One of the biggest crimes in Boston history occurred in quiet Jamaica Plain, with running gun battles and a dramatic shootout at bucolic Forest Hills Cemetery.  The story includes foreign anarchists, less-than-astute police work, a mysterious woman, and more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel.  And in the end, the entire thing was repeated overseas with a cameo appearance by Winston Churchill, in what must be his only connection to Jamaica Plain.  The story is told here as it was reported in the Boston Globe at the time, which makes it a confusing story indeed.  Much that was reported (or misreported) one day was corrected the next, but where the newspaper articles end, much remains unresolved.  Remarkably, this dramatic story faded from the collective memory of the residents of Jamaica Plain.  Here we bring it to life again. 

“Three Robbers Kill In Saloon”
Boston Globe, 22 July 1908

Seven men were sitting in the Winterson & McManus saloon at 3171 Washington Street, near the corner of Boylston Street.  It was just before 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 21, 1908.  Thomas Winterson, the proprietor (residing at 30 Sheridan St.), John Carty, the bartender (residing at 5 Atherton St.), and five customers were having a last drink.  Just before closing, three unfamiliar men entered.  As one jumped over the bar and threw the cash register to the floor, his two companions drew pistols and began firing.

Winterson took bullets to the base of the skull and the left arm.  Customer Patrick Doran was struck in the left side and the spinal column.  A second customer, Frank Drake, was hit in the right lung.  While one of the men picked up the money from the register, bartender Carty escaped to the back room and called police station 13.  With their take of $90 the three men ran into the street.

One block away at the corner of Washington and School streets, patrolman Butler was standing on duty when Frank Drake came running by, badly wounded and seeking a doctor.  Butler arrived at the saloon in time to see three men run across Washington Street.  After firing shots at them and losing sight of them in the darkness, he returned to care for the wounded at the saloon.  Two witnesses saw the policeman shoot at the men, and seeing their direction, chased after them.  They went up Chauncey Place (now Chilcott Place) through yards to Weld Avenue, School Street, back to Washington Street, and out Columbus Avenue, only to lose sight of them.

Patrolman Butler’s statement [from Boston Globe, 23 July 1908]:

“I was standing at the corner of School and Washington sts about 10:55 and heard a revolver shot followed by five others in rapid succession.  I ran to the saloon and on the way heard six or seven other shots fired.  When I reached the door of the saloon I was about to enter when I saw three men firing revolvers, and one of them, the smallest of the three, turned on me and pointed his revolver at me.  I dodged out of the door onto the sidewalk as he fired at me.  I did not have my revolver out and I got into a doorway in the next building to take it out, when at that moment the three men ran out of the saloon and across the street and into the lot where there are some old cellar walls.  I fired at them.  Someone cried out to me ‘Don’t shoot these men. The men you want ran down Washington st.’

“I got on to a passing car and rode as far as Green st, but could not see the men.  I got off the car and jumped into a carriage that was going in the opposite direction and was driven to the police signal box at the corner of Washington and School sts and telephoned Lieutenant Bodenschatz about the shooting and asked him to send me help.  I was told by a citizen that the men I had fired at were the right men, that a woman had told him she had seen them running through Weld av and down Washington st toward Roxbury.  I telephoned station 13 that fact and station 10 was notified.  I went to the saloon as quickly as I could and looked after the wounded until the physicians and extra police arrived.”

Thomas Winterson, the wounded proprietor, was brought home, where he was reported to be resting.  Customer Patrick Doran had a bullet removed that had passed from one side of his body to the other.  He was put on the dangerous list at Boston City Hospital.

“Desperadoes Kill One Man And Wound Eight Persons In Flight”
Boston Globe, 23 July 1908

At 7 o’clock on the evening of July 22, two of the yeggmen (bandits) involved in the raid at the Winterson and McManus saloon were in a running gun battle through the streets of Jamaica Plain.  Edward Powers, a local citizen, had recognized the men and pointed them out to patrolman Edmund Inglis on South Street.  In an exchange of shots at the corner of South and Child streets, patrolman Edmund Inglis took a bullet to his left leg.  Nearby, Mrs Mary Fallon was shot through the right side of her face while walking to the store with her child.  The men fled down Child Street.  In a field at the corner of Child and Lee streets, Patrick McGinn and Edward Wightman were both shot in their legs.

The fleeing yeggs turned right onto Lee Street and then left on Keyes (now McBride) Street towards Washington Street.  At the intersection of Washington and Keyes streets, Boston Elevated conductor Thomas Moore (of 191 Green St.) was shot while stepping off his streetcar, suffering a broken leg.  Here, also, John Nolan (of 60 Keyes St.), foreman at the Ross Twine factory, was shot in the right side, seriously injuring him.

From there, the desperadoes continued to Forest Hills Street, where they turned and ran for Forest Hills Cemetery.  At the entrance to the cemetery, Herbert Knox, a watchman at the cemetery, was shot in the abdomen and later died at Emerson hospital.

When news reached station 13, a force of policemen was sent out on the trail of the yeggmen, and calls were sent to headquarters for extra men from around the city.  By 8:00 p.m., electric cars and patrol wagons had brought 250 men to the streets around the cemetery.  Taking into consideration the size and terrain of the cemetery and the approaching darkness, no attempt was made to immediately search the grounds.  Instead, every street around the cemetery was patrolled by armed men.  Patrolmen took their places behind shrubbery and trees in the estates around the property.  Automobiles with searchlights cruised the adjacent streets.

At 9:20 pm, the police learned that the desperadoes had not escaped.  Patrolman Edward McMahon had been keeping watch on the west edge of the cemetery, in the back of 80 Woodlawn Street.  He heard a noise at the cemetery fence, and when he came out into the light to investigate, he fell with a gunshot wound to the abdomen.  His fellow officers returned fire in the direction of the shots, but with no apparent effect.  The rest of the night was quiet, as the police waited for daylight before closing in on the yeggmen.

“Identified By Two Men”
Boston Globe, 23 July 1908

Earlier that same day, policemen from Division 13 who had been watching the South terminal train station in downtown Boston observed a man fitting the description of one of the desperadoes.  When he saw the officers, the man ran and was caught after a short chase.  Giuseppe De Vico, 21 years old, of Somerville, was questioned closely on the scene.  He had a suitcase and a ticket to New York in his pocket, and claimed to be a shoemaker at his uncle’s shop in Somerville.  Satisfied by the man’s actions that he had done something wrong, the police brought him to Division 13 to be examined by witnesses.

When John Carty the saloon bartender was brought into the station house, De Vico was brought forward.  Carty immediately identified him as the second man to come into the saloon.  William Pettee, a customer in the saloon at the time of the robbery, came in next.  Pettee was brought downstairs to the cells and identified De Vico as one of the robbers, but suggested that his hat was not the same as the bandit’s.  When another hat was brought out from De Vico’s suitcase, Pettee recognized it and identified him as the man who took the money from the cash drawer on the floor.

“Yeggmen Thought To Be Hiding In Woods”
Boston Globe, 24 July 1908

After waiting on guard throughout the night, at 4:00 a.m. two hundred policemen entered Forest Hills Cemetery to engage and capture the bandits.  They had followed Superintendent Pierce, Chief Inspector Watts, and Captains Wescott and Hanley for a short distance to the left of the main entrance when they saw a man running over a hill toward a dry ravine.  When the man saw them, he unleashed a succession of bullets in their direction.  As quickly as he emptied the magazine, he reloaded with another clip and began firing again.  The police returned fire as they advanced, but he continued into the gully, firing as he ran.  He sought cover from one tree to another, settling behind a fir tree.  As police bullets rained down on the man’s location, a single shot came from behind the fir, and a puff of smoke, but no further answers to the police fusillade.

From the Boston Globe article (24 July 1908):

“Supt Pierce, Chief Inspector Watts and patrolman O’Sullivan ran down the gully to where the man leaned against the tree in a sitting posture.  Chief Watts grasped him about the throat, while patrolman O’Sullivan wrenched the revolver from the unresisting fingers.  ‘He’s dead,’ the chief said, but the announcement made no impression upon the police.  The force of armed men surged down the gully, frenzied with rage, crying, ‘Kill him,’ ‘Finish him up,’ ‘Make an end to him.’

