An online extension of the book by Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar and Eleni Macrakis
Category: Sites
This page displays sites that were not included in the original book. It includes ones prepared for the book but ultimately left out of the publication. It also includes new entries based on our ongoing research.
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.
Established in 1846, Harmony Grove was a commercial pleasure park. It had a lawn area for games, a dancing pavilion, and, as it sat on the edge of Farm Pond, a boathouse. It also had an amphitheater of sorts, in a natural depression, with benches that sat about a thousand people and a platform below.
Soon after Harmony Grove’s opening, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society began to hold an annual Fourth of July rally at the roughly 4-acre venue. It was a time of greatly heightened tensions surrounding the question of slavery and growing opposition, particularly in states such as Massachusetts, to what South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun first referred to as “the peculiar institution.” The year 1850 saw the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, for example; in 1852, John P. Jewett & Company*, a publisher in Downtown Boston, released Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and, in 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
In this charged context, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society held its most well-known and controversial gathering at Harmony Grove on July 4, 1854. Hundreds of abolitionists—one newspaper estimated the crowd at 2,000—gathered at the site. Decorating the platform was an upside-down U.S. flag bordered in black, a banner that showed Massachusetts chained to Virginia, and anti-slavery slogans. Speakers included Lucy Stone, a not-yet-famous Henry David Thoreau (Walden came out the next month), and Sojourner Truth, who warned the crowd that God “would yet execute his judgments upon the white people for their oppression and cruelty.”
William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator newspaper, opened the event. He called the U.S. Constitution “the source and parent of all the other atrocities—a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.” He ended his speech by burning a copy of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law as well as one of the Constitution, leading to many cheers but some boos as well from those in attendance.
Political gatherings continued at Harmony Grove for a decade following the end of the Civil War, but with a growing focus on women’s suffrage and temperance. In the 1870s, with the spread of railroads to new destinations, the popularity of Harmony Grove declined, leading to its closure in 1875. By the 1890s, the land was sub-divided into dozens of housing lots.
Today, the area that was once Harmony Grove is populated by houses and commercial buildings. At 156 Franklin Street, at the corner with Henry Street, there is a small marker with a plaque, placed there by the Framingham Historical Society in 1913, commemorating Harmony Grove. On the other side of Henry Street, at 166 Franklin, there is a Harmony Grove Welcome Arch. Dedicated on September 6, 2020, the arch sits on the front lawn of a private home. The result of a collaboration between Downtown Framingham Inc. and student organizations at Framingham High School and Framingham State University, the arch, which visitors are welcome to approach, contains sketches of historical scenes and of the landscape associated with Harmony Grove.
Getting there:
Commuter Rail from South Station to Framingham. 0.5 mile (nine-minute) walk.
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.
Pleasant Street (between Green St. and Titcomb St.), Newburyport
Postcard of Brown Square, 1913. Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
On May 31, 1836, the Essex County Antislavery Society held its first meeting at Brown Square. Among the speakers was the famed poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier. Established in 1802, the square was named after Moses Brown (1742-1827), the land’s donor, and, at the time, Newburyport’s second wealthiest individual and largest property owner.
Brown Square features an imposing statue of Newburyport’s most famous son: William Lloyd Garrison. On the base of the statue, which was erected in 1893, are engraved some of his most famous, hard-hitting words. The monument is located very close to what was the North Church, whose pastor, in 1830, invited Garrison to deliver a lecture about slavery. Many in the audience so disliked what the firebrand abolitionist had to say that he was uninvited to speak on a second night.
That the house of worship (the Central Congregational Church now occupies the site) at the western end of Brown Square treated Garrison poorly is related in some ways to the square’s namesake. Moses Brown was a merchant and shipbuilder, and an investor in the sugar, rum, and molasses trade. As such, like many in Newburyport, his wellbeing was tied to slavery. As an informational panel on the green notes, “Brown became wealthy and helped the development of Newburyport based on his profits from the ‘Triangle Trade,’ the economic engine that drove much of the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
In addition to Newburyport’s City Hall, various commercial establishments sit along the perimeter of Brown Square, including the Garrison Inn, a small hotel. Originally known as the Brown Square House, it was built (or commissioned) by Moses Brown.
Getting there:
Commuter Rail from North Station to Newburyport. Brown Square is 1.3 miles away (about a 26-minute walk). You can traverse most of the distance via the Clipper City Rail Trail, which connects the Commuter Rail station to Newburyport’s Harborwalk, along the city’s waterfront.
To learn more:
Susan M. Harvey, Slavery in Massachusetts: A descendent of early settlers investigates the connections in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Master’s Thesis, Department of History, Fitchburg State University, June 2011.
