Common Ground (88 page)

Through the late sixties and early seventies, the radical–social worker alliance focused its agitation on landlords whose substandard buildings housed many of the South End’s blacks and Puerto Ricans. In May 1968, a month after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the activists decided to take direct action against the largest landlord of all. Under a variety of corporate names, three brothers—Joseph, Israel, and Raphael Mindick—owned some forty-four buildings in the South End housing from 700 to 800 tenants, most of them black. The Mindicks held another distinction: they were the neighborhood’s most persistent violators of the housing code, yet activists had tried in vain to get effective code enforcement from the city. On May 5, the South End alliance organized a demonstration outside Israel Mindick’s house in Mattapan. But Mindick wasn’t home that day and, after picketing for several hours, the frustrated demonstrators reconvened to plan their next step. The consensus favored a demonstration the following Saturday outside Congregation Beth El in Dorchester, where Israel was a cantor.

That alarmed Rabbi Judea Miller, social action chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis, who had joined the demonstrators that day in an effort to deflect accusations of black anti-Semitism. Miller recognized that demonstrations at a temple were bound to prompt just such a charge, but, as he wrote a fellow rabbi, the Mindicks’ activities were “terrible, scandalous,” especially embarrassing to the Jewish community because Israel was known as “rabbi” to his black tenants. “That any pious Jew would make profit out of such degradation of other human beings is unthinkable,” Miller wrote. To head off the planned protest, yet assure that conditions be corrected, he proposed that the tenants take their case before Boston’s Rabbinical Court of Justice.

Rabbinical courts scattered through the United States deal with divorces, trusts, estates, and contractual disputes between Jews. Only rarely does a non-Jewish plaintiff bring a suit against a Jewish defendant and, on such occasions, the Jew is under no formal obligation to accept the rabbinical court’s jurisdiction. However, Rabbi Miller believed that once the tenants filed their action, the Mindicks would find themselves under powerful moral duress to acknowledge the court’s authority in the matter. As a cantor, Israel Mindick would be vulnerable to great pressure from the elders of his temple. Moreover, the whole family were Orthodox Jews who took their religion very seriously. As such, they could be embarrassed by the revelation that the dummy corporations under which they did business—Yiyu, Lirotzone, Imray, Fee, Vihegyone,
Libee, Hashame, Lifonecho, Tsuri, Vigoali—spelled out in transliterated Hebrew a line from Psalm 19, “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.”

Miller’s instinct was sound. The Mindicks accepted the challenge and, on May 8, they and the tenants’ representatives appeared before five skullcapped rabbis in the downtown offices of the Associated Synagogues of Massachusetts. In subsequent hearings, the tenants argued that the Mindicks’ buildings were rat- and roach-infested, unsanitary, hazardous, crime-ridden, and overpriced. In response, the Mindicks contended that they were not responsible for “abnormal conditions” in the South End, that they did their best to keep the buildings clean and safe, but that tenants threw garbage out the windows, broke furniture, and so vandalized the buildings that the family could no longer realize a profit from its South End properties.

The court heard testimony ten times during the next three months, but most of its work was conducted through an arbitration panel composed of members named by the tenants and landlords plus a neutral arbiter. Finally, on August 8, the rabbis promulgated a mutually acceptable agreement, binding in the city’s courts. The Mindicks agreed to keep their properties clean and safe, to provide locks, hot water, and a minimum room temperature of 68 degrees, and to recognize the newly formed South End Tenants’ Council as the tenants’ sole bargaining agent. The tenants agreed to pay their rent promptly, care for their apartments, and make “reasonable efforts” to cooperate with the landlord. A complex arbitration and appeals process was established to resolve further differences.

