Common Ground (89 page)

Opponents of gentrification soon broadened their indictment to embrace a whole “network” of mutually reinforcing parties: Boston banks—notably the Suffolk-Franklin Savings Bank, Workingmen’s Cooperative Bank, and Home Savings Bank—which concentrated their mortgages in white middle-class sections of the South End while refusing loans in its blacker, poorer areas; real estate agents like A. E. Rondeau and Betty Gibson (“Specializing in the New South End”) who steered affluent buyers and tenants into the community; government officials who funneled low-interest rehabilitation loans, intended for
poor and moderate-income families, to prosperous owners who could have obtained conventional bank loans; the Boston Center for the Arts, a South End cultural center which took a big slice of the neighborhood’s urban renewal funds to purchase and restore its sprawling, seven-building complex; chichi new boutiques, like one in the old Dover Street red-light district which began serving croissants in the shape of sailors and prostitutes; and the South End Historical Society (“Using the Past to Serve the Future”), which lobbied the South End onto the National Register of Historical Sites, then celebrated the community’s faded elegance with a series of antiquarian lectures (“Taste and Attitudes in Victorian Window Gardens”), house tours, flea markets, musicales, and other “Victorian revels.”

Every winter the Historical Society presented a “Victorian Champagne Ball” in one of the neighborhood’s renowned edifices. In 1971, it took over the Back Bay Station, embellishing its shabby waiting room with potted palms, bouquets of gladiolas, little gilt chairs, and glossy shoeshine stands. The following year, it hired a private railroad car to bring guests from as far as Route 128. On January 26, 1974, the ball was held in the old Cyclorama on Tremont Street, built in 1884 to house Paul Philippoteaux’s vast circular painting of the Battle of Gettysburg, later serving as a boxing arena, bicycle academy, wholesale flower mart, and, finally, headquarters of the Boston Center for the Arts. Under the high glass dome, the society installed a dozen department-store mannikins decked out in fanciful nineteenth-century costumes. The guests, who paid thirty dollars a couple, were encouraged to wear “Victorian furbelows and feathers” themselves or, failing that, black tie and evening gowns.

Many South Enders began the evening at small dinner parties scattered through the neighborhood, the Divers dining with their friends Dan and Mary Shannon. At the candlelit table, someone remarked that Joan’s long green velvet gown and string of white pearls made her look uncannily like Mrs. Jack Gardner, the
grande dame
of Boston’s Victorian art world. In his black tie and evening jacket, they all agreed, Colin looked less like “Mr. Jack” than a fresh-faced Jay Gatsby. Swept along by their table talk, the Shannons and their guests hardly noticed that it was 9:45 and that they were nearly an hour late for the ball. Bundling into warm coats and scarves, they hurried six blocks down Tremont Street to the floodlit Cyclorama—only to find that they had just missed a major demonstration by the newly formed South End for South Enders Committee.

On the sidewalk in front of the Cyclorama, and spilling out into Tremont Street, some 250 persons had milled about carrying signs which read: “Stop the Victorian Criminals,” “South End Historical Society Is an Upper-Class KKK,” and “Goldweitz Must Meet Our Demands.” As the party goers went by, the picketers thrust leaflets into their hands. “The luxury housing developers and others at this ball can be considered as nothing less than true enemies of the poor, the real South Enders. Extensive private development for the middle and upper class has the effect of creating another ‘Georgetown’—an elite-oriented
community…. So here this obscene ‘Victorian ball’ goes on and those who love our townhouses but don’t want us to live in them sip their champagne and dance gaily….”

Having scrutinized the demonstrators’ message, Colin and Joan did their best to sip champagne and dance gaily, but they began to feel profoundly uneasy. They’d heard charges from South End social workers before, revolutionary rhetoric from the
People’s News
, the outrage of black and Puerto Rican tenants against their landlords. But not until that night had they felt anger directed at them personally. Walking home past crumbling tenements and shabby rooming houses, they were acutely aware of the rage and resentment lurking in the darkened streets.

