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.
During the 1920s, the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, under the leadership of Cardinal William Henry O’Connell, a man known for his highly elitist ways, moved its seat of power from the South End to a semi-suburban area of Brighton. Following Boston College’s relocation to Chestnut Hill—an affluent “village” comprised of parts of Boston, Brookline, and Newton—O’Connell set up shop at the intersection of Lake Street and Commonwealth Avenue, across from the BC campus, on the land of St. John’s Seminary.*
The cardinal’s residence, a three-story, ornate and opulent Italian Renaissance-style palazzo—one financed to a large degree from a bequest from the family of Benjamin F. Keith, a vaudeville magnate—was the centerpiece of the Archdiocese’s “Little Rome.” According to David Quigley, a historian at Boston College, the residence was “a visible symbol of the imperial archdiocese in the early 20th century, and then, during the very difficult years in 2002 and 2003 [referring to the revelations of sexual abuse by members of the clergy], it was a site of daily protest and picketing.”
In 2004, the Archdiocese, in dire need of funds to pay restitution to the victims of the sexual abuse, agreed to sell to Boston College 43 acres of land and numerous buildings, including the cardinal’s residence, for $99.4 million. Three years later, it sold another 20 acres and three additional buildings, one of which was the chancery, the headquarters of the Archdiocese (today the home of Boston College’s alumni center), for $65 million.
The current cardinal lives in a modest rectory attached to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End.* Meanwhile, the offices of the Archdiocese are now located in Braintree, a South Shore town that has one of the Boston area’s greatest concentrations of residents of Irish descent. The move mimics the migration of many “old” Boston Catholics (those of Irish and Italian descent) to the suburbs. It also reflects a marked decrease in the Church’s political influence in the City of Boston in recent decades. As for the former home of all the Archdiocese of Boston’s cardinals in the 20th century, it is today Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art.
McMullen Museum of Art, former cardinal’s residence of the Archdiocese of Boston, June 2017. Photo by Joseph Nevins.
Getting there:
Green Line, B Branch, to Boston College station.
To learn more:
Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.
Ivory Bean was a mason. In 1855, he purchased a piece of land at what is today 47-49 Monmouth Street in Brookline’s Longwood neighborhood for the price of $11,400. The person from whom Bean bought the property was Amos A. Lawrence, a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist. It is thought that Bean might have worked for the Lawrence family.
Noteworthy is the restrictive language contained in the property deed. In addition to banning various forms of economic activity—including that of a soap boiler brewer, tanner, distiller, sugar baker, or brick maker—it also forbade the property’s “occupation by any negro or negroes” and “by any native or natives of Ireland.”
That Amos Lawrence had antipathy toward people of Irish descent is not especially remarkable as such sentiment was common among non-Catholic Greater Bostonians during the time. His hostility toward Black people, however, is somewhat striking as Lawrence was a prominent abolitionist. This seeming contradiction manifests, in addition to his own idiosyncrasies, the complexities of the society in which the textile merchant lived and his position with it.
As historian Catherine Devlin explains, Lawrence criticized “slavery without recognizing his own dependence on it.” He also “[opposed] its spread on political grounds rather than championing the end to an unethical practice.” As such, Lawrence “was both culpable for profiting from slavery and admirable for trying to prevent its spread, a man who was both racist and a self-proclaimed abolitionist.”
Also noteworthy about the racially restrictive covenant associated with the Ivory Bean property is its date. Historians typically trace the origins of racial covenants in the United States to the late 1800s. The 1920s marked a period of intense growth in their use—an outgrowth of a combination of factors: the Great Migration of Blacks from the U.S. South; a U.S. Supreme Court decision (in 1917) that outlawed the use of racial zoning by municipalities; and anti-Black race riots in many cities in the years 1917-1921. On the national level, racial covenants usually targeted Blacks, but, depending on the part of the country, also people of Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, and Mexican backgrounds. In Massachusetts, covenants barred people identified as Black, Irish, Italian, Polish, and the non-white broadly.