“‘Get back, get back,’ shouted Superintendent Pierce and Chief Watts, but the policemen paid no attention to the command.  They were for seizing the body and doing it violence.  Inspectors Douglas and Wolf jumped beside the superintendent and the chief inspector and joined them in resisting the frantic policemen.  Chief Watts and the others struck the patrolmen, knocked them down and fought them off for several minutes until the excited men regained their senses and dropped back.  Then Dr. Dunn made a hasty examination of the body and announced that the outlaw was dead.  From that moment the policemen were rational, obedient to orders again, the passionate resentment having subsided.  They helped place the dead man in the automobile and quietly went away when released from further duty.”

Soon after the shooting described above, a Mr. Hugh McDougall, a conductor on the Forest Hills elevated line, was arrested on Morton Street.  He was carrying a revolver, and was believed to be the second yeggman.  Police charged him with the shooting of patrolman McMahon at 9:30 the previous night at Woodlawn Street.  Immediately at the scene, a score of acquaintances vouched for him, to no effect.

The dead yeggman at the cemetery was identified by several witnesses in both the saloon raid and the running battle through the streets of Jamaica Plain.  Dissenting was Edward Powers, who originally identified the two bandits to patrolman Inglis.  Powers insisted that the dead man had different features, and a heavier mustache than the men he saw.

After the shootout at the cemetery, when things had gone quiet, patrolman Buckley walked along the edge of the Arnold Arboretum near South Street and the Arborway.  The policeman saw a man and called after him, but the man darted off, dodging from tree to tree.  Buckley chased him, firing his revolver as he went.  The fugitive turned on the policeman, raising his revolver and shouted “I’ll getta you yet” with an Italian accent.  With that, he sped off through the trees and was lost.

Patrolman Buckley returned to Forest Hills seeking help from the force that had surrounded the cemetery, but the police had all gone home, and the third man got away.  Later that day at the Williams farm on Centre Street on the opposite side of the Arboretum, a suspicious man was seen.  When called, squads of policemen searched for the man, but with no success.  In spite of losing him, police had confidence that he would be caught.  An hour before the two yeggmen were seen on South Street, they were believed to have entered the house of Christopher Spruhde of 48 Jamaica Street.  Mr. Spruhde and his brother had left two coats in the kitchen in the morning, but when they returned, their coats were gone.  In their place were two other coats, one with a bullet hole in one sleeve.  The lining of this coat was saturated with blood, suggesting that the fugitive would need medical attention soon.

“Dead Desperado Edmund Gutman”
Boston Globe, 25 July 1908

The dead desperado at the Forest Hills Cemetery was identified as Edmund Gutman, a Lett (Latvian) who had come to the United States from the western provinces of Russia within the previous two years.  Witnesses identified him as a participant in the raid on the saloon, and as the more vicious desperado in the running battle through the streets of Jamaica Plain to the cemetery.  Gutman, it was said, shot at those who challenged them through the streets, urging on his companion to reload the pistols as he emptied them.

The companion was believed to be Francesco Sperduto, who had been arrested the previous day in Dedham with Sepa Pasquale.  While no reason was given for the arrest of Sperduto, John Nolan, who was shot at Child Street, identified Gutman as the man who shot him, and Sperduto as the man who reloaded the pistol.  Police became aware of two good friends of Gutman, and believed that finding them would close the case.  Gutman himself had been identified by his Lettish countrymen when his death picture was published in the newspaper.  When he arrived in this country, Gutman had received the aid of countrymen who lived in colonies in South Boston, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.  After a time, he procured a job with the metropolitan park force doing gypsy moth extermination work in the Middlesex Fells.  Although he became a foreman, the men complained of his bad temper, and there were rumors that he had committed a murder in his own country.  In time, it was believed that he became familiar with Jamaica Plain, visiting a friend on Jamaica Street.

A note found near Gutman’s body in the cemetery gave further clues to his connection to the area.  It was addressed to a Miss L. Mauren, in care of Mrs Rosenwald, 3302 Washington Street, just north of Green Street and not far from the saloon that was robbed.  The note was written in Lettish, but was translated for the police.  When interviewed by the police with the aid of a translator, the Rosenwalds denied any knowledge of Gutman or a Miss Mauren, and said they had few visitors.  However, local people told police that the Rosenwalds had many Russian visitors, and one was a young, good-looking woman.

Even after the success at the cemetery, Jamaica Plain remained in terror.  Women and children remained inside their houses, and men came home early to be with them.  Men called Station 13 and asked for spare revolvers.  At all times, the streets were filled with young men, imagining a return of the fugitives to take revenge on the community, and extra police were sent in from the rest of the city to patrol the streets.  In Roxbury and South Boston, police watched colonies of Letts for signs of the fugitives seeking aid from their countrymen.

“De Vico’s Friends Set Up An Alibi”
Boston Globe, 25 July 1908

During the same day, friends of the suspect De Vico came to his aid.  Seven persons claimed that he had been on a Revere beach electric car at the time of the robbery, and had spent the night of the cemetery assault at a Revere beach cottage.  During the day there had been a problem at his uncle’s cobbler shop with two women, and when he saw the police at the train station he feared that the women had set the police upon him.  His poor command of English increased his fears, and caused him to run and draw further suspicion to himself.  His friends and acquaintances insisted that his nature was mild and his connection to the Jamaica Plain crimes impossible.

“On Trail Of Yegg’s Pals”
Boston Globe, 26 July 1908

Intelligence gained from a series of raids and roundups in the Lettish community convinced the police that Edmund Gutman’s associates in the raid and the running shootout at Jamaica Plain were fellow Letts who had been employed with him in the gypsy moth extermination crew.  This ruled out those suspects who had been arrested in Dedham and Roxbury.  Leontine Mauren, to whom the final note was addressed to, was traced to 43 Union Avenue, Jamaica Plain.  It was learned that Mauren, 20 years old, was married, but living under her maiden name since her husband had gone west seeking employment.  Upon locating her residence, the police went to 43 Union Avenue, searched the premises, and took an unnamed couple into custody.  They were questioned at station 13 and held for further interviews.  Mauren was not the woman found, having last been seen at 1:00 p.m. that day.

Having collected much evidence, the police became certain that they knew the identities of Gutman’s accomplices.  One had come from Philadelphia recently, and had written Gutman letters from that city.  With the certainty of these identities, the authorities decided to release all the other Letts who had been rounded up and held at Station 13.  Three men, Francesco Sperduto, Genaro Bruno, and Abraham Weise, were held on the basis of eyewitness identifications, but the police did not credit these identifications, and they were expected to be released soon.

Sepa Pasquale had been released the previous day, but was rearrested on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon.  Giussepe De Vico, who was arrested at South Station, and Hugh McDougall, who was taken into custody near Forest Hills Cemetery after the death of Gutman, were held at Charles Street jail for appearances in the West Roxbury district court.

With new intelligence, the police came to believe that Edmund Gutman was not a participant in the running shootout the day after the saloon raid.  The three men had spent the night of the raid in or near Forest Hills Cemetery.  During the day, Gutman’s associates went out, probably for food.  When recognized by Edward Powers and challenged by patrolman Inglis, the two shot their way back to Gutman and their sanctuary at the cemetery.  Arriving at the cemetery at the Canterbury Street side, they came upon watchman Herbert Knox.  They were overheard to ask Knox if he was a policeman.  When he answered, “No, I am a watchman,” one man said, “Take no chances,” and the other man shot him, mortally wounding him in the abdomen.

It was also believed by the police that they knew how two of the men had escaped.  At 8:15 that night, three patrolmen were stationed on Walk Hill Street on the south side of the cemetery.  One robber was seen approaching the fence, and they drove him back with shots from their revolvers.  An hour later, one of the men threatened to break out again, and again was driven back with shots.

In the early morning, when the assault on the cemetery began from the main entrance, the patrolmen on the periphery of the cemetery heard shots coming from the direction of Morton Street and ran to join the fray.  In the excitement, Canterbury Street was left unguarded and the two remaining yeggmen escaped over the fence.  With no police guarding the far side of the cemetery, it was believed that they jumped the fence, followed Canterbury Street to Walk Hill Street, turned right, followed the road down to Hyde Park Avenue, and crossed the railroad tracks to the Arnold Arboretum.  It was at this time that one of the fugitives was seen and chased by patrolman Buckley.

Gutman’s life in the United States was traced with the aid of local Letts.  After arrival, he found a job in a mica mine in New Hampshire.  In time, he came to Massachusetts and got a job with the gypsy moth crew at the Middlesex Fells park, eventually becoming foreman.  Two of his fellow Letts in the crew became close to Gutman, and a group photograph of the crew taken at the time was used to identify Gutman and his associates.  During his time in Massachusetts, Gutman became acquainted with the local Lettish community, and became very friendly with Miss Leontine Mauren.  Near the site Gutman was found dead, a woman’s handkerchief was found with the embroidered letters L M.  It was assumed that the letter found nearby and addressed to Miss Mauren was in Gutman’s hand.