For by early 1974, the gentrification battle had left the South End more bitterly divided than ever. From the beginning, the South End’s urban renewal plan contained an unresolved tension. On the one hand, it pledged to “protect and expand the city’s tax base, arrest economic decline, and by stabilizing property values, protect private investment.” On the other, it promised to ensure “the availability of standard housing at rentals that all displaced low-income residents wishing to remain in the South End could afford.” Thus, while the BRA committed itself to bringing middle-class families back to the South End, it pledged to safeguard the interests of all low-income residents. By June 1973, many South Enders had plainly concluded that those two ends could not be pursued simultaneously. That month, social workers, radicals, and their tenant clients won control of the South End Project Area Committee (SEPAC), the elected citizen review board which held a veto over neighborhood renewal projects. For years, the board had been dominated by middle-class homeowners and realtors. After the “people’s” slate took command, it adopted the “Zook Resolution”—named after its framer, the radical organizer Doug Zook—declaring that no further housing would be approved unless at least 25 percent of the units were reserved for low-income tenants.

Coming hard on the heels of the anti-Goldweitz campaign, the Zook Resolution stirred consternation among South End homeowners, who feared they were about to be overrun by the minority poor. Angriest of all was David Parker, a young carpenter and dedicated traditionalist who had meticulously restored his nineteenth-century town house to its original condition. High windows, ornate moldings, and pine floors framed a collection of hand-rubbed antiques: a Morris chair, a Boston rocker, a Connecticut clock. “Thomas Jefferson would have felt at home in this room,” he said with evident satisfaction. But his house faced West Concord Street, a South End thoroughfare perilously close to the black “wilderness” and more vulnerable than the insulated blocks of Rutland Square, West Newton Street, and West Brookline Street. Parker deeply resented the “Gold Coast liberals,” whom he accused of grabbing all the brick sidewalks, sculptured streetlights, and ginkgo trees for themselves while shrewdly maneuvering the subsidized housing they ostensibly favored into Parker’s less privileged neighborhood.

Together with a neighbor—an architect named Herbert Zeller—and fourteen like-minded homeowners, Parker formed the Committee of Citizens for a Balanced South End, which sought to stem the influx of low-income housing by shifting the burden elsewhere in the city as well as to the suburbs. On December 11, 1973, it called for an “immediate moratorium” on further subsidized projects in the South End and designation of remaining renewal parcels for “responsible market-level housing.” Two months later, committee members filed the first of several lawsuits to block low-income developments on the grounds that they would “perpetuate high-density ghettos of low-income blacks” and have a negative “environmental impact” on surrounding properties. Later, they joined the battle against new halfway houses and detoxification and drug treatment centers, arguing that the South End had too long been a “wastebasket of American society.”

Although many South End homeowners felt uncomfortable with the committee’s vehemence, its protest clearly reflected a widespread anxiety. Always sensitive to such ground swells, Kevin White’s administration moved quickly to assuage it. In April 1974, the BRA announced that since it had exceeded its target of 3,300 low- and moderate-income units for the South End, it would no longer give priority to such housing. Henceforth, it would concentrate on “providing the ancillary amenities to make the South End a more attractive and liveable community.” The BRA report stirred a predictable storm of protest and the Mayor retreated somewhat, calling for a neighborhood review. In May, SEPAC named an eleven-member committee, representing all the South End’s factions and chaired by Joshua Young, the socially conscious banker from West Newton Street. After fourteen months of hearings, interviews, and statistical analysis, the committee released findings sharply at odds with the city’s.

The BRA had found 6,015 subsidized units, or 46 percent of the South End’s housing stock; the committee identified only 4,439 such units, 30 percent of available housing. Even that exceeded the BRA’s goals, but the committee argued that it fell at least 3,000 units short of the community’s needs, largely because the trickle of young professionals had turned into a torrent, overrunning the South End’s tenements and rooming houses. A single new family could displace as many as four or five old ones, forcing them into subsidized projects or out of the neighborhood altogether. The committee urged that the community reaffirm an “absolute responsibility” to provide housing for all South Enders who wished to remain there. To achieve that end, it struck a compromise between its competing factions—proposing that 25 percent of future units be reserved for low-income tenants, 25 percent be rented at market rates, with the remaining 50 percent left undetermined. But David Parker and Herb Zeller found even that intolerable and angrily resigned from the committee, denouncing it for capitulating to a “narrow sociopolitical ideology.”

