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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Our aim is not only to teach facts, but social, democratic understanding.” So stated Dr. Harrison L. Harley, a professor at Simmons College, in reference to the pending opening of the Samuel Adams School for Social Studies, according to The Boston Globe. The school advertised itself as committed to a “Democratic America in a world of peace,” one that stood “shoulder to shoulder with the common people.”
Samuel Adams School for Social Sciences, 37 Province Street, Downtown Boston, December 6, 1947. Photo from Record-American newspaper; photographer unknown.
What the Globe characterized as a night school opened on September 25, 1944. The school’s initial offerings were 12-week courses that met one night a week; the cost of enrollment was $6. Over time, courses included the Negro in American Life, the Jewish People, Knowing the Soviet Union, Child Psychology, Contemporary Literature, and History of American Labor.
Its offerings also included Modern Art and Music Appreciation, in addition to courses on socialism and fascism; on Saturday mornings, there were story hours and music lessons for young children and a course on current events for youth, 12-16. Moreover, writes historian Allison Hepler. the school “sponsored a film series and a weekend workshop in folklore and literature, summers courses at Camp Annisquam in Gloucester, and an amateur theater group.” A key focus of the leftist institution was trade union education. It thus offered workshops on collective bargaining and shop steward training.
The Samuel Adams School for Social Studies was one of several adult education institutions across the United States affiliated with the Communist Party. Others were located in cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Louis. The largest and most well-known was the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York City; it had more than 45,000 students in its first four years of existence.
Schools for “Marxist studies” arose during World War II, a time when the U.S. Communist Party “took a super-patriotic ideological turn” asserts historian Marvin Gettleman. They were the descendants, in effect, of Party-run “Worker Schools” that emerged in the 1920s. But instead of focusing first and foremost on recruiting and educating members of the Party, the new schools were concerned with broad engagement with the cities in which they were located. As such, they had a greatly expanded curriculum and many more students than had been the case with the worker schools—some of them at their peak had thousands of students each term. The Samuel Adams School reported that 449 students, ranging from the ages of 16 to 60 and representing a wide array of occupations and backgrounds, enrolled during its first term. “Yes, truly a People’s School was born,” it proclaimed in its Winter Term 1945 course catalog.
Labor unions often sponsored and helped to finance the schools. Administrators of these adult education centers, as well as many (but certainly not all) of the faculty, were typically members of the Communist Party. In the case of Boston’s Samuel Adams School, manifesting the broad social ties that the Party engendered and enjoyed at the time, its “faculty list was Communist and non-Communist,” says Hepler; and its board of trustees included two Protestant ministers, an editor of TheJewish Advocate newspaper, trade unionists, and the head of a major publishing house.
Following World War II and with the emergence of the Cold War, strong anticommunist sentiment reemerged across the United States. In Boston and, more broadly, in Massachusetts—“something of a pioneer in red scare politics” in the words of historian M. J. Heale—leading politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, and elements of the Catholic Church hierarchy helped to fan the flames of anti-Left hysteria.* In this context, the Samuel Adams School, along with sister institutions in other cities, became a target for FBI infiltration and state repression.
In 1947, U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark added the Samuel Adams School, one of 11 schools included, to his list of “subversive” organizations. Several months later, in October 1948, the Internal Revenue Bureau stripped the school—and 39 other “subversive” entities—of its tax-free status. However, it appears that the Samuel Adams School for Social Studies had already closed its doors by this time.
It is unclear when exactly the Samuel Adams School ceased operations. According to Allison Hepler, it was in May 1948. Similarly, the July 8, 1948 issue of Counterattack, an anti-communist newsletter founded by three former FBI agents, claims that school closed in the spring of 1948, while suggesting that it was, in part, due to the newsletter’s “exposure” of the institution in its initial issue in 1947. As a result of such publicity, and the U.S. Attorney General’s subsequent inclusion of the school on his list of subversive organizations, the newsletter explained, “Some people in and near Boston who had been giving money to the school got scared. So the school folded up in the spring.”
Through much of the 1950s, authorities on the federal level and within Massachusetts continued to harass many individuals associated with the Samuel Adams School as part of their anticommunist crusade. In one particularly infamous case in 1953, the Town of Norwood, a Boston suburb, fired Mary Knowles, a librarian, for her alleged communist ties. Knowles had worked as a secretary at the school; in May 1953, she refused to respond to questions regarding membership in the Communist Party when called before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (see Morrill Memorial Library, South Norwood Branch).
The building in which the Samuel Adams School was located no longer exists; it stood a little to the north of where Bosworth Street intersects with Province Street. Like most of the west side of Province Street, the site is now occupied by a development dedicated to luxury condominiums.
On the lower-left side of the photo is where Bosworth Street intersects with Province Street. (One accesses Bosworth Street via a stone staircase.) The building in which the Samuel Adams School for Social Science was located stood immediately to the right of Bosworth Street. Photo by Joseph Nevins, March 2023.
Getting there:
Red or Green Line to Park Street Station, or Orange or Red Line to Downtown Crossing Station. The site is a 0.2-mile (4-minute) walk from either station.
Marvin E. Gettleman, “Defending Left Pedagogy: U.S. Communist Schools Fight Back Against the SACB (Subversive Activities Control Board) . . . and Lose (1953-1957),” Convergence, Vol. 41, no. 2/3 (2008): 193-209.