In a memorandum on the law, the court cited Dr. Isaac Herzog’s dictum that “the spirit of the law at times demands from man to conform to a loftier norm and standard than that which its letter can enforce.” Applying that to the present case, the court held that “a landlord who would do business in a low-income area must accept the special hazards of such areas…. If his resources will not permit him, for example, to maintain the buildings in a non-hazardous condition, then he has no right to be a landlord…. The tenant, typically, has no financial reserve with which to fend off calamity; the landlord, typically, can accept temporary reverses…. Our aim is clear, it is—justice for all concerned. ‘Justice, Justice, Justice, shalt thou pursue.’ ”

For a time it appeared that justice had indeed been achieved. But within months, the dispute erupted again. In February 1969, tenants of twenty Mindick buildings began a rent strike, arguing that the landlord had failed to live up to his part of the agreement. By then, the rabbinical court had concluded that the Mindicks were a liability to the Jewish community. Joseph “Inky” Mindick—invariably decked out in yellow polyester slacks, Hawaiian shirt, white shoes, and porkpie hat—was a caricature of the unscrupulous landlord. In March, the five rabbis fined the Mindicks $48,000. That May, worn down by the struggle with their tenants and wounded by the rabbis’ reproof, the Mindicks sold thirty-four of their buildings to the Boston Redevelopment Authority,
which, in turn, assigned them to the Tenants’ Council for renovation and management.

Soon the council adopted another tactic for prying living space from South End landlords. On September 28, 1969, several council leaders appeared outside a brownstone at 22 Yarmouth Street, broke into a vacant apartment, and installed Genine Williams, a gypsy, and her three children. They offered the landlord, Stephen Wolfberg, $60 a month for the one-bedroom apartment he had planned to rent for $195. Wolfberg refused, got an eviction order, and put the woman out, only to have another “squatter” immediately take her place.

Steve Wolfberg had always regarded himself as a liberal and friend of the disadvantaged. A Harvard Law School graduate, he had worked briefly as a civil rights lawyer in the South before entering private practice in Boston. Soon after he and his wife Judith moved onto Rutland Square in 1968, Steve became active with a church-sponsored housing program known as Low Cost Housing, Inc., which bought up derelict buildings and rehabilitated them with volunteer labor. With Mel King as chairman and Steve as president, it quickly won a reputation for providing low-income tenants with decent housing at reasonable rents. Wolfberg also bought ten other properties on his own, renovating them with low-interest government loans, but soon he encountered financing difficulties and no longer felt able to make all the repairs his tenants demanded. After the Tenants’ Council chose him as the first target of its squatters movement, his reputation as a social activist quickly dissipated. Tenants at another building launched a rent strike against him. His former colleague Mel King labeled him an “enemy of the community,” and forced his resignation from Low Cost Housing. Wolfberg felt badly misused. “Here I am, one of the good guys,” he told friends, “and I’m getting crapped on.”

Iwo weeks after Wolfberg’s building was occupied, the squatters movement spread to the property of another South End landlord, Ferdinand Arenella. On October 10, the council installed six black and Puerto Rican families in Arenella’s recently renovated building at 694 Tremont Street. When the manager sought to serve eviction notices, police and Tenants’ Council members became embroiled in a violent melee, during which a policeman was injured and four council members were arrested. One of those arrested, a black social worker named Ted Parrish, returned to the building and, standing beneath the squatters’ motto, “Human Rights over Property Rights,” told the crowd, “We’re not moving, because nobody is coming in here to force us out of our community.” Later, eighty tenants and their supporters converged on Arenella’s home, where they chanted, “Poor people stay, Arenella go!” During the demonstration, one young man sprayed “Pig” in yellow paint on Arenella’s car.

Ferd Arenella wasn’t a man to take this kind of thing lying down. Like his neighbor Steve Wolfberg, Arenella was a lawyer who had drifted into real estate; now he earned most of his income from forty South End properties. A twenty-year veteran of the neighborhood, he had settled there before it became chic or idealistic to live in the inner city. Unhampered by ideological considerations,
Arenella was determined to tough it out. But soon the confrontation got rougher than anyone had anticipated. Every day, the squatters at 694 Tremont Street collected their garbage—half-eaten pizzas, beer cans, egg-shells, and rotting vegetables—and deposited it on the graceful steps of the Arenellas’ town house at 11 Rutland Square.

Shortly after midnight on October 20, a mysterious fire broke out just down the block at 48 Rutland Square, causing $11,000 worth of damage. Eyewitnesses reported that the brick town house had flared up “like a tinderbox,” strongly suggesting arson. Activists quickly noted that, although 48 Rutland Square was a private dwelling apparently unrelated to the tenant-landlord dispute, 48 Rutland Street—one block away—was an outpost of United South End Settlements, then serving as headquarters for the South End Tenants’ Council and its squatters movement. Someone unfamiliar with the South End might easily have mistaken one “48” for the other.

