Branch.

*For more on the Palmer Raids, see the entry on “Socialist Hall” in the Lowell section of A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

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YWCA Building/Office of 9 to 5

140 Clarendon Street, Back Bay

YWCA building, 140 Clarendon Street, March 4, 1929. Photo credit: Edward A. Scanlan, Boston Globe Library Collection via Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections.

A few months after the March 4, 1929, opening of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) building on Clarendon Street, Boston Business featured an article about the new facility. The 13-story structure, gushed the Boston Chamber of Commerce publication, has “practically everything conducive to the welfare—physical, mental and spiritual—of the girl living away from home in a large city.”

Founded in 1866, the Boston Young Women’s Christian Association was the first YWCA in the United States. Its establishment was a response to the growing presence in Boston of single women working outside the home. At its initial location in Downtown, in a Congregational building at 23 Chauncey Street (where Macy’s now stands), it sought to support “the temporal, moral and religious welfare” of such women, So, in addition to assisting women to finding appropriate boarding, the YWCA offered classes in singing and the Bible and a prayer meeting every Thursday.

Congregational House, Chauncey St., Boston, occupied by the YWCA in its early years
Congregational House, 23 Chauncey Street, artist and date unknown. Source: Wilson 1916 via Wikimedia Commons.

Soon thereafter, in response to many more requests for assistance in securing room and board than it could accommodate, the YWCA purchased two houses at 25 and 27 Beach Street in what is now Chinatown. When the refurbished houses opened in 1868, they provided housing for 80 women. The typical resident was under 25 years of age, and a little more than half of them worked as seamstresses. Within six years, the YWCA had to move again when the City of Boston widened Beach Street. The newly constructed building, at 68 Warrenton Street, accommodated 200 residents; an adjoining house on Carver Street (now Charles Street) served as the YWCA’s employment bureau.

It would be more than 60 years later when the YWCA moved to the building on Clarendon Street. As detailed by Boston Business, the YWCA’s new home had myriad amenities: “A gym and swimming pool, facilities for social and recreational activities, educational classes, and even a meditation chapel tucked away from the gaiety and laughter in the remainder of the building, are but a few of the attractions that careful planning has provided.” The building also housed “a cafeteria, bowling alleys, which are open to men, a men’s dressing room, public showers, a vocational guidance department, and a tea room [sic]. The tea room, like the bowling alleys, is open to men. And men may smoke in both.”

Among the important functions of the YWCA is that it served as a space for women-led organizing. One manifestation took place in September 1973, when a group of women rented a small office in the building. There, they published a newsletter, one launched the previous year, called 9 to 5 for Boston’s women officer workers—there were over 200,000 of them in the city at the time; they ran an organization by the same name as well. The initial goal of 9 to 5 was to inform women clerical workers of their rights, to stop sexual harassment in the workplace, and to compel Boston’s major employers to end discriminatory practices.

Florence Luscomb, famed suffragette and women’s rights activist, speaking at 9 to 5 rally, Copley Square, April 25, 1974. Source: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard University.

On the evening of Monday, November 19, 1973, in the YWCA’s auditorium, 9 to 5 had its first public meeting. More than 200 women attended. “Boston women are some of the worst paid office workers in the country,” declared Karen Nussbaum, along with Ellen Cassedy, one of the organization’s founders. According to 9 to 5, of the fifteen largest U.S. cities at the time, only office workers in Birmingham, Alabama and Memphis, Tennessee were paid less.

9 to 5 would soon grow by leaps and bounds, in part by organizing chapters throughout the Northeast—in cities such as Albany, Rochester, Syracuse, and Worcester. It also joined forces with other organizations of women office workers—in Cleveland, Dayton, New York, and San Francisco—and, in 1978, created a national entity, one which became known as 9 to 5, National Association of Working Women; at its height, it had more than 12,000 members in at least 22 city-based chapters in addition to at-large members in all 50 U.S. states.