One cannot say with certainty when the first racially restrictive covenant came to be in the United States. (Many have mistakenly attributed the first racial covenant to a Brookline subdivision—“The Lindens”—created by Thomas Aspinwall Davis in 1843.*) But it is safe to say that the one Amos Lawrence imposed on the property of Ivory Bean is the earliest known instance of a racist property deed in Greater Boston and in the United States as a whole.
In approximately 1857, Ivory Bean built the house that now stands on the property. Today it is a private, multi-unit dwelling.
47-49 Monmouth Street, October 2021. Photo by Joseph Nevins.
Getting there:
Green Line (D Branch) to Longwood station (0.3 miles, about a 6-minute walk), or Green Line (B Branch) to St. Mary’s Street (0.2 miles, about a 4-minute walk).
Anne Wardwell, “’Longwood’ and ‘Cottage Farm’ in Brookline,” in Pauline Chase Harrell and Margaret Supplee Smith (editors), Victorian Boston Today: Ten Walking Tours, Boston: New England Chapter, Victorian Society in America, 1975: 58-69.
Nearby site of interest:
Longwood Mall, Kent and Beech Streets. The mall is a two-and-a-half-acre linear park linear park with historic beech trees. It is thought to contain the oldest grove of European Beech trees in the United States.
*Note
Anne Wardwell (see above) is the first author known to have written about the restrictive covenant associated with the Ivory Bean house. A history Ph.D. dissertation completed at Boston University in 1981 was the first scholarly source to do so. The author, Ronald Dale Karr, wrote:
“Before zoning, the primary protection against attempts to lower the class status of a development was the restrictive covenant. Restrictive covenants were written into deeds at the time of the original sale, enforceable in court by other landowners. Nearly every Brookline subdivision aimed at the upper-middle-class market employed these controls. For example, the deeds received by buyers at Linden Place in 1843 required that all buildings be erected at least thirty feet away from the street and ‘that the only buildings to be erected or placed upon said parcels shall be dwelling houses and their appurtenances exclusive of all yards, shops, or other conveniences for manufacturing or mechanical purposes.’ In Longwood, deeds from the Sears and Lawrence families commonly forbade commercial uses of the land for twenty years from the time of sale, and some varied detailed restrictions on the type of buildings that could be constructed. One even prohibited buildings to be occupied ‘by any negro or native of Ireland.'”
In the footnote associated with this text, Karr said that “This is the only example I uncovered of a restrictive covenant aimed at a racial, ethnic, or religious group.”
Historian Kenneth Jackson drew on Karr’s dissertation in his award-winning book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Here’s the relevant excerpt:
“Meanwhile, the use of uniform setback lines and the preference for centering a house to equalize both side yards created a homogeneous statement that enabled residents to eradicate many vestiges of the heterogeneity that characterized the cities they had fled. For example, in 1843, deeds for the lots in the Linden Place subdivision in Brookline, Massachusetts, included the provision that houses be erected at least 30 feet from the street and ‘that the only buildings to be erected and placed upon said parcels shall be dwelling houses.’ As the century progressed, deeds forbade sales to ‘any negro or native of Ireland.’”
Note that the excerpt implies that the racially restrictive covenant was associated with the Linden Place subdivision and also suggests that such covenants were multiple in number (i.e. “deeds forbade sales”). Jackson’s work thus distorts what Karr wrote in his dissertation. (Karr turned the dissertation into a book in 2018–see above.)
Subsequent authors have drawn on Jackson’s influential book regarding the origins of the racial covenant and have thus reproduced the original misrepresentation.
Finally, it is important to note that racial covenants stand out because of their formal nature. There were (and are), of course, all sorts of other, less formal means, by which homeowners, neighborhoods, and real estate interests have excluded negatively racialized individuals to maintain relative homogeneity in particular locales. (See, for example, here and James Loewen’s Sundown Towns.)
