"Hooked on Boston: A Love Story," by Susan Orlean

An Excerpt from The Good City: Writers Explore 21st century Boston

Published by Beacon Press with the Boston Foundation

I live in a neighborhood that hardly existed when I was last here.  It is way downtown, across a little inlet of water called Fort Point Channel.  The neighborhood comprises a bunch of square-shouldered old brick warehouses and factories and small turn-of-the-century office buildings.  The businesses left long ago, except for a few joke-supply shops and model-shipbuilders and a lobster outlet or two, and when Boston was in its doldrums, the rest of the buildings were abandoned to molder and collapse.  Then artists colonized them, taking advantage of the lovely openness of the spaces within the old warehouses, and, even better, the perfect view the neighborhood has of the city skyline, the sunset, and boats puttering by in the then dirty but now scrubbed clean Boston Harbor.  I’m part of the third wave of residents down here: I’m not a joke merchant, a lobsterman, or a visual artist; I’m just someone who likes the crazy overlay of industrial remnants and downtown boogie-woogie and the thick texture of an urban area.  There is a lot that’s new down here, and that’s the point, but there is also a lot that’s old, which is the other point and the more critical one.  Boston is not, thank goodness, Fort Lauderdale, where everything looks like it was just unwrapped and taken out of the box.  The new development here—the Raphael Vinoly-designed Convention and Exhibition Center, the gorgeous federal courthouse, the Channel Center residential blocks, the cool, glassy-skinned Manulife headquarters—is jumbled in with the great old Boston stalwarts like fish warehouses, banks, triple-deckers, and Irish bars.  It’s a nice, salty mix, and when I jog around my neighborhood on those mornings when I’m not too lazy, I love the way I can pass several different centuries and economies and atmospheres in one not-too-ambitious run.

For more of Susan Orlean’s chapter in The Good City, visit the Beacon Press website and purchase the book or visit your local library.

Find The Good City in the South Boston branch of the Boston Public Library

Washington Village Branch Library

Find The Good City in all branches of the Boston Public Library

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"There Goes the Neighborhood," by Michael Patrick MacDonald

An Excerpt from The Good City: Writers Explore 21st century Boston

Published by Beacon Press with the Boston Foundation

While realtors trumpet another gritty neighborhood on the rise, and note “improvements in the quality of life” for traditionally working-class South Boston, anyone who was woven into the tight knit community knows that the fabric is in fact being frayed beyond recognition. Long a neighborhood of renters, many are now being forced to move to the suburban hinterlands, unable to compete with the often childless professional’s means. Our mostly conservative leadership in Southie had forever distracted the residents from their own economic realities, with warnings of the dire social disaster that blacks would bring to our traditional family (read “white”) town. This despite the fact that everyone knew the neighborhood code of silence—maintained by homegrown drug lord and FBI-protected informant Whitey Bulger—concealed our own violence, a booming drug trade, and suicides of every kind. Recently, though, after Bulger went on the lam, Southie’s long held secrets began to come out, inspired by a budding truth-telling movement of parents and teens.

At the same time, the neighborhoods’ three large housing projects, long a bastion of poor white resentment of the “other,” reached a healthy diversity, one reflective of the city’s population: about 50 percent white, 50 percent of color. But before the town was able to totally untie the noose of its isolationism and its long suppressed secrets, Southie itself began to be sold off to developers and speculators as “Boston’s best kept secret.” It is ironic that this should happen right at the time when we might have seen the birth of a functional, healthy (and even diverse) working-class community.

For more of Michael MacDonald’s chapter in The Good City, visit the Beacon Press website and purchase the book or visit your local library.

Find The Good City in the South Boston branch of the Boston Public Library

Washington Village Branch Library

Find The Good City in all branches of the Boston Public Library

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“The Softer Side of Southie” by Dorothy E. Morris

Ben Affleck, Martin Scorese, Dennis Lehane and other local writers are giving South Boston a bad name. I am compelled to tell another side of South Boston, the one I knew growing up in the forties, fifties and sixties.

In 1944, our growing family moved from Dorchester to a 4-story brownstone on E. Broadway that had belonged to my grandfather and his family. He was a well-known local physician who did a lot of charity work, especially for the nuns and priests, respectively, who were located at either end of our block.

I would be in the first grade, and I did not think I could tell our house apart from the other brownstones. “You’ll be alright,” my mother said confidently, but just in case, she dragooned a passing altar boy to take us to school.

The following year, a great event took place, a parade up Broadway to celebrate the end of World War II. My friend, Rosemary, with her long dark braids, wore a red kimona and banged a pan in the parade.

A year or two later, at the St. Patrick’s Day (or Evacuation Day) Parade, my mother threw off her apron and ran out to the sidewalk. She pointed out JFK who was running for Congress. He was a tall, skinny fellow, with jaundiced skin. He didn’t look too auspicious to me. As a former history teacher, my mother predicted a great future for the young veteran.

At St. Brigid’s School and Nazareth High School we certainly learned our religion and improved our character. The parish was overseen by a true curmudgeon, Monsignor Patrick Waters, who walked the parish with shelalaigh in hand, and brooked no opposition. My mother thought highly of him, no matter how much we schoolgirls mimicked him in private. She credited him, and his many trips to the State House, with keeping the beaches and boulevards free from the honky-tonk atmosphere of Revere. Some of my high school classmates remain among my closest friends. The high school was not coed, and the Monsignor would not permit any dances in the parish so we had a hard time socializing with boys. Fortunately, there was City Point beach in the summer where we all could gather. When all else failed, we could request permission from our parents to attend Friday night novena, and then we could all congregate at McGillicuddy’s drugstore on the corner of E. Broadway and O Street to Mr. McGillicuddy’s great distress.

The only way I knew about drugs at the age of 16 was from the movie, “The Man with the Golden Arm.” There was no liquor at the parties and no one smoked.

After graduation, some of the boys joined the National Guard; most of the girls had office jobs. A few of us continued on to college. Four classmates entered the convent, much to the upset of the boyfriends. In the next few years, most of the young men and women who had gathered at McGilliduddy’s married and started families. Many eventually moved to the suburbs south of Boston.

In 1972, the busing situation exploded in Boston. As the situation heated up, more and more of my friends refused to enter South Boston. On the way to the bus, I daily saw angry confrontations. The final straw was the strident honking of cars up and down Broadway. Although at that time, I agreed with the idea of busing, being young, I had not realized the turmoil and subsequent tragedy it would sow, especially among the young people whose education was disrupted or prematurely ended.

I decided to move south of Boston, but I never really left South Boston. Although I heard over the years of problems at Columbia Point and the D Street Project (both my sister and one of my friends taught at the Condon School), it never really sank in.

I joined the South Boston Artists Association a few years ago, but I refused to read MacDonald’s book or see “The Departed.” That is not the South Boston I knew, and I do not want to think of crime and violence every time I walk around Southie. I did not live there during the Whitey Bulger era, but I am aware from the writing of some of the young poets in South Boston of the effects of the drug culture and the tragedy that it brings still to local families.

My views have matured, but I’m glad I have mainly happy memories of my formative years.

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