Marvin E. Gettleman, “The Lost World of United States Labor Education: Curricula at East and West Coast Communist Schools, 1944-1957,” in Robert W. Cherny, William Issel, and Kieran Walsh Taylor (eds.), American Labor and the Cold War: Grassroots Politics and Postwar Political Culture, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004: 205-215.
M. J. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935-1965, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Allison Hepler, McCarthyism in the Suburbs: Quakers, Communists, and the Children’s Librarian, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018.
Judith Larrabee Holmes, “The Politics of Anticommunism in Massachusetts, 1930-1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1996.
“Samuel Adams School for Social Studies Will Open Sept. 25,” The Boston Globe, September 11, 1944: 8.
*For examples of anti-Left frenzy in Greater Boston and Massachusetts, see the Sacco and Vanzetti Tour in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston; see also the entry on River Works/General Electric (in Lynn).
Acknowledgment:
Thanks to the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at the New England Historic Genealogical Society for allowing us to peruse its holdings related to the Samuel Adams School for Social Studies.
Graduation ceremonies for Our Lady of Presentation School normally took place inside the Catholic elementary school. On June 9, 2005, however, the one for the kindergarten was held across the street in Brighton’s Oak Square Common. The ceremony was one of both celebration and protest—protest against the Archdiocese of Boston’s abrupt closure of the school the previous day. The Archdiocese had made the move out of fear that parents would occupy the building in order to prevent the shutting down of the school, scheduled for two days later.
The early 2000s was a challenging time for the Catholic Church in Boston. Growing out-migration of Catholics of European descent to Boston’s suburbs and broader changes in churchgoing among Catholics (decades-long processes) brought about a dramatic decline in church attendance within the city. These factors, combined with the revelations of sexual abuse in 2002, led to a sharp decrease in financial support for the Church from area Catholics. Meanwhile, the sexual abuse scandal itself exacted high financial costs: About two years after the revelations, the Archdiocese of Boston had paid $85 million in a settlement involving 500 victims.* In this context, the Archdiocese announced in mid-2004 that it would close 82 parishes (out of a total of 357) in the coming months. It also announced the closure of Our Lady of Presentation School.
Given the strong identification of Boston’s Catholics with their parishes and the associated institutions, parishioners often resisted the closures, and, in some instances, successfully. In the case of Our Lady of Presentation, parents, students and community members occupied and camped out in Oak Square in protest of the lockout, attracting national and international media attention and strong support across Boston in the process. Eventually, in 2006, the Archdiocese agreed to sell the property to the Presentation School Foundation, an organization of parents and community members.
Today, the former school is the home of the multi-service Presentation School Foundation Community Center, which opened in 2012. It houses a range of non-profit organizations that serve children, families, and recent immigrants.
Constructed in 1911-1913, the Boston Fish Pier has been the focal point of the city’s fish industry for over a century. According to one study, the efficient and sophisticated nature of the Pier made it a model for the world’s fishing industry in the early 1900s. In 1936, 339 million pounds of fresh fish passed through the Boston Fish Pier. By 1975, however, the amount was 22 million pounds, a manifestation of a dramatic decrease in fish stock due to overfishing, a decline that has intensified since. Massachusetts once had, for example, the world’s richest cod stock. Today, the cod catch is a tiny fraction of what it was.
As a result, the Boston Fish Pier, now owned by the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport), has undergone substantial changes in recent decades. Originally focused on the landing and distribution of fresh fish caught in the waters off of Massachusetts, the majority of the fish now processed and sold there arrive from afar. One wholesaler and retailer housed at the Pier reported to The Boston Globe in 2016 that 75 percent of his fish was transported from overseas, arriving in Boston by plane or ship.
The Boston Fish Pier is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is located in the Seaport District of South Boston and consists of three buildings, all of which were constructed in 1910-1914; one of them serves as a multipurpose function facility. As of 2020, the pier complex housed 20 commercial fishing boats and 19 seafood-related businesses.
While Massport subsidizes the rents of its tenants, many associated with the pier fear for its future. The key reasons are the lucrative nature of the space the pier occupies in an economically booming Seaport where the fishing business is an outlier and the ever-changing nature of the food industry.
Nickerson Field, September 2015. Photo by Joseph Nevins.
The former site of the Allston Golf Club, Braves Field, the home of the National League’s Boston Braves was the largest baseball stadium in the country when it opened in August 1915. Prior to then, the Braves had played, since the team’s founding in 1871, at the South End Grounds
While the neighboring American League Boston Red Sox—the last team in baseball to field a Black player—were long marked by racism, the Braves, by comparison, were a progressive team. One year after the Brooklyn Dodgers became the first major league team to field a Black player (Jackie Robinson), the Braves became the fifth one to do so when they debuted Sam “Jet” Jethroe in 1950. By 1952, the Braves’ last year in the city (they moved to Milwaukee), Boston’s National League team had three Black players on its roster. (Today, the team is located in Atlanta, where it maintains its racially offensive name, one first adopted in 1912.)
Boston University (BU) purchased Braves Field for $430,000 in 1953. Today it is the site of a university stadium called Nickerson Field, where BU’s men’s and women’s lacrosse and soccer teams play. The offices of the BU police department are in the original building that housed the Braves’ administrative offices. In the entry area (close to Braves Field Way), in back of the stadium, a small monument marks the site of what was Braves Field.
Photo by Baseball Panoramic, June 14, 2014. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Getting there:
Green Line, B Branch to the Babcock Street stop. 0.4 mile (four-minute) walk.
To learn more:
Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.