One of the two assumed associates of Gutman had recently traveled to Philadelphia and addressed letters to Gutman in Jamaica Plain, which suggested to the police that Gutman had a familiarity with the area.  The man returned from Philadelphia, and he and Gutman were later traced to a home at 17 Oakdale Street, Jamaica Plain.  This address was the home of a local Lett, John Walter, and also the place of publication of a Lettish newspaper called Truth.  Police interviewed Walter, and learned that the men had no money, and had spoken of going out that night and committing highway robbery on a dark Jamaica Plain street.

In this meeting at the Walter house, there were five men, so the police assumed that others of the gang could be at large and planning more raids.  With the intelligence they had gained from Lettish sources, the police raided houses on Green street, Jamaica Street and Oakdale Street.  Among the effects of one lodger was the group photograph of the 16 men who worked on the gypsy moth crew, including the dead Gutman.  The two men believed to be close associates of Gutman were recognized in the photo, and the rest were gradually identified, rounded up by the police and interviewed.  Each accounted for himself and identified Gutman and his two friends.

While the police were focusing on the two known, but officially unnamed associates of Gutman, members of the public continued to arrive at Station 13 and identify Sperduto, Pasquale or Bruno, though none could identify McDougall or De Vico.  In spite of the eyewitness identifications, the police were certain that Sperduto, Pasquale and Bruno were not involved in the raid at the saloon or the running gun battle through Jamaica Plain.  It was the belief of the police that in carrying out such attacks, Letts would not trust men of another race, for “men of different races would distrust each other too much.”

When the lawyer for Sperduto, Pasquale and Bruno arrived to see his clients at Station 13, he was denied access to the men by the police.  Going directly from there to police headquarters, he was told that no lawyer could see the suspects, as it might hurt the case against them.  When the lawyer pointed out that constitutional protections were being violated, opening the possibility of civil prosecution, access was granted.  Back at the station, it took the intervention of a Captain to allow the lawyer to speak to his clients alone, as the Constitution required.

“Plaude, Jekapson The Yeggs Sought”
Boston Globe, 27 July 1908

It was announced that Peter Plaude and Andrew Jekapson, two friends of the dead outlaw Edmund Gutman, were the men who shot their way through the streets of Jamaica Plain. All who knew Gutman recognized these two men as his closest associates.  It was claimed, as well, that the men appeared identical to the descriptions given by witnesses who saw the running gun battle along Keyes Street.  Plaude was “the big man” who did the shooting, and Jekapson resembled the other, who reloaded the pistols for his partner.  Both men were Letts, both in their twenties, with sandy hair.  Both had spent time in Philadelphia as well, and were expected to attempt to return there in an effort to find aid from their countrymen and gain passage out of this country.

It had been learned that the three men, along with Miss Leontine Mauren, had been members of a Lettish anarchist organization that held Sunday meetings in Roxbury.  Gutman was a leader, while Jekapson and Plaude were his admirers and followers.  The three companions were low on funds, and their extreme anarchist beliefs on property rights justified and led to their attack on the saloon.

Peter Plaude had come to the United States with his brother.  Some time after arriving, the Plaudes moved into 53 Jamaica Street, opposite the home of Christopher Spruhde, where the outlaws later left their coats.  At the time, the Mauren woman was with them.  Miss Mauren was known within the Lettish community to be very fond of Peter Plaude.  Eventually, the Plaudes and Miss Mauren moved to 3302 Washington Street, near Green Street.  Plaude took the job with the Middlesex Fells Reservation gypsy moth crew, and became close to Gutman and aligned with his violent anarchist principles.  Plaude and Andrew Jekapson, another Lettish gypsy moth crewman, began defrauding installment stores, buying furniture and clothing and reselling it without first paying the full amount.  In time they came under pressure from agents of the sellers.  Plaude fled to Philadelphia, disappeared from sight, and Leontine Mauren returned to her parents.

After a time, Miss Mauren came back to Jamaica Plain, this time living with her young sister at 43 Union Avenue.  According to local Letts, Mauren was a believer in a violent form of anarchism.  She would, it was said, address gatherings of their group, denouncing the treatment of the workers, and counseling murder when expedient.  It was also believed by Lettish acquaintances that, contrary to earlier police belief, the note found near the body of Gutman addressed to Miss Mauren was probably written by Plaude, whose relationship with her was the longer and closer.

Eventually, Plaude returned from Philadelphia and again found his friend Gutman.  Gutman was now living in Roxbury, and sought the aid of his landlady in finding rooms for two friends.  She referred them to a friend of hers, who later identified the two boarders as Plaude and Jekapson.  Shortly before the raid on the saloon, all three men complained of a lack on money, and under Gutman’s theory of property, they struck at the saloon to seize what the considered was rightfully theirs.

“Bandits Return To Scene Of Shooting”
Boston Globe, 28 July 1908

Witnesses from the gun-battle in the streets were shown the picture of the gypsy moth crew.  All identified Jekapson as one of the men who ran shooting through Jamaica Plain, and all but one recognized Plaude.  A new witness added to the certainty of the police.  An acquaintance of Plaude and Jekapson, she volunteered that she had seen both men in Jamaica Plain on Wednesday night.  New information led police to suspect that there had been a fourth man at the raid on the saloon, with one standing guard outside.  The fourth man was Peter Sware, a known associate of the three bandits, though not a member of the gypsy moth crew.  Sware did not have the reputation for violence the others did, and police said they sought him as a witness rather than as a definite suspect.

The police continued their search for Miss Mauren.  A search of the homes of Lettish people on Ruggles Street in Roxbury failed to find a trace of her, as did a watch on her parents’ home in Lawrence.  As she seemed to be the one person in the area who would remain loyal to the men, the investigators believed that she might be in contact with them.  At the same time, the police of Station 13 continued to prepare their cases against Francesco Sperduto, Giuseppe De Vico and Hugh McDougall.  Although police had reasoned that Gutman and his fellow Letts would not trust an Italian like Sperduto, six persons identified him as one of the bandits at the saloon, and one man identified him as the man who shot Herbert Knox at the cemetery.  Hugh McDougall was under suspicion for shooting patrolman McMahon near the cemetery border at Woodlawn Street, but he was released on bail supplied by the treasurer of the Boston Elevated Railway Company.

A week after the raid on the saloon, only three men remained hospitalized.  Patrick Doran, who was shot in the abdomen at the saloon, was now off the dangerous list.  Thomas Moore, the streetcar conductor who was shot in the side at Washington and Keyes streets, was improving every day.  Patrolman Edward McMahon, with a wound to the abdomen, was still on the dangerous list, but was also improving.

“Baffled In Yeggmen Hunt”
Boston Globe, 29 July 1908

In the week since the shootout at the cemetery, there had been no sightings of the missing men or their associate Leontine Mauren.  The Mauren woman was now known as a philanthropist of the group of Letts.  Police were told that she had supplied Plaude with the money to return from Philadelphia in early July.  She had also helped friends of Gutman, and was the one person to whom the outlaws would turn for aid.  Her disappearance had shocked her reputable friends, and the police had concluded that she was traveling with the fugitives and aiding them in their effort to leave the country.  It was reported by local Letts that the four had been expelled from their association several months earlier for their bloodthirsty views, and the fear that they would bring disrepute upon the law-abiding members.

“Both Men Released”
Boston Globe, 30 July 1908

On Tuesday, Francesco Sperduto of Dedham and Giuseppe DeVico of Somerville had their hearings in front of Judge Perrins in the Jamaica Plain court.  Witnesses called against DeVico during the morning session could not positively identify him in court.  Both John Carty the bartender and William Pettee, a customer, said that they were brought to see DeVico in his cell, and were not required to pick him out of a line-up.  When witnesses for DeVico testified that he was with them in Malden during the saloon raid and at Revere beach the night of the running shoot-out, the judge ordered him released.  It was revealed during the afternoon Sperduto hearing that the police had believed since the day of his arrest that he had a perfect alibi.  In spite of this belief, police put on witnesses in an effort to hold him.  In the afternoon court session, none of the government witnesses could positively identify Sperduto as one of the two bandits from the running gun battle Wednesday night.  David Eldredge, who was with watchman Knox when he was shot at the entrance to the cemetery, began his testimony quite sure of his identification.  In spite of his initial confidence, the defense lawyer got him to admit that he “wouldn’t want to swear to it, because they all look so much alike.”  The defense put Edward Powers on the stand, who had followed the bandits at the cemetery in the morning, and identified them to patrolman Inglis later that day.  He insisted that Sperduto was not one of the two men he had followed that day.  When the owner of the lodging house Sperduto lived in testified that he had been at home both Tuesday and Wednesday nights, the police closed the case and he was released.