In addition, as a way of formalizing its power and engage in contract negotiations with employers, 9 to 5 organized a Boston-area labor union. Founded in 1978, Local 925 was affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). And in 1981, Local 925 went national, becoming District 925.

Group of people at 9to5 rally for John Hancock action
9to5 rally, John Hancock action, Boston, August 26 1981. Photo by Jane Jewell. Source: Collections, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Over the years, 9 to 5 made substantial gains for women clerical workers. Through lobbying, demonstrations, lawsuits, media work, public hearings and other pressure tactics, 9 to 5 brought about back pay and raises, improved working conditions, and better hiring practices—among other advances.

Today, 9 to 5 lives on—not least in popular culture due to the 1980 movie 9 to 5 with Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton (who sang the accompanying hit song), and Lily Tomlin. While SEIU District 925 did not last long for a host of reasons, 9 to 5, the national advocacy organization, endures, albeit as a smaller entity, one now based in Milwaukee. With an agenda that goes far beyond women office workers, 9 to 5 focuses on matters ranging from paid sick leave and childcare to equal pay and an end to discrimination; it also helps renters facing eviction.

File:YWCA on Clarendon Street, Boston MA.jpg
YWCA building, June 2011. Photo by John Phelan. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

As for the building at 140 Clarendon Street, the YWCA sold it in 2019. Via a public-private partnership, the building is currently undergoing a process of renovation that will lead to 210 units of affordable housing, 111 of which will be supportive housing for formerly homeless individuals who will receive services from the Pine Street Inn. When completed, the historic building will continue to house current tenants, including the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, the Snowden International School (a City of Boston school), and YW Boston, as the YWCA in the Back Bay is now known.

Getting there:

Orange Line to Back Bay Station or Green Line to Copley Station. The building is a 0.2-mile (3-minute) walk from Back Bay Station; it is a 0.3-mile (5-minute) walk from Copley.

To learn more:

Ellen Cassedy, Working 9 to 5: A Women’s Movement, A Labor Union, and the Iconic Movie, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2022.

City of Boston, “Groundbreaking for 140 Clarendon Street Celebrated,” December 13, 2021.

“Hub Women Office Workers Unite for Higher Pay,” The Boston Globe, November 22, 1973: 75.

Tim Logan, “Work Launches on Re-do of Former YWCA into Affordable Housing,” The Boston Globe, December 9, 2021.

“New Y.W.C.A. Offers Many Facilities,” Boston Business, Vol. 20, No. 6, June 1929: 28+.

Daphne Spain, “Women’s Rights and Gendered Spaces in 1970s Boston,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2011: 152-178.

Judy Waxman, “Interview with Karen Nussbaum,” The VFA Pioneer Histories Project, August 2020.

Elizabeth Wilson, Fifty Years of Association Work Among Young Women, 1866-1916: A History of the Young Women’s Christian Associations in the United States, New York: National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Associations of the United States of America, 1916.

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Morrill Memorial Library, South Norwood Branch

1159 Washington Street, Norwood

On November 9, 1951, FBI agents visited the South Norwood branch of the Morrill Memorial Library to speak with Mary Knowles, a librarian. They asked about individuals she knew and their involvement in the Communist Party. Knowles declined to answer their questions.

Mary Knowles was of interest because she had worked for a time as a secretary at the Samuel Adams School for Social Studies, a Communist Party-affiliated institution in Downtown Boston. Some months after the school was forced to close in the spring of 1948, the City of Norwood’s public library hired Knowles for its South Norwood branch.

Immediately following the FBI’s visit, Knowles informed her supervisor, Edna Phillips, of what had transpired and offered to step down from her position. Phillips, however, saw no reason for Knowles to resign and encouraged her to stay on.

Mary Knowles (center) at the South Norwood Branch of the Morrill Memorial Library with a young patron (date unknown). Edna Phillips is in the left corner of the room. Photo courtesy of the Morrill Memorial Library.

The issue would have likely died there had not an undercover FBI agent identified Ms. Knowles as a member of the Communist Party in testimony before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (also known as the Jenner Committee) on May 6, 1953. This would lead to the Committee issuing a subpoena for Knowles.

