Longform - Boston - Dart Adams
STREETS AND STORIES
BY DART ADAMS
COUNTLESS TIMES, I’ve fallen into heated debates, with both born-and-bred Bostonians and longtime residents alike. What neighborhood is a house, school or business in? Is it in Chinatown? Is it in the Theater District? The Leather District? Where does Roxbury stop being called Roxbury and instead become Longwood Medical and Academic Area? I’ve spent many man-hours explaining moving borders and looking at street parking signs for clarification. I’m usually vindicated. Several times I have been humbled. Damn you, Bay Village! Just a word of advice: If you want to avoid a heated Boston debate, do not ask locals if Donna Summer is from Roxbury or Dorchester. Alternatively, if you enjoy chaos? Do it.
Boston streets–especially the ones in my neighborhood, which is Lower Roxbury and/or the South End, depending on where you stand–just don’t follow any traditional grid format. They don’t align with north, east, west and south. Instead they tend to run northeast, southeast, northwest, and southwest. Our borders are just as unruly. Neighborhoods bleed into one another. Side streets run alongside main streets, and boundaries blur. You can often think you’re in one Boston neighborhood, but you’re actually in another. You can overshoot an entire neighborhood just by walking five minutes down a major thoroughfare.
For example, Massachusetts Avenue runs for 16 miles through several towns. I grew up near the corner that marked the South End/Lower Roxbury border. Going toward and past Boston City Hospital along Mass. Ave. took you into Lower Roxbury. So did going down Tremont Street, past the Piano Craft Guild Apartments–known to locals as The Piano Factory–toward Ruggles Street station. No signs tell you you’re no longer in the South End, unless you look at individual parking signs along Tremont and Columbus, which inform you that you’re now in Roxbury.
South End connects to Lower Roxbury on one side and the Back Bay on another. By chance, I recently found the marker denoting the border of the South End and Back Bay. It’s almost hidden on a wall across the street from the Orange Line’s Mass. Ave. station, on the side of a structure tucked between the station exit and an assisted-living community. Most people will never see the green-and-white sign that says, “END OF SOUTH END. WELCOME TO BACK BAY.” They won’t know that the station itself is in one neighborhood, but the Subway right next door is in another.
This is barely the tip of the iceberg.
Follow Columbus Ave. from Egleston Square at the border of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury into Roxbury to Roxbury Crossing station, you’ll be at 1234 Columbus Ave. Even the bus stop on the corner says, “COLUMBUS AVENUE.” However, at the next crosswalk we reach Malcolm X Boulevard. Cross the street on the same side and you’ll arrive at the Reggie Lewis Center, which bears the address of 1350 Tremont Street. Pardon me? Where did Columbus Ave. go? Not to fret. Walk past Ruggles Street station on the opposite side of the street and you’ll discover Columbus has now jumped one street over, running parallel to Tremont.
This is how the city of Boston does its magic tricks with geography–tricks the natives learn to live with and use to their advantage.
Growing up in the South End and Lower Roxbury, I never really wanted a car. I was close to everywhere I wanted to go already. (Plus, there never seemed to be anyplace to park.) Also, my neighborhood contains hundreds of public alleys–narrow and often almost hidden–that as kids we referred to as Warp Zones. We’d used this seemingly endless maze of back streets, side streets and public alleys to either get into mischief or escape it. Today, they don’t show up on Google Maps.
Once you hit Dartmouth Street, there’s the Back Bay station across the way from Copley Place Mall, which is connected to the Prudential Center by a skywalk and leads to Boylston Street, which runs parallel to Newbury Street.
If you take another side street or two, you’ll eventually reach Commonwealth Ave. and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, leading to the Public Garden and Boston Common. Pro tip: You can reach the Charles River quick from Boylston if you turn onto Newbury then take a right on Fairfield, then follow Fairfield Street until it brings you to the bridge that takes you across a highway to the beautiful Charles River Reservation.
I could go on. The streetscape is a puzzle, but there are many solutions. It’s all just a matter of knowing where you are.
***
South End, Lower Roxbury and Back Bay make an extremely aesthetically pleasing stretch of Boston. There are numerous brownstones, cul-de-sacs and rotaries with small parks with fountains in the middle, such as Braddock Park, Rutland Square and Union Park along Columbus and Tremont. Trees and gardens line many streets.
It’s classic Boston in so many ways, and yet the true history of the communities that live and have lived in this pocket of the city is a story of Boston that almost never gets told, especially not in the mass media.
Boston is, famously, a city obsessed with its own place in history. However, the full richness of Roxbury and South End, one of the city’s most vibrant, diverse and historically significant neighborhoods, goes almost unmarked and uncommemorated. With the passage of time, the neighborhood has gone through changes and transitions. Some things are vastly improved and more convenient. But the history of the neighborhood can become obscured by new development and the displacement of people who lived here generations ago.
I grew up along the 400 block of Mass. Ave. between 1975 and 1999. At one point the Boston chapter of the NAACP had its office at 451 Mass. Ave., directly across the street from the Harriet Tubman House at 566 Columbus Ave., a community center recently demolished, revealing a vista of brownstone backstairs. Ella Little-Collins, Malcolm X’s older sister, used to live in an apartment across from my building at 487 Mass. Ave. These sites were key to the history of the community and civil rights in Boston but are now unmarked.