Testimony during the day’s hearings added to the public’s knowledge of the case.  It was revealed for the first time that the police were informed Wednesday, the morning after the saloon raid, and twelve hours before the gun battle in the streets, that two suspicious men were in Forest Hills Cemetery, but they failed to investigate.  Edward Powers, who later identified the two men to patrolman Inglis at South Street, had followed the two into Forest Hills Cemetery.  As he was on his way to work, he asked two people to inform the police.  Powers said that one of the two had done so, because a policeman later told him of receiving the information.  Another witness, Lawrence Gingoff, testified that as he was looking into the saloon during the robbery, patrolman Butler came upon the scene, looked into the window, and walked off, probably to go to a patrol box for help.  When it was his turn to testify, patrolman Butler said that when he reached the door of the saloon, one of the men fired his pistol at him.  He jumped back, and in the time it took him to draw his revolver, the bandits had run from the saloon and up the street.  Patrolman Butler went on to testify that he gave chase, firing at the bandits and shouting at them to stop.  When he lost sight of them, he boarded a car that was going in the opposite direction, explaining that he was sent in the wrong direction by a citizen.  When he realized his mistake, he returned in a wagon pressed into service.

“In Defense Of Police”
Boston Globe, 1 Aug. 1908

The next day, Hugh McDougall, accused of shooting patrolman Edward McMahon at Forest Hills Cemetery, was released by Judge Perrins when no witnesses could testify to his presence at the scene of the shooting.  Eight witnesses had testified for the defense when the judge discharged the defendant.

Following the revelations coming from the court hearings of De Vico, Sperduto and McDougall, Police Commissioner O’Meara defended his men.  According to his statement, there were 238 policemen of all ranks on duty at Forest Hills Cemetery, not the 600 claimed by some.  One hundred and forty nine men stood guard, while 89 entered the cemetery.  Of those, it was determined that 67 fired 208 shots.  After pointing out that the two missing fugitives could have left the cemetery before the police cordon was in place, the commissioner stated, “I have studied the events of the night with a greater interest perhaps than any other man can have and I do not see wherein the plan could have been improved, even if the work were to be done again.”  Regarding Mr. McDougall, the commissioner said that his arrest was due to his own folly, and that if one of the fugitives had been in the cemetery at the time and had later escaped, it was due to the police believing that McDougall himself was that man.

“Mauren Girls In Harlem”
Boston Globe, 30 Oct. 1908

Boston Police detectives traced Leontine Mauren and her sister Elizabeth to a lodging house on 170th Street, New York City, where they were working as dressmakers.  The police were confident that the sisters had no information to provide regarding the case, and expected to drop their watch on the two.  With Peter Plaude in Russia, and Andrew Jekapson and Peter Sware assumed to be there as well, it was likely that no arrests would ever be made in the case.

Here, the trail goes quiet for over five years.  On February 6, 1914, one final report is made in the Boston Globe.  The Boston police announced that the two fugitives involved in the Jamaica Plain shootings of 1908 were dead.  Three years earlier, two of the three men who escaped from Boston were involved in the Houndsditch jewelry robbery in London in December, 1910.  One was shot and killed by one of his companions, and the other was killed in a building fire while fighting off the police.

Only in recent months had the Boston police learned of the connection between the events in London and the crimes that shocked Jamaica Plain.  Inspector Thomas Lynch traveled to London, and with the intelligence gained there, an investigation in Boston was carried out and corroborated what he had learned.  The companions of Edmund Gutman, the man who had been killed at Forest Hills Cemetery, were Fritz Svars and Poolka Mourrivtz.  Both were Letts and anarchists, and both were known as criminals with many deaths on their hands.  Inspector Lynch had learned in London that Svars had killed Herbert Knox, the cemetery watchman.  Gutman was not killed by bullets fired by the Boston police, nor by his own hand, but had been killed by Mourrivtz before he and Svars fled.  Gutman had told them that he could not keep up their pace, and Mourrivtz killed him out of  fear that Gutman might be captured and talk.

It was a tip from Boston’s Lettish community that sent Lynch to London, following rumors that the two would be found there.  In London, he learned that both Svars and Mourrivtz had boasted of the raid on the saloon and the running shoot-out through Jamaica Plain.  A woman who was associated with both men in London could not say where the crimes had occurred, but the details she gave were such that the police were confidant that the crimes she described and those that took place in Jamaica Plain were the same.

In London, the Houndsditch robbery and the notorious Siege of Sidney Street repeated the events of Jamaica Plain in a remarkable way.  As in Jamaica Plain, there was an initial robbery/shootout and a later siege on the surrounded fugitives.  During the attempted robbery at Houndsditch, three policemen were killed by Russian revolutionaries.  Through a tip, the gang was found in a house at 100 Sidney Street.  When police attempted to take them, a gun battle erupted in which the police found themselves seriously out-gunned.  Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary at the time, called in the Scots Guards, and during the siege, the building caught fire and burned to the ground.  As the Boston Police came to learn, two of the men killed in London had taken part in the Jamaica Plain raid and shootout as well.  So here we have the promised connection between Churchill and Jamaica Plain.

So our story finally ends, but the questions continue.

1.  How did Edmund Gutman die?  If we credit the story from London, we would have to believe that Mourrivtz shot Gutman as he hid behind the fir tree, but did so unnoticed by 89 policemen in the cemetery.  The “fog of war” is relevant here.  Can we trust the police story as conveyed by the Globe article?  This entire story is an indictment of the value of eyewitness evidence.  The original “swarthy” Italian bandits turned out to be sandy-haired Latvians, and the policemen who gave the story of Gutman’s death staged a massive brawl over the body.

2.  How did Miss Mauren go from rabid anarchist, to gun moll on the run, to harmless Harlem seamstress?  President McKinley had been assassinated in 1901 by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist.  Revolution had been put down in Russia in 1905, and pressure by the Czar’s secret police caused many, including Letts, to flee their homeland.  How much did these events play in the portrayal of Leontine Mauren?  If xenophobia played a part, it becomes harder to explain the sudden disinterest in her.  Perhaps someone in the local Lettish community, feeling the pressure of midnight raids and round-ups, decided to point the finger at Mauren to protect the greater community.  In the end, Leontine Mauren was able to convince the Boston police that she had no part in the crimes and provided no aid to the fugitives.

3.  What of Plaude and Jekapson?  According to reports from the Lettish community, there was no doubt that these two men would be Gutman’s partners in crime.  They were picked out by witnesses in the gypsy moth crew photograph.  If they were innocent, then the police must have pointed them out in the photo and asked, “Is this them?” rather than requiring them to pick out the men on their own.  So why did they run?  They had been involved in the installment store scam, and perhaps they brought a distrust of the police with them from their homeland.

4.  What of Peter Sware?  He was the fourth man, suspected of standing guard outside the saloon.  Could Sware be the same man as Fritz Svars, who was killed in London?  In the Boston Globe articles, De Vico became De Vigo, and it was certainly common for immigrants to change their names when they came to the United States.  The Globe gives us no help here.

5.  Why the Italians?  Witnesses described the bandits as “swarthy.”  De Vico and Sperduto were picked up by policemen on the basis of eyewitness descriptions.  Patrolman Buckley heard an Italian accent from the man he chased.  How did straw-haired Latvians become dark Italians?  The statement of the witness in open court:  “They all look alike,” certainly tells us something about the mentality of the time.

6.  Why did the police insist on prosecuting Sperduto, De Vico and McDougall?  Reports of their doubts as to the involvement of all three had already been published in the newspaper.  They clearly recognized the inherent weakness of eyewitness identifications, and logic told them that a small immigrant group would not trust outsiders.  It almost seems that they preferred going to court and losing to telling their witnesses that they had accused the wrong men.

Finally, for bonus trivia points, a Jamaica Plain connection can be made to Alfred Hitchcock.  His 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much featured Peter Lorre and drew on the events at Sidney Street for its final shootout scene.  Hitchcock remade his own film in 1956 with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, and featuring the song Que Sera, Sera, but without the climactic Sidney Street scene.

So the story finally ends for good.  No movie was made about the events in Jamaica Plain, and no books were written.  Both this middle-aged writer and his 82-year-old mother grew up in Jamaica Plain, and neither ever heard the story.  Perhaps the people of Jamaica Plain were just too busy working and raising families to bother retelling the story to their neighbors and children.  In any case, it is a story worth passing on to future generations.