When Mary Knowles went before the Jenner Committee, she invoked her Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer its questions, including one regarding whether she was or had been a member of the Communist Party. She only supplied her name and address and information about her employment at the library. In a brief statement, Knowles asserted that “attempts to impose uniformity of thought or religion by using the weapons of economic pressure or unwanted publicity … is a deep threat to our liberties and the strength of the United States.” Her appearance before the committee lasted less than five minutes.

In a context of “Red Scare” politics, Knowles became a target of anti-Communist individuals and organizations in and around Norwood. On May 9, 1953, Norwood library trustees suspended Knowles from her position pending the results of her own appearance before the Jenner Committee. On June 1, less than two weeks after her testimony, the trustees, bowing to pressure from Daughters of the American Revolution and an entity called the Community Chest, which threatened to withhold funding for the library, fired Mary Knowles from her position by a 4-0 vote. (The junior high school classmates of Ms. Knowles’s son, Jonathan, responded by electing him president of their class.)

“South Norwood was perhaps a fitting venue” for what befell Mary Knowles, according to historian Allison Hepler. “On January 2, 1920, South Norwood got swept up in the first American ‘Red Scare,’” she writes in reference to what became known as the Palmer Raids.* “Raids, generally aimed at the nation’s urban immigrant groups and led by police and Justice Department officials in twenty-three states, netted twelve men from South Norwood, who were arrested ‘on suspicion of being Reds or members of the Communist Party.’”

South Norwood Branch of the Morrill Memorial Library (date unknown). Photo courtesy of the Morrill Memorial Library.

The South Norwood branch library, which occupied a storefront, opened in 1941, in response to the desires of area residents and the South Norwood Merchant’s Association. At the time, according to Hepler, South Norwood was “the industrial and immigrant heart of the town.” Much of the population of the area, also known as “the Flats,” was comprised of “first- and second-generation Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, and Syrians who provided the labor for the town’s paper, roofing, and building factories.”

The site on 1159 Washington Street remained the home of the South Norwood branch until 1971 when a new facility, located a few blocks south on Washington Street, took its place. Only five years later, however, the South Norwood branch closed for good for reasons of cost and the duplication of services, explains Norwood historian Patricia Fanning. Today, the building in which Mary Knowles worked as a librarian still stands. The former home of the South Norwood branch library now houses a dog grooming salon.

As for Mary Knowles, she moved to Pennsylvania where she found a job at the William Jeanes Memorial Library in what is today Whitemarsh Township. Ms. Knowles remained employed there as a librarian until her retirement in 1979.

1159 Washington Street, March 2023. The storefront on the right side of the building housed the South Norwood Branch. Photo by Joseph Nevins.

Getting there:

An MBTA bus that runs between Forest Hills Station (Orange Line) and Walpole passes by the site.

To learn more:

Allison Hepler, McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists, and the Children’s Librarian, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018.

Patricia J. Fanning, Keeping the Past: Norwood at 150, Staunton, Virginia: American History Press, 2021.

Patricia J. Fanning, Norwood: A History, Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2002.

E. V. McLean, “Suspended Librarian May Face Jenner Committee,” Norwood Messenger, May 12, 1953: 1-2.

Nancy Sullivan, “The Plymouth Meeting Controversy,” blog of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, March 9, 2017.

“Norwood Woman Remains Silent on Red Charges,” Norwood Messenger, May 26, 1953: 1+.

“Trustees Fire So. Norwood Librarian on 4 to 0 Vote,” Norwood Messenger, June 2, 1953: 1+.

*Regarding the Palmer Raids, see the entry for Socialist Hall (in Lowell) in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

Related site:

Residence of Mary Knowles during her time in Norwood, 159 Cottage Street.

Acknowledgment:

Thanks to the staff at the Morrill Memorial Library for rendering myriad forms of assistance and for allowing us to peruse its archives related to Mary Knowles and the South Norwood Branch.