1031 Beacon Street and 1842 Beacon Street, Brookline
At 10am on Friday, December 30, 1994, John Salvi entered the offices of Planned Parenthood on Beacon Street in Brookline and opened fire with a rifle. Salvi, 22, then drove a short distance westward to Preterm Health Services, one of two other reproductive health clinics on Beacon Street at the time. Upon entering the first-floor office at 10:10am, he again opened fire, after asking if he was in the right place.
Shannon Lowney (l) and Leanne Nichols (r). Source: The Boston Globe.
In addition to wounding five individuals, Salvi killed two people that winter day on what anti-abortion activists called “Abortion Row”: Shannon Lowney, 25, a receptionist and Spanish translator at Planned Parenthood, and Leanne Nichols, 38, a receptionist at Preterm Health Services.
The following day, police finally caught up with Salvi. Authorities apprehended him shortly after he fired a dozen bullets at the Hillcrest Clinic in Norfolk, Virginia. At the time of the shootings, Salvi was an apprentice hairdresser living in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Active on the margins of the anti-abortion movement, Salvi suffered from mental illness, and, according to members of his own family, had grown increasingly fanatic in his religious beliefs.
In addition to John Salvi’s idiosyncrasies, the shootings in Brookline reflected a charged political climate regarding reproductive rights—locally and nationally.
Protests outside the clinics on Beacon Street in Brookline were common in the 1990s. They ranged from clinic blockades and prayer vigils to harassment of individuals entering the facilities. On at least one occasion, Salvi himself attended a protest outside Planned Parenthood.
Former site of the Planned Parenthood clinic, 1031 Beacon Street in Brookline. Photo by Joseph Nevins, October 2021.
In Greater Boston, the Catholic Church, then under the leadership of Archbishop Bernard Law, was vocal in its opposition to abortion. In his first public statement after becoming archbishop in 1984, Law called abortion “the primordial evil of our time.” (In 2002, Law resigned from his position in disgrace in the wake of revelations of widespread sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests in the Archdiocese of Boston and his role in ignoring or covering up of many such cases.*)
In the United States, the political climate regarding reproductive rights was not only charged, but also violent at times. In the 22 months preceding the killings in Brookline, there had been three other fatal shootings at clinics elsewhere in the country.
Former site of Preterm Health Services, October 2021.
In early 1996, a jury in Norfolk County Superior Court found John Salvi guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and five counts of armed assault with intent to murder. The judge, who had determined that Salvi was mentally competent to stand trial, sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Eight months later, authorities found Salvi dead in his cell in MCI Cedar Junction at Walpole (formerly known as Walpole State Prison); he had committed suicide.
That same year, Preterm Health Services and Planned Parenthood merged and moved to a new clinic, the Greater Boston Health Center, on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.
Outside of the former site of the Planned Parenthood clinic, there is a small plaque that honors the memory of Shannon Lowney. For unknown reasons, there is nothing similar honoring Leanne Nichols outside of the former site of Preterm Health Services.
Getting there:
For Planned Parenthood, Green Line (C Branch) to St. Mary’s Street station; the site is diagonally across the street. For Preterm Health Services, Green Line (C Branch) to Englewood Avenue station; the site is directly across the street.
On February 26, 2021, a ceremony took place in front of Brookline’s largest elementary school (kindergarten – 8th grade) to celebrate the renaming of what is now called the Florida Ruffin Ridley School.
The renaming grew out of a broad reckoning with Brookline’s involvement in slavery. In 2006, an entity called the Hidden Brookline Committee, which serves under the Town’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Community Relations, began research on, with the goal of enhancing public understanding of, the history of slavery and freedom in Brookline. Hidden Brookline found that about more than a quarter of Brookline’s households owned human beings in the mid-1700s.
Among Brookline’s enslavers was Edward Devotion (1688-1744), who owned four landed properties, the largest of which is today the Coolidge Corner neighborhood. In his will, Devotion left a portion of his estate to Brookline and requested that it be used to build a school near the center of town. While the Town of Brookline never acted on this wish, it did honor Devotion’s bequest almost 150 years after his death when, in 1892, it opened a new school directly behind his house, and named it after him.
In early 2018, two Brookline residents, Deborah Brown and Anne Greenwald, launched a campaign to drop Edward Devotion’s name from the school due to his being an enslaver. In May of that year, Brookline Town Meeting (Brookline’s legislative body) voted to temporarily rename it the Coolidge Corner School.
A subsequent public process overseen by the Brookline School Committee resulted in 119 different proposals for a new, more permanent name from community members. A committee of students, guided by parents and school staff, then deliberated and opted to recommend that the school be named after Florida Ruffin Ridley, a prominent suffragist and civil rights leader. On November 20, 2019, the Town Meeting, by a vote of 195 to 15 (with 13 abstentions), approved the committee’s recommendation. The school’s new name officially went into effect on September 1, 2020.