Mark Bulger
Dedham, MA
October 2007

  43 Union Ave in 1908.

43 Union Ave. in 2007




The robbery suspect shot at Forest Hills Cemetery

Leotine Mauren

Map of the crime scene

 

This article originally appeared in the December 11, 1910 edition of the Boston Daily Globe. Production assistance provided by Kate Markopoulos.

The Jamaica Plain Cooperative Association, a real estate organization, composed of several of the leading business and professional men of that section of the city, has just approved the plans for a handsome, new, 80-apartment house, which is to be erected on Center St., opposite Seaverns Ave., Jamaica Plain.

Building operations will begin very soon and it is expected that the building will be ready for tenants early in September next. The proposed building will be the largest, most pretentious and attractive structure of its kind in that section of the city. The suites will be en separate and will contain every modern convenience. The owners have planned for a first-class building in every particular. Everything is to be done to attract a desirable class of tenants.

It is expected that such a building, within 20 minutes of the business center of the city will prove a magnet to those who desire to live within a few minutes ride of their business and at the same time wish to enjoy a suburban life. This section of the city is within easy walking distance of the park system of the city and the famous Arnold Arboretum.

The projectors were induced to embark in the scheme by the demand for moderate priced suites within easy reach of the downtown section of Boston. The site is ideal, being accessible either by the L surface lines or the L itself. When the Green Street station of the L is ready in the spring, it will be within a three or four minutes’ walk, which brings one within 16 minutes of the shopping and business section of the city.

The suites as planned will contain five, six and seven rooms, and every room will have the advantage of sunshine and good air, for which this section of the city is noted. The success of the Robert Emmet Association building, which was constructed by the Hooper-Waters company of this city, and which is situated almost opposite the site of the new apartment building, was taken into consideration by the officers of the Cooperative Association in deciding to undertake the new enterprise.

Although not yet quite two years old, the association purchased the Williams estate in November, 1909, consisting of 20,000 feet of land, on which stood several buildings. The estate was assessed for $240,000. The adjoining Barnard estate, containing 14,000 square feet, was also purchased. The latter estate was secured last July. The association plans to develop all of the property. Plans for the building were drawn by Charles R Greco.

The association was formed at a meeting held in the Seaverns building, Jamaica Plain, in May, 1909. Francis J. Horgan, Hon Frank J. Seiberlich, Thomas F. Ward, Joseph B. Kavanagh, James Ryan and Thomas F. Busby were appointed a committee to draw up by-laws for the association. Later the following officers were elected: Francis J. Horgan as President, Frank J. Seiberlich as Vice-President, Joseph B. Kavanagh as Executive Secretary, Isaac F. Meyers as Financial Secretary, Edward G. Rowen as Treasurer, and the following board of directors: The President, Thomas F. Ward, Joseph A. Delaney, Thomas F. Busby, John Finnegan and George Helfrick; Trustees, John F. McDonald chairman, T. C. Haffenreffer and James H. Egan. At the annual meeting last May the same officers were chosen with the exception that John H. Ratigan was made Executive Secretary and Wallace W. Brown was chosen Financial Secretary.

Well, not exactly like the other stations on the dial, but there was a broadcasting transmitter from my bedroom at 590 Centre Street in the late-1940’s that reached a small neighborhood audience, and far beyond as we shall see!

I built a phono-oscillator transmitter, connected a microphone and a 78 rpm turntable into an amplifier, strung the wire outside my bedroom window, and climbed a tree at Parley Avenue to attach it. I called it “WBIM” for “The World’s Best In Music” at 900 on the AM dial. The dial position of 900AM seemed to be clear enough, so I was really “in like Flynn” (a familiar Boston expression at the time.)

The “phono-oscillator” was a technical radio invention that transmitted the recorded music from a record player turntable in one room to a regular radio receiver in, say, the living room without a wire connection. In fact, every radio in the house tuned to the AM frequency of the phono-oscillator could receive the same “broadcast.” It was legitimately designed for a limited range signal, maybe only a few hundred feet.

There were people in a nearby apartment complex who could hear the broadcast, and my best friend, Kirk Seward, could hear it clearly on Goldsmith Place and he was several blocks away. I also learned to my complete surprise that there were listeners to my WBIM broadcasts in Nashua, NH…almost 50 miles away!! They complained to the FCC of my interference with their own station, WOTW at the same 900AM in Nashua. That long wire on to the tree top made a big difference, of course the amplifier gave the broadcast a good boost as well … but a 50 mile “signal skip” from Boston to Nashua was totally unexpected.

I found out that by being on the air only intermittently for almost ten months, the FCC monitoring equipment at The Customs House tower in downtown Boston could not easily locate my “pirate” transmitter. I’d come home from school and “sign on” for a few minutes or a half- hour before dinner and homework, and then again sometimes on Saturdays to play a few 78 rpm records.

One Saturday morning, however, the Feds rang my apartment doorbell at 590 Centre Street, my Dad met them, heard them say that “having an illegal transmitter would be cause for imprisonment and/or a $10,000 fine” … or, they could just take the equipment. Dad wisely said, “Take it!” and the G-Men then came into my bedroom unannounced, of course. I didn’t even say “Goodbye” to my vast listening audience, but I remember the final song playing on the turntable was “The Song Is Ended (But The Melody Lingers On)” which, I guess, is an appropriate farewell for WBIM.

I really don’t know how many people actually listened to WBIM. I drove my Dad’s 1949 Buick around, over Parley Avenue, down Parley Vale with the car radio tuned to 900AM while my friend, Alain DeVergie played the records, and I could clearly hear the broadcast. It faded when I drove around Jamaica Pond and over to Perkins Street. But, if you remember hearing WBIM, I’d like to hear from you.

This early experiment led to a 40+ year career in the broadcasting business, a legitimate career, of course.


Russ and his best friend, Kirk Seward, are shown in this 1949 photo. Russ is speaking into the microphone while Kirk listens with a headset. The boys are broadcasting from 78 rpm disks like the one held by Kirk.

A rack of 78s can be seen to the right of Russ and an electric clock with a sweep second hand. Notice the speaker on the shelf and the phono oscillator transmitter with two tubes. Behind the curtain was the bedroom window through which the antenna wire ran out to a tree top.

Photograph provided courtesy of William Kirkwood Seward. After graduating from high school in 1953, Kirk worked for the Boston Public Library in Copley Square until he sadly became disabled with Multiple Sclerosis when he was in his early thirties.

Russ volunteered after high school classes in 1952 when WGBH-FM, Boston first began on the air with studios in Symphony Hall. Then off to a Summer announcing job at Radio Vermont, WDEV in Waterbury until his military service and Armed Forces Radio. In 1955, Russ had a live, variety television show on Sunday nights for a year on WTAO-TV 56, the first UHF television station in Boston. It was just black and white TV back then and done with only one camera from the studio’s transmitter building on top of Mt. Zion.

While attending Northwestern University, he was an NBC Page at the Merchandise Mart studios in Chicago, then he joined several stations; WNMP and WEAW in Evanston, WEBH in the Edgewater Beach Hotel, and he was with an investor group who put a new Chicago FM station, WFMQ on the air.

He moved to do West Coast sales, marketing and promotion with Crowell-Collier’s KEWB in San Francisco and KGY in Olympia, WA in the 1960’s. He relocated back East in the 1970’s for sales and marketing positions with WEZF in Burlington, VT and hosted Ella, Frank and Friends on Vermont Public Radio for ten years. He was also the Development Director for Vermont Public Television. While with The Knight Quality Stations, he represented a network of New England radio stations for four years. He designed multi-media marketing concepts promoting Quebec tourism while living in Montreal as their Canadian Marketing Director.

In 1991, Russ moved to Newport, RI where he had a jazz show on WOTB-FM “Cool FM” and a Home Shopping radio show on WADK. In 1994, he relocated to Southern California and entertained thousands of retired seniors by presenting a program he created of reminiscing therapy with old time radio, interactive trivia and nostalgia music.

You may contact Russ at:

A Stroll Around 1940s J.P.
One Man’s Recollections of Earlier Times
By Richard Goolsky

The streetcar tracks were still there, winding down from Dudley Station, following Roxbury Street to Columbus Avenue and under what we called “The Bridge,” the dividing line between Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. The railroad bridge carried the old coal-burning steam trains over Centre Street and along Lamartine Street out to New York or some faraway place that a pre-teen couldn’t comprehend. In fact, even South Boston was a distant place where my relatives lived.