Acknowledgments:
Thanks to Jesus MacLean and Camille Arbogast, curators at the Brookline Historical Society, and to Ken Liss, President of the Brookline Historical Society, for their assistance. Thanks as well to Stephanie Call, the Associate Director of Archives and Education, Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center at the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
In 1952-1953, while a graduate student at the Boston University School of Theology, Martin Luther King resided in a building located at 397 Massachusetts Avenue (as indicated by a small plaque on its façade). At the time, it was likely a boarding house in which residents rented rooms.
Plaque on the outside of the building at 397 Massachusetts Avenue.
MLK’s apartment also served as the meeting place for the Dialectical Society, a club dedicated to discussing matters of philosophy and theology and composed largely of African American male graduate students. His future wife, Coretta Scott (who he met in early 1952), lived nearby as she was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, and occasionally participated in the group’s meetings.
In the early 1950, the neighborhood was a vibrant, largely Black community with a rich array of restaurants and jazz clubs, ones where the likes of Count Basie and Duke Ellington could be seen. Today, only a few of those institutions remain in the heavily gentrified area.
No longer a boarding house, 397 Massachusetts Avenue is today home to apartments owned and maintained by the South End’s Tenants’ Development Corporation. Founded in 1968, the organization works to increase the availability of housing for low- and moderate-income individuals and families.
397 Massachusetts Avenue, 2016. Photo by Joseph Nevins.
Getting there:
Orange Line to Massachusetts Avenue Station. Exit at Massachusetts Avenue and immediately go left. Number 397 is two buildings away on the left-hand side.
Nearby points of interest:
170 St. Botolph Street. At some point after living at 397 Massachusetts Avenue, MLK lived in an apartment in this building.
Wally’s Café Jazz Club (the last of the area’s venerable jazz and blues clubs), 427 Massachusetts Avenue.
Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe. Established in 1927, the white-owned restaurant was featured in The Green Book as it welcomed Black diners and Black jazz musicians during its first few decades, a time when many area establishments. The floor above the restaurant served as the union hall of the Boston branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an African-American-led union. 429 Columbus Avenue.
New England Conservatory of Music, 290 Huntington Avenue.
Stephen C. Ferguson II, “The Philosopher King: An Examination of the Influence of Dialectics on King’s Political Thought and Practice,” in Robert E. Birt, The Liberatory Thought of Martin Luther King: Critical Essays on the Philosopher King, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2012: 87-108.
The photo at the top of the entry is from April 22, 1965. MLK is speaking on the front steps of the William Boardman School in Roxbury, in support of parents working to remedy substandard and unequal schools and racial segregation in the Boston Public Schools. Source: Boston Herald.
A vibrant and complex cluster of abolitionists emerged out of Haverhill in the 1800s. They included Sydney Howard Gay, future editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard and partisan of the Underground Railroad. Perhaps the best known was John Greenleaf Whittier, who gained national prominence as the author of Snow-Bound, a bestselling poem. Published in book form in 1866, the poem celebrated the disappearing New England family farm.
Whittier, born in 1807, was educated at a local Quaker school led by an influential abolitionist minister, Joshua Coffin. It was in a newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison (see our entry on Rockledge), the Newburyport Free Press, in which Whittier’s first published poem appeared, in 1826.
John Greenleaf Whittier birthplace, 2016. Photo by Suren Moodliar.
Whittier was ambivalent about his hometown’s best-known contribution to abolitionism, the famous Haverhill petition. In 1841, John Quincy Adams, the former president and member of the U.S. House of Representatives, presented the petition to Congress. It called for the dissolution of the United States, in effect Northern secession, claiming that taxpayers in the North were footing the bill for the defense of slavery in the South. Whittier was quite troubled by this tactic, fearing that if it were to succeed, slavery would remain intact. Despite this difference, Whittier remained a strong advocate of using formal political institutions to challenge slavery.
Built in 1688, Whittier’s birthplace still stands; today, it is a museum dedicated to the poet. The Whittier family homestead is open to the public from May until October via guided tours. The neighboring properties retain much of the bucolic character of Whittier’s time.