Quieter forms of history also unfolded here. At each end of that block, there was a rivalry between New York House of Pizza–formerly Ugi’s Subs–and South End House Of Pizza, now known as South End Pizza & Grill. Neighborhood residents were often torn on which spot to visit. Half of my family would order from one, and the other half the other–frustrating to me, since I’d have to go pick up both orders. There were neighborhood stores where they knew you by name and knew your families because they’d been there for a generation or more. Brown’s Market, Morales Market, Kosmos Market and Braddock Drug, which was at George’s Barber Shop at 777 Tremont, now occupied by A-1 Barber Shop. My barbershop is now Cut N Edge, at 410 Mass. Ave., formerly home to Skippy White’s record store in the ’80s and early ’90s–a shop known for soul and R&B, and the only store that specialized in rap records and tapes locally until about 1986.
Back when the South End/Lower Roxbury was a jazz mecca between the early ’30s and early ’60s, that same spot was home to the Savoy Café, favorite hangout of Malcolm X and Nat Hentoff, the great jazz critic and free-speech advocate. Martin Luther King Jr. lived right across the street when he attended Boston University in pursuit of his doctorate. He met New England Conservatory of Music student Coretta Scott in this same neighborhood. Sammy Davis Jr. grew up in the South End/Lower Roxbury, too. He lived in multiple rooming houses along Columbus Ave. as a member of the Will Mastin Trio with his father Sammy Davis Sr. and his “uncle” Will Mastin, including at Mother’s Lunch at 510 Columbus Ave.
Sadly enough, no plaques highlight these landmarks of historical and cultural significance. There’s a story of diversity and creative culture here that doesn’t fit the stereotypical narrative of Boston Brahmins and Irish immigrants.
As a kid, we visited the neighborhood playgrounds, sure to get home before the streetlights came on. There was Carter Playground, Titus Sparrow Park, O’Day Playground, Peters Park, Ringgold Park and Derby Park. Around 1981, Teddy Bear Arcade opened up at the corner of Stuart and Church, right before the Theater District. It drew gamers from all over–kids from the nearby Josiah Quincy School, Don Bosco High, Boston High and Blackstone School, as well as college students from Northeastern University, Emerson College and Boston University. Kids from Chinatown, the South End, Lower Roxbury and the Back Bay all converged at one of the few places where young people of all backgrounds could be part of a community not related to sports. Even local gangs deemed it a neutral site.
Along Tremont Street between the late ’70s and the late ’90s, there were apartments populated mostly by Latino residents, predominantly Puerto Ricans. On the sunny side of the street, starting from the library, there was Kosmos Market on the corner. Then Ida’s Bridal Shop, which made cakes so amazing people special-ordered them for birthday parties. There was a neighborhood church and a company that specialized in moving people to and from Boston and Puerto Rico. And on the corner at the end of the block was Casa Cuong, the quintessential corner store that everyone visited.
Salsa, merengue and dancehall reggae poured out of storefronts, and freestyle and Latin hip-hop, R&B and rap played from neighborhood windows, passing cars’ stereo systems and out of Walkman headphones. Down to the corner of West Dedham, the housing complex called Villa Victoria came to be after years of the activist organization IBA (Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción) clashing with the Boston Redevelopment Authority over housing for the growing Latino population. By 1976, over 400 units of affordable housing were built, spread among several complexes. The only spots still remaining from this bygone era are the neighborhood Chinese takeout place Yum Mee Garden and Casa Cuong, still hanging in there at the end of block, albeit directly across the street from a Starbucks.
The neighborhood was once home to landmark establishments like the Hi-Hat, Estelle’s and Bob the Chef ’s. The latter has been replaced by the Southern restaurant Darryl’s Corner, but Slade’s Bar & Grill and Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe are still where they’ve been since the South End/Lower Roxbury was a prime destination for Harlem jazz musicians arriving by train at the nearby Back Bay Station. Wally’s Cafe Jazz Club was located directly across the street before it moved to the location it has occupied since 1979: the lone jazz venue still in operation from the neighborhood’s glory days. Students from the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston Conservatory at Berklee and Berklee College of Music still perform there and continue to busk along Mass. Ave., Boylston and Newbury in the spring and summer months. The sounds evoke memories of generations past, when the neighborhood was alive with lounges and clubs on every block and corner.
My neighborhood was also the home of Allan Rohan Crite, an American master painter who created the first depictions of Black life in Boston, now shown in museums and galleries nationwide. Mel King, an activist, politician, poet and historian, wrote the history of the neighborhood, Chain of Change. He also created and oversaw the South End Technology Center on Columbus Ave. shared by both the Methunion Manor Cooperative and nearby Tent City Apartments, housing developments created by community leaders and South End/Lower Roxbury residents who fought for affordable and equitable housing in their neighborhood in 1967 and 1968.
The area has gone through a great deal of changes over the past 20 years. There are skyscrapers and high-rises where none previously existed. Luxury apartment complexes and new developments spring up where there’d previously been nothing for years. Many of the working-class folks and families who once inhabited the South End and Lower Roxbury have been priced out by steadily climbing rents. But regardless of the turnover, my neighborhood still manages to retain its identity as a crossroads of diversity, creativity and culture. It’s forever Black and Latino at its core.
DART ADAMS is a journalist, historian/fact checker, lecturer and author from Boston. He’s written for Complex, NPR, Mass Appeal, Okayplayer, Ebony, Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Magazine and hosts two podcasts, Dart Against Humanity and The Boston Legends Podcast.
BUY WILDSAM BOSTON
Jared Briere