Florida Ridley Ruffin School, October 2021. Photo by Joseph Nevins.
Born and raised in Boston, Ridley was the second Black teacher in that city’s history. Along with her mother, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, she helped found the Women’s Era Club, an advocacy group for Black women in the Boston area; she also served as an editor of the organization’s newspaper, The Women’s Era. In 1896, Ridley moved to Brookline with her husband and purchased a home (which still stands, at 131 Kent Street). Together, they became either the first, or among the first, Black homeowners in Brookline.
Edward Devotion House, October 2021.
The Edward Devotion House remains standing on Harvard Street, with the U-shaped Florida Ruffin Ridley School surrounding it on three sides. The Devotion House was built around 1740 and contains a house frame which dates to approximately 1680. It is today owned by the Town of Brookline. It serves as the headquarters of the Brookline Historical Society, which administers the historic building and has been meeting there since 1901.
Getting there:
Green Line (C Branch) to Coolidge Corner station. 0.3 mile (6 minute) walk. MBTA buses also pass by the site.
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.
Consisting of two residential buildings, the Royall House and Slave Quarters are what remain of the huge eighteenth-century estate owned by Isaac Royall, Sr. (1677-1739). Royall purchased the 500-acre property, a larger version of which had been previously known as Ten Hills Farm*, in 1732. Later that same year, Royall and his family moved into a what had been an already large house, one that he had had expanded. Royall also oversaw the construction of a large outbuilding to house the twenty-seven enslaved people he brought with him from his sugar plantation in Antigua.
The Africans enslaved by the Royall family in Medford (at the time part of Charlestown) engaged largely in domestic and agricultural work. Their labor enabled the gentlemanly lifestyle of Isaac Royall Jr., his lively civic engagement, and his entertaining of the Massachusetts ruling class. Royall Jr. served on the Governor’s Council and on the Board of Overseers of Harvard College.
The presence of slaves on the Royall estate reflects the fact that Greater Boston was an important center of slavery. In the 1740s, in what was then the Town of Boston, for example, there were more than 1,600 enslaved people—between 10 and 15 percent of the overall population, according to historian Jared Hardesty—many of whom were highly skilled and thus central to the area’s economy. This translated into about one out of every four Boston households having slaves.
Most enslaved people in the Boston area lived in the homes of their “owners.” In this regard, the Royall family, with its separate quarters for their enslaved workers, was exceptional.
Slave Quarters, July 2015. Photo by Joseph Nevins.
Royall Jr.’s suspected Loyalist sympathies saw him flee Massachusetts during the American Revolution and live out his life in London. He bequeathed a portion of the proceeds from his original fortune and from land speculation in western Massachusetts to Harvard University. These funds helped to establish Harvard Law School.
In October 2015, a dynamic student movement inspired by the South African and British #RhodesMustFall activism emerged at Harvard Law School. Organized under the name “Royall Must Fall,” the students argued that the school’s seal, which contained the crest of the Royall family, endorsed a slaveholding legacy. The students’ efforts resulted in the Law School announcing, in March 2016, that it would drop the seal and replace it with a new one.
Once home to the largest slaveholding family in Massachusetts and the individuals they held in bondage, the Royall House and Slave Quarters, the latter being the only such remaining structure in the northern United States**, is now a museum. The museum seeks to educate its visitors about both the Royall family and the struggles of the Africans whose enslavement helped to create the family’s fortune. In addition, the museum seeks to highlight how the legacies of slavery inform systemic inequalities in the present. It is open to the public for tours on weekends from May through October.
Getting there:
The site is a half-hour (1.3 mile) walk from the Red Line’s Davis Square station; MBTA bus lines also have stops nearby.
Daniel R. Coquilette and Bruce A. Kimball, On the Battlefield of Merit: Harvard Law School, the First Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
13 Frisbie Place, Cambridge, and 95 North Harvard Street, Allston
Beginning in 1941, research on incendiary weapons development took place in the Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge. The third-floor lab—”a glass-walled room-within-a-room” in the words of historian Robert Neer—was under the direction of Dr. Louis Fieser, a professor of organic chemistry. An official, top-secret project of the U.S. Department of War, Fieser’s work was listed as “Anonymous Research No. 4” in Harvard’s records.
Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory, 1929-1931. Credit: HUV 2329 (BP 51), Harvard University Archives.
The research was the offspring of what was a marriage of sorts between academia, the U.S. military, and weapons manufacturers brought about by the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940, the NDRC sought to enhance research on, and development of, military weaponry by building linkages between civilian researchers, the Pentagon, and industry. It was the brainchild of Vannever Bush, one of the founders of Raytheon (today Raytheon Technologies headquartered in Waltham*) and an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bush designated James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, as the head of “Division B,” which was responsible for bombs, fuels, gases, and chemical problems.