The First Town House opened in 1658. The wood frame building served as Boston’s town hall and the colonial seat of government. The building had a public market on the first floor. It also hosted legislative meetings and receptions by colonial officials and prominent Bostonians. In addition, it housed Boston’s first public library.
On December 25, 1686, Sir Edmund Andros, the royal governor of the Dominion of New England, attended two religious services at First Town House celebrating Christmas. British soldiers flanked Andros as the recently appointed official feared protests by opponents of the Christian holiday. The Puritans saw Christmas as little more than a pagan festival, with origins in the celebration of the winter solstice, dressed up in religious garb. Moreover, Christmas often involved behavior that Massachusetts Puritans perceived as antithetical to respect for Christ’s birth—“rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes” in the words of historian Steven Nissenbaum. As the highly influential religious leader Cotton Mather said to his adherents in 1712, “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty…by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!”
In 1659, about 27 years prior to Governor Andros’s attendance at the religious ceremonies at First Town House, the Massachusetts Bay Colony criminalized the celebration of Christmas, imposing a five shilling fine on those who violated the law. In 1681, however, Massachusetts rescinded numerous puritanical laws, including the ban on Christmas, in response to political pressure from Britain. Still, through the early decades of the 1800s, businesses and schools in Massachusetts did not close for Christmas, and many churches did not open. It was not until 1856 that Christmas became a public holiday in the state.
A huge fire destroyed the First Town House in 1711. Two years later, the Old State House, which still stands, was built on the site.
Steven Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday, New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Hugh Morrison, Early American Architecture from the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period, New York: Oxford University Press (88-89), 1952.
On March 14, 1887, the 7:00am commuter train left Roslindale station on its way to the Forest Hills stop. On board were somewhere between 200 and 300 passengers. As the train crossed the Bussey Bridge, the iron structure gave way and the passenger cars fell 40 feet or more (estimates vary) right through the bridge, killing at least 23 people and injuring more than 100 others.
Caption of illustration: “Massachusetts – the recent disaster at Forest Hills, on the Boston and Providence Railway – extricating the killed and injured immediately after the accident. Taken from a photo by D.W. Butterfield, Cambridgeport, Mass.” Source: Digital Commonwealth.
The Bussey Bridge was originally made of wooden trusses that were coated with tin for reasons of fire prevention, earning it the nickname “Tin Bridge.” By 1876, however, the entire bridge was made of iron. Following the fatal tragedy of 1887, an official investigation determined that bridge had been improperly designed and manufactured, and that it had gradually weakened from heavy usage. The Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners also concluded that the Boston and Providence Railroad Company had been negligent in its managerial and inspection responsibilities. As a result of the disaster, railroad inspection regulations greatly improved across the country.
The wreckage also attracted a great number of viewers. Some claim that the viewing subsequently led many to decide to move to the area due to its beauty, thus spurring the growth of Roslindale.
Today, the rebuilt bridge, now made of cement and stone, stands as a memorial to the victims. The year of the accident, 1887, is engraved at the top of the bridge, and a small plaque explaining the event hides in the shadows on the left side (on the abutment) of the bridge on the Washington Street side.
Bussey Bridge, Summer 2014. Photo by Eleni Macrakis.
Getting there:
Orange Line or MBTA bus to Forest Hills Station. (0.8 miles, about a 16-minute walk.)
To learn more:
Boston 200 Corporation. Roslindale. Boston, Boston 200 Corporation, 1975.
Larry Pletcher, Massachusetts Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival. Guilford, Connecticut: Morris Book Publishing, 2006.
Anthony Sammarco, Roslindale. Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 1997.
Boston Edison Company’s Pilgrim Station Unit 1, circa 1972. Public domain.
On New Year’s Eve, 1988, Diane Turco was preparing for evening guests, but decided to join friends protesting the imminent restarting of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station. (The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had forced the plant to shut down in 1986 because of many safety violations.) By that evening, Turco was sitting in jail, having joined 34 other activists in refusing to obey a police order to remain across the road from the plant. The arrested were soon released on their own recognizances, however. Indeed, even some of the police were sympathetic: one activist recalls an officer saying, “Thank you for doing this because we know this place isn’t safe and we could never evacuate the people [if there was an accident].”