To my right, where the Bromley-Heath Project now stands, was an empty field where carnivals would set up in the summer months. Next to the field before Bickford Street was a red-brick tenement with a row of stores on the street level, and a barroom, the Monte Carlo, which Tom Nardone owned. His hobby was showing movies, and that was the way his sign read in the window. Next door was an Italian food store, the Stella chain. I can still smell the aroma of olives, salamis and cheeses coming through the open door. Across the street was Rocco’s Barber Shop and a couple of doors up was Saleri’s Variety store, where, for a nickel, you could fill a bag with penny candy that would last through two cartoons and a serial - Superman, maybe. (Remember when a brand-new 1941 Buick would go off a cliff and the episode would end, and the next Saturday a 1928 Ford would crash in flames at the bottom?) All this could be seen at the Madison, a movie house where admission was nine cents. Dutchy was the old ticket taker. A few doors up was Hoffman’s Bakery, a great German bakeshop with some wonderful strudels and tarts.

On the other side of the street was Plant’s Shoe Factory, a large building that took up about four city blocks. It housed many industries, including Block’s Leather Jackets, where my mother worked as a stitcher. She would put together a suede jacket for me out of the best leather she could find. But the best part of the building was a very loud steam whistle that would blow at 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. and could be heard all over J.P. On snow days someone would give three or four blasts that echoed for miles. It meant NO SCHOOL! This was before television.

At the end of the factory was a park with benches that extended down to the Heath Street projects. A Stop & Shop supermarket was built there in the 1950s. On the corner of Walden Street stood a small Protestant church. I can’t recall ever seeing anyone enter that church. A row of stores extended toward Gay Head Street, including Helen’s Bakery and a men’s club that was housed in the basement and called the Jam-Rox Club. Us kids never knew what went on in there. Hanley’s Pharmacy anchored the block on the corner of Gay Head. It had the standard marble soda fountain for the time that Charley Hanley owned it and another one at the corner of Centre and Moraine. It was also the corner the big kids hung out on. But most were gone now, fighting in WWII.

Across the street was Mozart Street, where I lived for about 17 years. The Lowell School, a four-story brick structure with a slate roof and iron fire escapes clinging to its sides, had been standing there since the 1880s. The other corner was occupied by another Protestant church. Forgive me for not knowing the names of the two aforementioned churches, but being raised Catholic in those days it was almost forbidden to know such things - one of my first lessons in bigotry. I lived in the big three-decker, nine-apartment house next to the playground - third floor, middle unit. The John Holland playground was named after a WWI soldier who was killed in action. It was our ballfield and one of our hangouts. Every morning at 9 old Mr. McGregor would come out with his ladder and set up the swings under the “swing roof” as we called it. It was summer, and the days seemed to last twice as long as they do now. The playground was surrounded by seven or eight poplar trees then, very tall trees. In late summer, every time a big storm hit, one of the trees would be blown over. God, every kid in the neighborhood would grab his old man’s ax and those trees would be in pieces before the day was over. The city would send a truck around to pick up the pieces. I heard they built a school where the playground was, and built a playground where the Lowell School once stood. How about that!

I remember back in 1947 when my father died, my mother had his wake at the house, one of the last house wakes I had ever been to. It lasted three days and nights, not a dry eye in the place. They talk about Irish wakes but this one was Polish, and it wouldn’t have been outdone by any wearing of the green.

Back up to Centre Street there was Teddy’s Hardware Store owned by Theodore Levin, a fine man who treated everyone really nicely, and next to him was a little fruit store owned by a small Italian guy named Joe. Thinking back, we were a melting pot of nationalities: Irish, Italian, Jewish, Armenian, Greek, some American Indians, and blacks. And we all got along just fine.

Now, when we got a little too worldly for the playground, there was another hangout spot, the Busy Bee Spa. It was a soda shop, a meeting place with nickel cokes and six plays for a quarter on the jukebox. It was owned by an old Greek couple whose son fought in the war and later rose to the rank of general in the army. If we lingered a little too long, or Police Officer Davenport, the cop on the beat, was having a bad day, he would tell us in as few words as possible to get off the #@!%& corner. If we didn’t move fast enough, “Hubba-Hubba” Davenport, as some wiseguy would call him, would lash out with one of his size 11’s and plant his foot on the nearest rear end. He said he kept his shoes shined on our rear ends.

The Blessed Sacrament Church and what was then known as the Cheverus School was a big part of my life for over 10 years. The church was led by Monsignor Burke, Father O’Leary, Father Coyne and Father Clark. I’m still pretty sure that you have to be Irish Catholic to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Depending on the politics of the day, Blessed Sacrament parish was split with Our Lady of Lourdes (over near Washington Street) for the presence of one of J.P.’s most illustrious citizens, James Michael Curley. Ever the showman, he would arrive for Mass five minutes late, march to the first pew of the church and get more admiring glances than if God Almighty was here for the Second Coming.

The school was run most efficiently by the Sisters of Charity, who, I am sure, taught the Marines how to fight the Second World War. But thanks to my mother’s homemade fudge and the fact that they couldn’t put up with me for another year, I escaped with honors in 1951. In June after school let out, the church held the Rose Festival, a fundraiser for the parish. A carnival was held on the grounds for about a week. Two cars would be raffled off. Can you now imagine a Buick and a Chrysler for 10 cents a chance?

Across from the church was the undertaker’s parlor run by Mr. Milely, who also was Santa Claus at the kids’ Christmas Party. Boy, I hated to sit on his lap. Half a block up was Estelle’s Bake Shop, where we would go after Mass to bring home jelly doughnuts the size of softballs for 50 cents a dozen. The next block up to Hyde Square, and the end of my neighborhood walk, was taken up by a five & dime store, Sawyer’s Drug Store, that was right out of the 1890s. A German deli, another barroom and a couple of package-goods stores were there, too.

The streetcar tracks went around the rotary, past the First National Store on the corner of Day Street, past the Angel Guardian Home for Boys and the Jamaica Theater, to connect to the tracks of the South Huntington Avenue line and go to the car barn on South Street, where a project was later built when the tracks were ripped up, the poles for the electric wire were ripped down and some of my childhood was paved over.

If anyone I once knew wants to get in touch, please write: Richard D. Goolsky, 912 Canvasback Rd., Rio Rancho, NM 87124; e-mail:

I Remember When
By Richard Goolsky

Here’s to the kids I grew up with. In each others’ eyes we’ll stay forever young. Most of us parted ways when we were twenty-one or so. Some had nicknames, some not. There was Bobby (Cupcake), Sully, Hawkeye, Danny, Frankie (Happy Tooth; braces weren’t an option in a working class neighborhood.) I can’t forget Muzzy, Chuck and Scully and Sonny. Jeez, I think the cast of Westside Story ripped us off. My name is Richard Goolsky and I grew up in the “block” at 41 Mozart Street and lived there from 1942 until 1958.

Jamaica Plain really hadn’t changed much from the 1880’s until after the Korean War in the 1950’s. Times weren’t stable for those seventy-some-odd years. First there was World War I, followed by the Great Depression, which lasted through the thirties. Then World War II came, so the surroundings stayed nearly the same through the first half of the Twentieth Century.

A lot of people came to Jamaica Plain from Germany in the late 1800’s to work in the breweries. There were still two breweries operating in the 1940’s. The Haffenreffer Brewery off Boylston Street made Pickwick Ale. We called it the poor man’s whiskey. A quart of it, and you were on your way.

The other brewery was the Croft Brewery at Heath and Terrace Streets. They also made a couple of potent brews, Croft Cream Ale and another god-awful concoction called Gamecock Ale. Living between these two, and high up on the third floor, I thought that the natural smell of Jamaica Plain was malt, barley and hops. The names of some of the streets reflect the German influence: Mozart, Dresden, Minden, Germania, Schiller and Hoffman Streets. On Amory Street near Jackson Square there was a German Social Club, The Arbiter.

Growing up in Jamaica Plain in the 1940’s, our lives were mostly confined to a six or seven block area. We hung out around the John Holland Playground on Mozart Street. It was named after a World War I vet who was killed in the war. I went back to Jamaica Plain this year for the first time since the early 1960’s and found a school on what was the playground, and the Lowell School, which was on the corner of Centre and Mozart, was razed. A playground is now on the site. Progress?