Soon after the NDRC’s founding, Harvard assigned Fieser two rooms in the basement of the Converse Chemistry Laboratory (at 12 Oxford Street) to conduct research on explosives. As the research of Fieser and his team progressed, it shifted from poison gas to incendiary gels, requiring a move to the nearby Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory.
On July 4, 1942, Fieser and his fellow researchers brought the fruits of their labor to the Harvard soccer field, near the university tennis courts and the Harvard Business School, across the Charles River in the Boston neighborhood of Allston. University workers had prepared the field, digging a circle 60 feet in diameter, which firefighters from the City of Cambridge proceeded to fill with water. Fieser and others then carefully placed a 70-pound bomb containing white phosphorous and 45 pounds of jellied gasoline on a metal stand in the middle of the shallow pond. After Fieser flipped a switch, “a spectacular, billowing, 2,100-degree-Fahrenheit cloud arose over the field,” writes Neer. “Napalm bombs had arrived in the world.”
July 4, 1942, Harvard soccer field. The first outdoor test of napalm. Source: Harvard Magazine.
The success of the test reflected how Fieser and his team had invented not only napalm, but a way to scatter the gruesome substance over a wide area, while igniting it. Liquid and gel incendiary weapons have a long, even ancient, history. What makes napalm an especially effective (and terrifying) weapon is that it is sticky and it burns at an extremely high temperature.
Louis Fieser, April 1965, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Source: Public Domain.
The U.S. military used napalm to horrific effect in Japan during World War II and in the U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam. The Pentagon also used the weapon during its invasion of Iraq in 2003. For such reasons, napalm is symbolic for many of the horrors of war and of U.S. military power in particular.
The Wolcott Gibbs Laboratory was constructed in 1911-1912. A couple of weeks before it opened, The Harvard Crimson described the building as “the most perfectly planned and equipped physical-chemical laboratory in the world.” Harvard demolished the facility in 1999 to allow for the construction of the Bauer Life Sciences Building, which now stands on the site.
As for the Harvard soccer field, it was renovated and named Ohiri Field in 1983. (It is unclear if Ohiri Field sits on the exact same site as the old soccer field, but, most likely, at the very least, it overlaps with it.) Until 2010, Ohiri Field served as the primary home field for the Harvard men’s and women’s soccer teams. Since the opening of a new stadium called Jordan Field, Ohiri Field has served as the secondary home for the two teams.
Ohiri Field (undated) with Harvard Stadium, which sits on the other side of North Harvard Street, in the background. Source: Harvard Athletics.
Getting there:
Red Line to Harvard station. Enter Frisbie Place (a walkway that is diagonally across from where Quincy Street intersects Kirkland ) at Kirkland Street. The part of Frisbie Place where Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory once stood is a now a combination of a courtyard and, at its northern end, the Bauer Life Sciences Building (0.4 miles, about an 8-minute walk.) From there, Ohiri Field is a one-mile (approximately 20-minute) walk. MBTA buses from Harvard Square also pass in front of Ohiri Field.
First established in 1826 as an informal group, what is today the Somerset Club became formalized as the Beacon Club sometime thereafter. In 1851, the club purchased a house at the corner of Beacon and Somerset Streets to serve as its home. Renamed the Somerset Club the following year, it is the oldest of Boston’s private clubs.
In the years surrounding the Civil War, political tensions permeated the Somerset as many of its members were “Copperheads”—Democrats strongly opposed to abolitionism, the war and President Abraham Lincoln. This led to one of its members on the other side of the political divide to found the Union Club nearby (on 8 Park Street) in 1863.
Reflecting the Harvard ties of many elite social clubs, the Somerset is now located in what was the mansion of David Sears (Harvard class of 1807). The club purchased the property in 1871.
The Harvard Crimson newspaper has characterized the Somerset as “traditionally . . . the haughtiest and most prestigious of clubs.” One does not to ask to join the Somerset, but rather one is asked. The club is so secretive that one needs to be a member to access its website.
Long associated with Boston Brahmins and WASPs—its members have included powerful Yankee politicians and businesspeople and deans from the area’s elite institutions of higher learning—the Somerset did not admit women until the late 1980s. While its membership still reflects “old money” and proper “pedigree,” the Somerset, like Boston’s private social clubs as a whole, is no longer at the center of the area’s pyramid of power. Given large political-economic shifts over the last several decades and the internationalization of Boston’s economy, the Somerset’s status is somewhat a relic of the past.
Somerset Club, 42 Beacon Street, March 2017. Photo by Eleni Macrakis.
Getting there:
Red or Green Line to Park Street Station. 0.3 mile (seven-minute) walk.
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