Members of Cape Downwinders, an organization that Diane Turco co-founded in the mid-1980s, protest Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, circa 2013. Source: The Patch.
Built by the Bechtel Corporation for Boston Edison, the station came online in 1972. Very soon thereafter, Boston Edison announced that it would expand the plant. In response, the Plymouth County Nuclear Information Center, or PICNIC, emerged to organize against the expansion and for closing the already existing station. Community resistance waxed and waned over the years in the form of various organizations. Nonetheless, activist efforts frustrated the plans of expansion in the case of Edison and renewal in the case of Entergy, a power company based in New Orleans, Louisiana which took ownership of the plant in the late 1990s, during the Clinton-era deregulation of energy. Community protest and advocacy also dramatically strengthened safety measures and public awareness through dogged litigation, protest, and educational activities. Although public health studies revealed that cancer rates increased with proximity to the plant, it was only after Japan’s Fukushima disaster 2011, and uncertainty about the plant’s economic viability in light of strengthening safety standards that, in 2016, Entergy announced that it would decommission the plant. On May 31, 2019, the plant closed down.
These developments notwithstanding, many are very concerned about nuclear waste that remains on site. There is also alarm at the deteriorating condition of its containment and the fact that the waste storage vessels are located just above sea-level. These will remain radioactive for millennia as well as exposed to rising sea levels and storm surges.
Getting there:
About 7.5 miles south of the Commuter Rail station in Plymouth.
When it opened on July 4, 1891, the Copley Square Hotel was the first and only hotel in the Back Bay. In 1896, the hotel served as the campaign headquarters for then-presidential candidate William McKinley. During the 1940s, the hotel housed the Storyville Jazz Club, which hosted, among others, the famed Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald. Less known is the occupant of a second-floor suite from 1939 to 1942: the New England chapter of the Christian Front and its leader, Francis Moran, an agent of Nazi Germany.
Father Charles Coughlin, the antisemitic and fascistic priest from Detroit whose weekly radio broadcasts enjoyed a national audience of millions during the 1930s, established the Christian Front in the United States. Soon, the organization, a variant of which originated in Europe, had a large presence in Boston. Indeed, under the capable leadership of Moran—several hundred would often attend the organization’s meetings at Hibernian Hall in Roxbury—the city emerged as the epicenter of the Christian Front’s activities in the United States.
The membership of the Boston-area Front was composed mostly of Irish Catholics and largely of people on the socioeconomic margins. It also enjoyed significant support within Boston’s police force, within organized labor, and among key elements of the area’s political establishment. According to historian Charles Gallagher, “fronters” perceived themselves as under threat and as engaged in a holy war of sorts, one in which Communists and Jews—overlapping categories in their eyes—were the enemy. Many Catholic priests soft-peddled the far-right politics of the Christian Front while providing theological leadership. Meanwhile, the Church hierarchy did nothing to challenge, while often effectively sanctioning, the organization’s hate-filled propaganda.
German consul’s house, 39 Chestnut Street, Beacon Hill, 1940. Source: Tufts Digital Library.
Recruited by Germany’s consul general on Beacon Hill with the goal of helping to build support for U.S. neutrality during World War II, Moran would become a Nazi agent soon after the Christian Front’s establishment in Boston. Eventually, Frances Sweeney, head of Boston’s Irish American Defense Association, exposed Moran as a Nazi propagandist.* With the United States having recently declared war on Germany, this led the Boston Police Department to shut down the Christian Front’s operations and its office at the Copley Square Hotel in January 1942. Nonetheless, the Front continued to operate, clandestinely, in the Boston area until 1945 or so.
The Copley Square Hotel advertises itself as “the city’s second-oldest hotel in continuous operation.” However, it closed at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic for reasons of renovation. It reopened in April 2022. The hotel’s worker’s are unionized, members of UNITE-HERE Local 26.