Far from mending the community’s divisions, the report only exacerbated them. For housing in the South End had taken on heavy symbolic freight,
beyond its function as shelter or even its value as real estate. It had become a tangible measure of class standing and of society’s willingness to reward or ameliorate that standing. Though the South End struggle was frequently framed as “white” vs. “black,” “majority” vs. “minority,” “New South Enders” vs. “Old South Enders”—and, to some degree, it was all those—it was principally a class conflict, a battle between the “haves” and the “have-nots.”

Its racial and ethnic dimensions were often misunderstood. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the worst victims of gentrification—those forced not only from their homes but out of the neighborhood altogether—were not overwhelmingly black and Puerto Rican. In absolute numbers, blacks declined as widespread demolition and rooming-house conversion cut the South End’s population by more than a half within two decades, but the black share actually rose from 39 percent in 1960 to about 44 percent in 1975. During that same period, Hispanics grew from a negligible 1 percent to 9 percent, while Chinese and other minorities grew from 2 to 6 percent.

Meanwhile, despite the influx of thousands of young professionals, the white population sharply declined—from 58 to 40 percent. Many of the departing whites were aging “roomers” who, once their old lodgings had been appropriated, never found housing at rents they could afford. Others were remnants of the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Syrian, and Lebanese working-class communities who, as the South End became recognized as black and Hispanic “turf,” abandoned their traditional enclaves (the new gentry may have tolerated physical proximity to blacks because they enjoyed a social distance; white workers, with no social buffer, required physical distance). Within fifteen years, the South End largely replaced its white population, exchanging the poor, tired, and aging for the young, prosperous, and energetic. Not surprisingly, between 1960 and 1970, the median income of South End whites more than doubled, from $3,771 to $7,792.

Nevertheless, affluent whites remained a small minority in the neighborhood. In 1970, three-quarters of all South End families still earned less than $10,000 a year. Whereas 45 percent of whites had incomes over $10,000, only 17 percent of blacks and 5 percent of Hispanics made that much, while 47 percent of blacks and 62 percent of Hispanics earned less than $5,000. The twin millstones of urban renewal and gentrification had ground away most of the South End’s working class—both black and white—leaving the community deeply polarized between an overwhelmingly white middle class and a heavily black and Hispanic lower class.

Because racial and class categories largely overlapped, it was difficult to unravel the roots of South End hostilities. Most white conservatives steadfastly disclaimed any racial animosity, attributing their position to distaste for “lower-class behavior”: noisy parties, blaring radios, squalid homes, littered streets, overflowing trash cans, vandalism, gangs, drugs, and violent crime. Those who sought to limit low-income housing projects (“publicly subsidized islands of crime and squalor”) often argued that the South End was laboring under an impossible liability. Racial and ethnic integration was unexceptionable,
the time-honored “melting pot” of American history. But class integration, they contended, was something altogether different, a mixing of styles and standards which was “always a failure in American cities,” destroying any neighborhood which persisted in that “ill-conceived experiment.”

That position was anathema to the socially committed young professionals who had moved into the South End precisely because they sought a “truly mixed community,” integrated by class as well as race. They weren’t about to abandon that goal now. The struggle over subsidized housing divided the South End’s new middle class against itself, pitting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, sometimes even husband against wife. Block association meetings frequently erupted in angry shouting matches. Two young mothers who had been stalwarts of the Bancroft Parents’ Association stopped speaking to each other. A regular “boys’ night out” poker game broke up because the four men could no longer stand the sight of each other across the table. A homeowner woke up one morning to find a neighbor’s ax buried inches deep in the bright red veneer of his Victorian door.

No slice of the South End was so roiled by this conflict as the “Gold Coast” blocks of Rutland Square, Pembroke, West Newton, and West Brookline streets. Rutland Square, in particular, with its stately old houses surrounding a park, had been among the first blocks to attract young artists, architects, and social workers. For years it—and its extension on Rutland Street—was the heartland of the social worker-radical alliance. Old residents like Tristam Blake, administrator of the South End Community Health Center, architects Henry and Joan Wood, and Martin Gopen, a manpower specialist at United South End Settlements, were principal spokespeople for the neighborhood’s poor and dispossessed. But Rutland Square’s amenities attracted others who saw the situation rather differently—among them, the two embattled landlords, Steve Wolfberg and Ferd Arenella. For years, they crossed to the other side of the square when they saw certain of their neighbors approaching. Indeed, Ferd Arenella suspected at least one of his neighbors of helping to firebomb his house.