Most of the kids’ lives revolved around playgrounds. Jefferson Field, also known as the “Ledge”, would encompass Day and Heath Streets and the Hyde Square area. On the other end there were the Green and Carolina Street playgrounds. The kids around Parker Street and Bromley Park and Bickford Street had the playground on top of Parker Hill. Shared by all was Daisy Field off the Jamaica Way. I guess the kids around Eggleston Square had Franklin Park.

We had a sort of unwritten pecking order about hanging in different places in the neighborhood. When we reached around thirteen, we moved to the “Busy Bee Spa” on the corner at Centre and Wyman Streets. Five cent cokes, and six plays for a quarter on the Juke Box. The dividing line between the two police stations that serviced the area was right around there so if we didn’t move fast enough when the cops told us to get off of the corner, we had a choice of getting a kick in the seat of the pants by either “Hubba Hubba” Davenport from Station Thirteen on Seaverns Avenue or Cornelius Mahoney from Station Ten in Roxbury Crossing. Back in those days the cops used to keep their shoes shined by kicking us in the rear, for no apparent reason.

Around the age of seventeen the next move was to hang around Hanley’s Drug Store on the corner of Centre and Gay Head Streets. I bet that if the doorway next to the drug store hasn’t been remodeled, you can still see some names carved into the moldings from the 1940’s. During the early 1940’s that corner was kind of deserted after the eighteen-year-old kids went off to war. I guess it’s OK to name some of them. Mishey Murphy, Harold and his brother Richie Fahey, Mal Maloney, Jackie Curren, Eddie Smith, and Doodie Gallager were from the Mozart/Preising Street area.

To show how things revolve, after the vets were mustered out of the service, most returned to the playground on Mozart Street. They were eligible to collect money from the government. I don’t remember the official name of the program, but they called it the 9/20 Club. That meant that they could collect nine bucks a week for twenty weeks. Most played stickball at the playground until the dough ran out. Seems like it takes about ten years to circle the block up Bolster Street to Wyman and down Centre and back to the playground again.

Richard Goolsky can be reached at 912 Canvasback Rd., Rio Rancho, NM 87124 or by e-mail to: Reprinted by permission from the November 2002 JP Bulletin.

Times Have Changed
By Richard Goolsky

The wife and I flew back to Massachusetts from our home in New Mexico last May. After the compulsory visits to relatives and friends, we put aside some time to visit our old neighborhoods. Carol grew up in Dorchester Lower Mills, near the old Bakers Chocolate Mill.

Things there were pretty much the same as they were nearly fifty years ago - new names on the old storefronts, more traffic congestion, but easily recognizable. We drove to Jamaica Plain by way of Walk Hill Street to Forest Hills. That’s when I started to notice the changes. If it weren’t for the overpass to the Arborway, I would have missed the exit to South Street.

The El (elevated train) that used to go through Boston and on to Everett was gone. I looked to my right, and the MBTA yard that used to be the starting point for the streetcars that ran to West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park and Huntington Avenue was an empty field. On South Street, the project that used to be the turn- around point for the Dudley Street streetcars was still there. I was so busy trying to drive and look around that I didn’t even notice if the old tracks were still there.

Things hadn’t changed at all for the next few blocks. Curtis Hall was still there; we used to go swimming in the pool in the basement. We called it “the tank.” No bathing suit for the guys, but the girls wore city-issued one-piece suits. I’ve been told that the bigger the girl was, the smaller the size suit she got, and vice-versa. The monument area didn’t look too different either. Gone of course was the First National Market.


Pictured: 1905 photogaph of Curtis Hall from a postcard published by The Metropolitan News Company, Boston.
When we came to Burroughs Street, I remembered the drug store on the corner, but I remembered even more the Hanlon’s shoe store that was above it. You had to climb about forty old wooden stairs to get to it, but what a great smell of leather - no man-made materials back then. A new pair of penny loafers to go with your dungarees cost you $6.95.

My thoughts also ran down Burroughs Street to the Children’s Museum. What a great place that was. They had stuffed birds and animals and displays on the Southwest and other sections of our country. They took us on nature walks and bird watching hikes to the Arnold Arboretum and around Jamaica Pond. How great it is to have a rural setting so close to downtown Boston.


Pictured: The Children’s Museum at 60 Burroughs St. Photogaph from Jamaica Plain Historical Society archives. Photograph by Walter H. Marx, Jr.
One of the exhibits was of mounted animals from Africa and Australia; they even had a small baby elephant. The story is that the school kids of Boston around 1914 saved their pennies, and with them the city purchased three baby elephants for Franklin Park. They called them Molly, Waddy and Tony. That was Molly in the display - she died of pneumonia a few months later. I think I spent every Saturday there from the time I was seven until I was a teen. I heard that the museum still exists in Boston, near the waterfront. I wonder if they go for nature walks along the Big Dig?


Pictured: Photogaph from Jamaica Plain Historical Society archives. From a postcard published by Mason Brothers and Company.
Across from Burroughs Street was my first bank, The Boston Five-Cent Savings Bank. I think the big clock in front was still there, but that could be wishful thinking. Next door to the bank was Harvey’s hardware store. It was a small turn-of-the-century store with bins for the nails and screws, the kind of place that you can only see at the Smithsonian now.

Gone also was Woolworth’s on the corner of Seaverns Avenue. The old fire station that was across the street had moved and the Mohigan Market on the corner of Green Street was gone. What caught my eye was the kaleidoscope of colors of the storefronts: the reds, oranges, yellows and purples. Most of Centre Street looked about the same as it always had until I got to the Mary E. Curley School. The only change there was new windows, but across the street on the corner of Spring Park Avenue, the Wolffel Brothers Shell gas station was an empty field.

The Mobil Station, and the A&P Super Market, where I had my first job, was also just a passing memory. Looking down South Huntington Avenue, as I continued down Centre Street, I first became aware that the streetcar tracks weregone. I know that the tracks had been ripped up on lower Centre Street in the 1940’s, but not seeing them on South Huntington was my first real notice of change since the last time I was in Jamaica Plain maybe forty years ago.

Continuing down Centre Street, the Connolly Branch Library was still there. Interestingly, although owned by the City of Boston, it was started when Monsignor Connolly of the Blessed Sacrament Church died and willed his vast book collection to start a local library. From Hyde Square down to the Roxbury line was, well, like I was driving down an unfamiliar street. Gone were the Jamaica Theater, The Hyde Square Bowling Alleys, and Braun’s German Deli.

The First National Super on the corner of Day Street, O’Donnell’s Packy, Woody’s Record Store and Pino’s Barbershop and further down the block Sawyer’s Drug Store. What a great place to have a frappe! Walking through the door was like going back to the 1890s - a marble counter, ceiling fans and the old wooden and wire tables and chairs. On the opposite corner used to be the Pelham Spa, another hangout for the kids from the square.

Callahan’s Clothing on the corner of Forbes St. was a very classy men’s store in its time. The place that really makes my old memories salivate, Elsie’s Bake Shoppe, was next door. After Sunday mass, the ritual was to get a dozen jelly donuts or cinnamon coffee rolls. Now I’m not talking about today’s donuts and rolls, I mean donuts and rolls the size of your hand, I mean so big that only a half a dozen would fit in a foot square box, and the price was only 60 cents a dozen. And the taste? Let me put it this way. Sit back and think, think of your first real meaningful passionate kiss. Not the kiss from your Grandmother, or your fat Aunt Sophie with the moustache. I mean the kiss that you will remember until your dying day. I bet you haven’t thought about it in years, until now. That’s how I remember those baked goods. There’s much to be said about Blessed Sacrament Church and the old Cheverus School, but I’ll take up the almost ten years I spent there in grammar school in another chapter.

Morgan’s Creamery on the corner of Westerly Street, the Busy Bee Spa on the corner of Wyman Street, and Moe’s Meat Market on the other corner had vanished. Someone had told me my street, Mozart, was now one way coming up from Lamartine Street, so I turned down Wyman to go around the block. What struck me was that there weren’t any parking spaces. The houses hadn’t changed at all, except for different coats of paint. The First National on the corner of Mozart and Chestnut Ave., and the Pioneer Food Store on Mozart and Armstrong, were gone. I would have liked to park the car and walk around, but there were no spaces.

A playground still stands where the John Holland playground once was. Turning back onto Centre I expected to see the old Plant’s Shoe building. I gave a yell asking one of the locals, “Where did it go?” After a strange look and a short pause came the reply, “It burned down.” It must have been some fire; that place was huge. Most people don’t know much about it, other than that a lot of separate businesses were located there. Alpert’s Furniture, Bernet’s Yarn, Garland Sweaters, and Blocks Leather Jackets - where my mother worked as a Stitcher - were among the many tenants.