Photo by Suren Moodliar, October 2021.
Getting there:
Green Line to Green Line to Copley station; 0.2 miles (4-minute) walk. Orange Line or Commuter Rail to Back Bay Station; 0.4 mile (8-minute) walk.
To learn more:
Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Couple Square: The Forgotten History of the Christian Front, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021.
*See our entry on South Boston High School in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston to learn more about Frances Sweeney, the Irish American Defense Association, and the Christian Front.
Statue of Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) from “Bewitched” in Salem. Source: Atlas Obscura.
At the intersection of Essex and Washington streets in Salem’s downtown area is a nine-foot-high bronze statue of a friendly-looking witch sitting on a broom. Installed in 2005, the statue honors Elizabeth Montgomery, the actress, and her television character, Samantha Stephens, a likeable suburban housewife and benign sorceress on the U.S. sitcom, Bewitched (1964-1972). In 1970, the crew and cast of the popular television show arrived in Salem to film some episodes, including one at the House of Seven Gables.
The installation of the statue proved to be controversial. Its local supporters presented it as a celebration of the connection, real and figurative, between the show and Salem, and as a booster of the city’s tourist economy. Meanwhile, its critics derided it for trivializing and commercializing the real-life (and death) drama involving those accused of witchcraft in the early 1690s, while serving as a crass advertisement for TV Land, the cable television company that built it. As one letter-to-the-editor writer stated in The Boston Globe, “If this statue is acceptable in Salem, why not have TV Land consider erecting a statue outside Auschwitz, honoring that funny and lovable German, Sergeant Schultz, a character on the TV series ‘Hogan’s Heroes’” (a comedy about U.S. POWs held in Germany during World War II).
In addition to obscuring the atrocities associated with the Salem Witch Trials*, the statue does not reveal that Montgomery was a progressive political activist. And her politics were manifest in the show at times: despite the comedic nature of Bewitched, one of its most famous episodes centered on racism and interracial marriage. Outside of the television studio, Montgomery was outspoken in her opposition to the Vietnam War and was a strong supporter of gay rights—in both cases well before it was fashionable to do so. She also narrated two documentary films highly critical of U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s: Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair (1988), and the Academy-Award-winning The Panama Deception (1992).
Getting there:
Commuter Rail from North Station (Newburyport/Rockport line) to Concord Station. About 0.2 miles (a 4-minute walk).
To learn more:
Kathy McCabe “’Bewitched’ statue plan bothers, bewilders,” The Boston Globe, April 28, 2005.
The Mather is the oldest public elementary and the first tax-supported school in the United States. It was founded in 1639 near the corner of what are today Cottage Street and Pleasant Street as a one-room schoolhouse. It remained there until 1694, when it moved about a half mile to Winter Street (the site of a fire station today) atop Meetinghouse Hill, Dorchester’s highest point–just yards from the school’s present location. It was then that the school was named after Richard Mather (Increase Mather’s father and Cotton Mather’s grandfather), a Congregational minister who settled in Dorchester in 1635. It is unclear when girls first attended the school, but in 1784, the town of Dorchester voted to allow females to do so and provide for their education.
In 2014, the Mather School marked its 375th birthday. Today, it is a school of great diversity, with students of African American, Cape Verdean, Haitian, Irish, and Vietnamese backgrounds. With many recently immigrated students of Vietnamese descent with limited English proficiency, the school runs a Vietnamese Sheltered Instruction program.
The Mather is today housed in a building constructed in 1905. There is a beautiful view of the harbor and much of the city from the school’s grounds.
Getting there:
Red Line to Fields Corner station. 0.7 mile (15-minute) walk.
Nearby point of interest:
First Parish Church Dorchester (established in 1631, Unitarian Universalist), 10 Parish Street. The congregation, which founded the Mather School, has had a church on Meetinghouse Hill since the 1670s. The current building was constructed in 1897.
.jpg){kind=link}
