End of the Line for Dirty Old Boston

To live in Boston is to straddle a sometimes very thin line between the historic and the instantaneous. That’s where I found myself the night of April 30, 1987, the final hours for the elevated Orange Line between South Cove and Forest Hills Station.

Instead of quiet passengers outnumbered by empty seats, the car I got on was packed with the chatter and mingling of a party. If not exactly old friends, we were familiar faces: community activists mainly from Jamaica Plain, officials who worked in the neighborhoods, and a couple of community reporters, myself included. The plan was to ride the el to Downtown Crossing, then catch an outbound train back to Forest Hills.

I managed to photograph my fellow travelers on the way back, after they got off at Green Street to wait for the very last train. From across the tracks, they looked almost cheerfully out of place. Instead of just waiting, they were really sightseers. But the el itself, despite its almost immutable signs of age, looked different, already a flashback. With its dull, blistered paint, lesions of rust, and tangles of graffiti, this version of the Orange Line was a remnant of the city’s industrial past. Within a matter of months, it would come down like a string of dominoes and be hauled away. That was the ending we already knew.

Unlike its successor, discreetly nestled in the Southwest Corridor and buffered with greenspace, the el was an eyesore with a view. Sometimes the view was even picturesque, whether it was the Boston skyline at night, or the green trees sloping up toward Franklin Park, a reminder that Roxbury and Jamaica Plain had once been two of Boston’s “garden suburbs.”

The view was also a chain of names and places, creating a quirky sense of progression from outer neighborhoods to downtown, and from above ground to below. There was the convenience store at Green Street, just around the corner from Sydney’s (as in Greenstreet) Casablanca Room, where my father watched the first Kennedy-Nixon debate. There were a movie theater and firehouse at Egleston Square, followed by A Nubian Notion and the Ferdinand’s Furniture building after lurch and squeal at Dudley Square. Then came Skippy White’s and Uncle Ned’s below Northampton Street, the Red Fez and Harry the Greek’s near Dover Street and, just before the tunnel, the earlier location of the Pine Street Inn.

Between Northampton and Dover, as the train rolled past the gothic puddingstone of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, there was yet another marker, as some riders doffed their caps or used their right thumb to make an invisible trace on their foreheads. The gesture was usually done quickly, with little fuss, but over multiple trips it amounted to a serial act of penance.

Down below, whether it was in the cathedral, at Doyle’s, or amid heaps of clothing at Filene’s Basement, the trains were hard to ignore. The rumble and clatter of heavy metal, in crescendo and fadeout, were an intrusion of larger forces. Work had to be done, and people were on the move, even late at night. Maybe that’s what made a city a city: less a refuge than a state of exposure to the mechanical and impersonal, familiar enough to navigate, yet neither here nor there.

Like the highways that channeled people between Boston and the suburbs, the el was built to let more of them live farther away, where there would be less density, fewer intrusions, and maybe better schools. By the 1970s, Boston’s long decline was nearing its low point, in terms of housing conditions and population. And the downslide was supposed to continue, with properties already being cleared for one more highway along the Southwest Corridor.

In the pages of Jim Botticelli’s photo book, Dirty Old Boston, change proceeds with demolition followed by new construction, whether it’s the Central Artery, or the more faceless buildings that sprang up in the West End and Government Center. In the older black-and-white photos, there’s little sign of traffic congestion on the artery or a shortage of parking in downtown Boston. Though the buildings put up by urban renewal show less wear and tear (apart from plywood on the John Hancock Tower), they somehow look more dated. In this earlier “New Boston,” the modern was only a replacement for the obsolete, since the post-modern collage of historic and innovative had yet to crystalize, at least as a visual signature.

In the most disruptive years of urban renewal, the 1950s and 1960s, public officials and business leaders rallied support for projects mainly as a crusade against “blight.” Though one person’s blight might have been another person’s neighborhood — and which should have been protected from demolition and displacement — Dirty Old Boston has plenty of photos showing old buildings in a state of neglect made even shabbier by the improvisations of commerce. People needed their bargains, cheap thrills, and hot dogs, so venerable facades were cluttered with signage. In the unflattering glare of the “New Boston,” these buildings were a throw-away inventory that few considered endangered or profitable enough to preserve, let alone restore.

For all its drawbacks, the hodge-podge in the city’s built environment had a parallel in the way people came together. Though there was more racial separation and fewer people of color in the half-century covered by Dirty Old Boston, the city had a larger working-class population, and there were more signs of its presence downtown. Some of the signs were the seediness of adult entertainment venues, in Scollay Square and later the “Combat Zone,” but the overall impression was more overlap and less physical distance between upscale, low-life, and decent but affordable.

