The South End: A Lite Neighborhood History

I have lived in the South End of Boston since 2003, with one year off (2008-2009, moved to East Boston). I have lived in the same apartment since 2009. 

Like every urban neighborhood, everyone has nostalgia for a past, some of it real and some of it imagined. South End has a deep history, going back to its formation in the mid-19th century, when the city filled in the South Bay to create it. (While this history may seem far back, it arises more often than you might think, as when there is a drought and locals worry about the wood pilings under their buildings drying up and getting damaged.) It has hosted a number of demographic groups, based around ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, and more. There was overlap, which gets confusing to some folks. I am quite certain there were complicated politics.

I could provide a history here but I will only give the biggest overview, to get us to the period that interests me so much (the 1970s and the neighborhood's political publishing scene!). This is not footnoted and you'll have to excuse that, but also, its (pardon the pun) well-trod ground

After the fill, Boston (or, I suppose, developers?) laid out streets inspired by London, with Victorian rowhouses - still the largest concentration in North America. They occasionally included squares, as one finds in London, and I find myself on one now. There was a uniformity in the red brick buildings, an austerity even as they went fairly high end. These were single-family homes at that point, and some wealthy folks started buying them up. Legend has it that the Back Bay, a neighborhood also created by fill, with a vibe that was more continental Europe, with broad, tree-lined avenues, started coming on the market, absorbing the wealthy real estate money and leaving the South End as suddenly the bridesmaid rather than the bride. This was a story to be repeated in different ways over the decades to come. 

The above map, borrowed from the South End Historical Society, gives a sense of how close the South End is to downtown. In other words, if getting downtown is your goal, as it was for many years when industry was centered there, then this was a prime neighborhood in which to live, across generations. On the edge, between the South End and South Boston, the railroad prompted the building of more industrial buildings, so it was not, and is not, a purely residential area. 

The lux rowhouses were devalued as the money drifted west to the Back Bay, and by the end of the 19th century, immigrants of various kinds were moving in, dividing up the homes. I come from Irish stock so of course I imagine multi-generational Irish hordes taking over building after building, though there were also Italian, Syrian, Lebanese, and other immigrant groups moving in. Into the twentieth century, some of the buildings became SROs, Single Room Occupancies, with single men living there on the cheap. By the mid-20th century, the neighborhood was considered a dangerous one, though some would argue it had a strong sense of community. One corner, I believe around Columbus and Mass Ave, hosted a number of blues and jazz clubs, and the neighborhood into Roxbury had a large Black population. Other parts, perhaps closer to clusters of SROs, had a number of dive bars, some of which were still around even into the start of the 21st century. (I always think of one that had painted right into the side of the building, "Women welcome," which I always assumed would have the exact adverse effect.) 

This is all important to know as we think through the setting for radical publishing that would take place around the neighborhood starting in the 1970s. This is not to say that there was not publishing or radicalism before this decade, of course, but I'm limiting myself. I want to think about the publishing coming out of this neighborhood in this time period - South End Press but also Alyson Publications and New England Free Press - which were also part of the publishing scene in Boston in this period, alongside Persephone and Kitchen Table and others. 

One amazing source for Boston moving into the 1970s were these booklets done I believe for the Boston Public Library, with the incredible UMass Boston historian Jim Green writing the South End booklet. I went to look up info on this booklet, which I recall taking out of the Library years ago. I searched "Jim Green historian South End," and I got to this obituary for Green in the Socialist Worker, in which another highly regarded Boston historian, Jim O'Brien, recalls meeting up with Green in 1971:

Busy as he was in commencing his academic career, he was determined not to be defined by it. When Jim and I met for lunch (at a Lebanese restaurant in Boston's South End, where he lived at the time), we almost immediately started speculating about a potential radical history conference, aimed at bringing together radical academics and community/labor organizers.

What I love about this quote is how it shows someone sitting in the South End in this period with political commitments - socialism, in particular; radicalism - who is insistent on combining the academic and the community. This is just what the South End Press would do soon after, as a publishing house in the neighborhood. But there is a complicated interplay at work. Green was a professor at Brandeis at this time - "a sheep among senior wolves," as O'Brien says - but he would end up at UMass Boston, where I met him. For a time, he was quite proudly part of the experimental College of Public and Community Service, until it got dissolved and he was placed into the History department. 

I remember meeting Green and discussing Boston history, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas (1985) came up. I had heard of it but I don't think I'd read it, and I didn't really understand what a lightning rod it was. Green made clear that there is a very valid critique of it as a one-sided book masquerading (maybe that's too harsh) as an impartial journalistic account. I have since found this article from a UMass Boston Sociology professor of the time with one critique (in 1987). The book paints busing as an unfair burden placed on the white working class, for one. But I will return to Common Ground to talk about the focus on Colin and Joan Diver, a straight white couple who move into the South End in the 1970s, the kind of folks some called "pioneers." It is not hard to look back now and see the story Lukas wanted to tell, and told well, versus the actual conditions of the neighborhood. This is an important part of the story I want to tell as it recast the neighborhood for such a wide audience, via the readership of this bestseller, potentially taking part in a kind of erasure of the radical politics happening on the ground. Though, to be fair, Lukas does capture some of these elements of the neighborhood. 

The challenge is, looking back now, how different were the white radicals moving into the neighborhood from the white liberals like the Divers? Displacement is displacement, no? But there is a difference in output, in what they did once there, that is worth examining. Did the larger effort, to promote diverse voices and leftist politics, outweigh how they may have disrupted communities in place in the South End before their arrival? And how do we then make sense of what got me interested in all this at the start, the adverse impact of gentrification on Boston publishing, and in particular on radical independent publishers, if they potentially helped hasten along this gentrification by moving into the South End in the 1970s?