At 2:00 a.m. the same night, another fire broke out a few doors away at the Arenellas’. Ferd, his wife, and child were awakened by flames racing across their rear deck. Police discovered two unexploded Molotov cocktails in the yard. A third firebomb had apparently ignited the deck, scorching the building’s upper façade, causing $5,000 damage.

The dispute at 694 Tremont Street was ultimately resolved when Arenella and his partner agreed to let the squatters remain in the building, supported by leased housing grants from the Boston Housing Authority. But before long the Tenants’ Council’s battle with Arenella spread to a row of twenty-four tenements he owned on West Newton Street between Tremont Street and Shawmut Avenue. By 1969, these buildings were occupied principally by Puerto Ricans, the South End’s most rapidly growing ethnic group. Assisted by Father William Dwyer of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, they formed the Emergency Tenants’ Council (ETC), which was soon locked in a bitter struggle for control of the properties.

On July 24, 1970—one week before Colin and Joan Diver moved in just down the street—black and Puerto Rican demonstrators blockaded the intersection of West Newton and Tremont streets to dramatize their grievances against the “pig landlord.” Meanwhile, the
People’s News
beat its tattoo on Arenella, denouncing him as “greedy, ruthless and dishonest,” thundering, “We the community have had enough of you, Arenella. Cease and desist and leave this community!”

The pressures finally took their toll. In October 1970, at a news conference on West Newton Street, Mayor White announced that his administration had arranged for Arenella to sell the properties to a developer who would rehabilitate them, then sell them to the Boston Housing Authority, which, in turn, would contract with ETC to manage the buildings.

If the Mindicks were unreconstructed slumlords, Wolfberg and Arenella preferred whenever possible to exchange their low-income tenants for a classier clientele. But the new breed of South End landlord eschewed poor people altogether, developing properties explicitly for the “urban elite.”

A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, Mark Goldweitz was ideally prepared for such an undertaking. When he rented a duplex apartment in the South End in 1969, he recognized at once the potential of those graceful old buildings. In 1971, he bought the town house in which he lived. Over the next three years—operating through nine limited partnerships financed by savings banks and wealthy investors—he accumulated forty-five buildings, renovating their 279 units as luxury apartments. Unlike many of his counterparts, Goldweitz was careful to retain his buildings’ architectural character, restoring existing woodwork, plaster ceilings, and marble fireplaces. But he also added modern touches—stripping walls to the bare brick, installing recessed lighting, skylights, and roof decks. Sensitive to the wider environment, he provided free window boxes and, outside one building, even constructed a vest-pocket park, replete with sculptured sundial. The college professors, lawyers, and admen who rented his apartments—many of them gays, young singles, and couples without children—brought with them all the accouterments of urban chic: hanging ferns, butcher block furniture, Marimekko fabrics, Cuisinart food processors, and KLH sound systems. The curbs outside were lined with Volvos, Saabs, and BMWs. Goldweitz’s buildings became the very essence of South End gentrification.

In part because of his personal style—he wore rep ties, sported gold cuff links, and drove a silver Mercedes-Benz 280 SL—he soon became the principal target of the social worker-radical alliance. In November 1973, a group calling itself the Committee for a South End for South Enders published a sixteen-page pamphlet denouncing Goldweitz’s “greed and arrogance.” His apartments, the committee noted, were far beyond the reach of low-income tenants: studios, $150–$200 a month; one bedroom, $200–$275; two bedrooms, $250–$300; three bedrooms, $325–$450. “The poorer members of the community, still a majority here, are forced to fight to get into a project,” the committee said. Goldweitz vehemently denied that he had displaced anyone, since he purchased only vacant buildings, but the committee claimed that he routinely bought structures on condition that the old landlord evict the tenants. “The South End is not about to roll over and play dead,” it warned. “Mark R. Goldweitz has built an empire here. But history teaches us that unless the needs of people are met, empires will eventually fall.” To meet those needs, the committee demanded that Goldweitz rent all vacancies to low-income families at public housing rates until at least half of his units were occupied by such tenants—a proposal the landlord summarily rejected.