Looking back through the pages of Dirty Old Boston, it’s easier to notice how people flocked to other destinations that offered little in the way of stylish décor — from the Boston Garden to the legendary cutting-edge music club in Kenmore Square, the Rathskeller (or, more colloquially, the “Rat”). Even the view from the grandstands at Fenway Park was less glamorous. A single Citgo (or Cities Service) sign over the left field wall might be iconic, but an additional sign for White Fuel just created more clutter.

For all the nondescript surroundings, it was possible to feel a thrill at being inside the real Fenway Park, in the presence of real major-leaguers. My first impressions of the park and its surroundings from the outside were anything but picturesque. I only felt excited when I saw the green fabric of the playing field and figures in uniforms still doing warm-ups. But the surroundings that looked unremarkable to a 10 year-old in 1963 now look different, especially in black and white. After more than half a century, maybe the tolerance for blight has weakened.

What photos in Dirty Old Boston also bring back to mind is how many people would gather outside, for one occasion or another. Even the marches for Occupy Boston in 2011 were a far cry from larger turnouts downtown protesting the Vietnam War, racial inequality in the public schools, or the attempt to remedy inequality through mandatory busing. Before the seventies, Boston also had larger crowds at other events, from Park League baseball and football games to neighborhood parades. And, yes, the old photos do suggest the ban on public drinking was more loosely enforced.

Dirty Old Boston ends with the 1980s, and it can be said the decade marks a turning of the tide, most conspicuously by removal of the el. To be sure, there were rediscoveries and regenerations of the old city here and there beforehand, and more urban exodus to follow. There would still be poverty, substandard education, and crime — not to mention the longer commutes downtown from Dudley Square. But the shift of the Orange Line between Jamaica Plain and South Cove — in contrast with the removal of the el in Charlestown — also eliminated the railroad tracks that ran atop a dark granite wall from Lower Roxbury to Forest Hills. This was a real change of topography that, unlike some urban renewal projects, was supported by grassroots vision and community-based agencies, not to mention the federal money that was originally supposed to have been used for the highway.

Improvements along the Southwest Corridor would also help extend the reach of gentrification. But the vision of renewal coming from the neighborhoods along the Southwest Corridor — renewal for the neighborhoods, as opposed to a highway mainly for other people in other places — was a new direction, even a harbinger of what would happen some thirty years later, when the old path of the Central Artery would become a greenspace lined with new development.

By drawing a boundary in time, Dirty Old Boston invites a comparison between before and after. This is not to profess nostalgia for the seediness of the “Combat Zone,” the perforated film noir shadows of the el, or the no-frills bars of Dorchester Avenue, with the smell of stale beer, cigarettes, and mopped floors. Unlike what’s caught by the naked eye in the flux of real time, a photo is a single extracted moment that remains unchanged, even when encountered years later. Because the image is fixed, there’s time to make out details that might have been overlooked in the present tense. That’s why even a familiar past can look different or strange, why what was originally instantaneous or routine can seem historic. And, if what was experienced as singular and exciting looks more ordinary and dated, even hopelessly provincial, that’s one more discovery.

Since the “Rat” was the last place where I was “carded” for a drink, I’m hardly surprised at photos of patrons and performers. What gave me pause was a photo from outside, showing the squadron of pay phones. Thirty years later, something I scarcely noticed while passing the Rat on the way to work was an odd reminder that, without the internet and smart phones, life was different.

As Jim Vrabel notes in another new book on the same era, A People’s History of the New Boston, a huge part of the city’s middle-income and working poor population has moved on to a better place or gotten squeezed out. Though Boston had its share of racial and class differences before the 1980s, the distance between — whether physical, social, or psychological — has changed. Hipsters mingling with the truly needy in second-hand stores are no substitute for the cross-section at Filene’s, or even the mood-swing from basement to the upper floors.

For all their grassroots principles and civic acumen, my fellow travelers at Green Street in 1987 were, at least conditionally, embracing the future. But, when I came back to join them, I couldn’t resist pointing my camera at the opposite platform, which already looked like a different time zone. I saw just two silent figures standing twenty feet apart. No story here, except that it’s cold enough for one man to tug at his jacket, while the other leans against a wall, his head turned purposefully toward Forest Hills, as if trying to speed up the approach of a train. With the graffiti stranded in pools of light, and framed by almost total darkness, the station seems even more desolate, as if it were drifting through space. In this prolonged instant, Boston is still the dirty old town, and the men on the platform are still waiting.

Originally conceived as a gloss on “Dirty Old Boston” by Jim Botticelli, which was published in 2014: https://www.amazon.com/Dirty-Old-Boston-Decades-Transition/dp/1934598127