John Brown’s Hedgehog Grooming Service

47 Huntington Avenue, Back Bay

https://lostnewengland.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/770_1909c-loc.jpg — Copley Square Hotel, circa 1909. Source: Library of Congress.

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.

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.

Gal Tziperman Lotan, “Workers protest as hotel closures drag on and on,” The Boston Globe, October 28, 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.

182-186 Dudley Street, Roxbury

The Emerald Isle Orchestra, Hibernian Hall, 1939. Source: Digital Collections, Joseph P. Healey Library, UMass Boston.

Built in 1913, Hibernian Hall was an important center for Boston’s Irish community for almost fifty years. It hosted concerts of traditional Irish music, and contained a bowling alley, ballroom and many meeting rooms. Among other organizations, many local chapters of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic fraternal organization, which had its 19th century roots in combating discrimination against Irish immigrants, frequently took advantage of the space. So, too, did Boston’s largely Irish Catholic chapter of the Christian Front (see the entry on the Copley Square Hotel), an anti-Semitic organization, in the early 1940s.

In the initial decades of the 1900s, an influx of Jewish immigrants to Roxbury led to the Hall providing space for Bar Mitzvahs. In later years, the growing Black community in Roxbury led it to host James Brown and the Famous Flames before their rise to prominence. In a context in which many residents of Irish origin had moved out of Roxbury to other areas in Greater Boston and growing numbers of African Americans moved in, the Opportunities Industrialization Center bought the building in 1972. Started by Reverend Leon Sullivan of Philadelphia, the Center focused on providing technical and life skills training to the Black community.

In 2000, the Madison Park Development Corporation, a local community non-profit, purchased the Hall and relocated its offices there. The building’s 250-seat ballroom serves as the Roxbury Center for Arts at Hibernian Hall, a venue for theater, concerts, dances, film screenings, and private events.

Hibernian Hall, 2014. Photo by Eleni Macrakis.

Getting there:

Silver Line to Nubian Square station. Walk towards Dudley Street and turn left. Hibernian Hall is on the left side of the street. (0.2 miles, a 4-minute walk.)

To learn more:

Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021.

Gedutis, Susan. See You at the Hall: Boston’s Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press/University Press of New England, 2004.

Madison Park Development Corporation. “Hibernian Hall 100th Anniversary Video, Dudley Square, Roxbury, 1913-2013,” posted on YouTube on October 11, 2013.