A wealthy industrialist, Thomas Plant, built the Plant Shoe Factory in the 1890s. His family came from Canada, by way of Maine. When built, the whole building housed his company that specialized in women’s shoes. The Great Depression took a toll on his business and he had to subdivide the factory. What is little known about the nine-story building, situated on thirteen acres, is that Fredrick Law Olmsted designed it. Olmsted designed Central Park in New York City and the Emerald Necklace that runs from the Charles River through the Fenway, Jamaica Pond and the Arnold Arboretum to Franklin Park.

At the Plant Shoe Factory, there was also a nice little park with trees and bushes and benches. It was a kind of oasis. This disappeared around 1950 when a Stop & Shop was built on the corner of Walden Street. The last couple of blocks towards Jackson Square were also devoid of my childhood places. The Madison Theater and Hoffman’s Bake Shop were both gone.

On the corner of Wise Street, I expected to see Kelly’s Bar Room, an old joint that must have been there over a hundred years. I wanted to stop in and ask what ever happened to the old crowd. However, when I got there, in its place was an empty lot. A street fair or flea market was in progress but I didn’t stop. I guess it’s inevitable that things change, but in my head I still think about the cinnamon rolls the size of your hand and the guys pulled up to bar stools at Kelly’s.

Richard Goolsky can be reached at 912 Canvasback Rd., Rio Rancho, NM 87124 or by e-mail to:

Reprinted by permission of the JP Bulletin. November 2002.

Some of the Other Guys
By Richard Goolsky

In the section of Jamaica Plain on the Roxbury line bounded by the train tracks and Centre, Heath and Bickford Streets, lived some of my friends that had fathers and uncles that were a little left of center with the law.

Most of them lived on Parker Street and Bromley Park. The Bromley-Heath housing project gobbled up these streets along with Albert Street when it was built in the late forties and early fifties. They called themselves The Parker Slobs. It was never meant in a derogatory way - the kids even wore the name like it was a badge of honor.

I’m sure some of you that are reading this will remember a few of the Parker Slobs. One of the girls, Toby, had a father who was kind of famous by any standard. While my dad had a regular job working at the Navy Yard in South Boston, Toby’s dad made his own hours. His name was Theodore Teddy Green. He was one of the most infamous bank robbers of the time.

After he was caught and did his time, he got a job selling used cars - sort of the same line of work. On the night of Jan. 17, 1950, a couple of the kids’ uncles did something that flashed on the news all over the country, if not the world: the Boston Brinks Robbery. At that time it was the biggest heist in the world. They got over 1.2 million in cash, with over another million in checks and bonds.

Knowing who the perpetrators were, and then proving it, was difficult. They probably would have gotten away with it if some of them hadn’t short-changed Specs O’Keefe out of his share of the loot. Later on Specs ratted the others out to the cops. Even then, it still took over seven years to wrap up the case.

The Centre Club, later known as the Irish Centre Club, on the Corner of Heath and Schilller Streets, was owned by one of the guys, Jazz Maffie. A few days after the robbery, the FBI and the Boston cops tore the inside of the club to pieces, but they found nothing. Jazz and Anthony Pino (they may have even been godfathers to my friends) were taken in and later released. They used to hang around Jackson Square a lot. The House of Murphy and the Napoli were a couple of the best known watering holes at the time, and we mustn’t forget the Cross Roads at Heath and New Heath Streets or MaGee’s Tavern, down the street from The Canada Dry bottling plant at the foot of Walden Street.

I almost forgot the Moxie (that soda that used to taste like rusty water) plant that took up the whole block of Heath, Bickford, and Parker Streets. For us kids there was the White House Baking Company on Parker. For ten cents you could buy a shopping bag full of day-old bread and cakes, I mean jelly rolls, spice cakes, and chocolate marshmallow rolls that you had to pay 29 or 39 cents for the day before.

But I digress. Back on the subject of robberies, another guy with roots in Jamaica Plain planned the Brinks job. Although he didn’t participate in the robbery itself, he had a lot to do with the planning. His name was Joe McGinnis and he owned a package goods store (a liquor store if you’re not from Boston), across the street from the Egleston Square Theater and next door to The Plainsman, a bar and grill. There was also a strip club next to it and upstairs from the theater; I’m not sure, but I think McGinnis owned it too. I think it was called the JA Club. I guess there’s a fine line at Egleston Square, some call it Roxbury, but I always considered from Atherton Street up past Forest Hills to be Jamaica Plain.

There are some famous people buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain including Eugene O’Neill, the famous playwright who wrote The Iceman Cometh; poet E.E. Cummings; abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; General William Heath, killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and for whom Heath Street was named; and the inventor of the fountain pen, Lewis Edson Waterman. If you’re under fifty years old, you may not know what a fountain pen is.

Back to the born and bred Jamaica Plain guys. Not all of the locals were famous for being left of the law. Every time you take a bite of a Dole pineapple, think of James Drummond Dole, who is credited with establishing the Hawaiian pineapple industry. Dole was born right here in Jamaica Plain. There was a Jamaica Plain guy who “done good.”

Richard Goolsky can be reached at 912 Canvasback Rd., Rio Rancho, NM 87124 or by e-mail to:

Reprinted with permission from the November 2002 JP Bulletin.

Jamaica Plain People
By Richard Goolsky

Back in the 1940s, the city and the schools kept us kids pretty occupied during school vacation. While the parents were planting Victory Gardens such as the big one on the Jamaicaway at Daisy Field, the city provided small plots for kids, and supplied the seeds, tools, and the teachers to show us how to grow vegetables. They had about an acre of land on Paul Gore Street for us to plant. Everything we grew we took home.

The easiest crop to grow was Swiss Chard and to this day I still don’t eat that stuff. We got by all summer long eating Devil Dogs, Whoopee Pies and Spuckies (that’s what we called a submarine sandwich back then).

Lou Perini was a local builder who also owned the Boston Braves at the time. The Sox were the top draw back then and the Braves were lucky to get a couple of thousand fans a game, so in order to swell the attendance, Perrini and the city started the “Knot Hole Gang” and we got in for free. The only cost was five cents each way on the streetcar to Braves Field on Gaffney Street off Commonwealth Ave.

We got that much easily enough by picking up bottles. We got two cents deposit back on the small bottles and a nickel on the large tonic bottles. Now you know I grew up in Boston; we didn’t call it pop or soda, but rather tonic.

Now the Braves weren’t a bad team; they won the pennant in 1948 but lost to the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. A couple of the players lived in Jamaica Plain at the Beaufort Apartments, on Centre Street: Alvin Dark the shortstop, and Eddie Stankey, the second baseman.

In those days a major league ballplayer was a touchable person. You could talk to them on the street and they shopped at the same stores we did. Oh, we thought they were rich. Our folk’s salary was around three thousand bucks a year while these guys were pulling in about seven grand. How times have changed! These days Pedro Martinez makes seven G’s a pitch.

Of course the most famous citizen of Jamaica Plain at that time was James Michael Curley who lived on the corner of Moraine Street and the Jamaicaway. Curley had been both Governor of Massachusetts and Mayor of the City of Boston.

The “Irish Robin Hood”, Curley took from the rich and gave seventy percent to the poor. In his later years I sometimes drove him home from the barbershop. He used to get his hair cut in Hyde Square. I would hang out at Mary and Angelo’s bowling alley and poolroom downstairs. When he was finished, the barber would yell down to see if anybody would drive Curley home. He always gave me a few bucks for a tip. He was a politician to the end. He died in 1958.

John Collins was another Boston mayor from Jamaica Plain. Collins held office from 1960 to 1968. He lived on Myrtle Street across from the Mohican Market on the corner of Centre and Green Streets.

Lastly, another local boy, Maurice Tobin, was born in nearby Roxbury’s Mission Hill neighborhood in 1901. In 1937 he defeated Curley in the race for mayor. Tobin defeated Curley again in 1941 and in 1944. He served as Governor of Massachusetts from 1944 to 1946. The Tobin Bridge was renamed in his honor although some locals still call it the Mystic River Bridge.

Richard Goolsky can be reached at 912 Canvasback Rd., Rio Rancho, NM 87124 or by e-mail to:

Saturday Matinees
By Richard Goolsky

Anyone remember before television existed? We had this thing called radio. It was kind of like TV. There was sound but you supplied your own pictures in your mind. After school I’d run home and turn on the big parlor Philco radio. At four o’clock the programs started. Some lasted a half hour but most were fifteen minutes long. My preferred position for listening to the radio was to kneel on the chair, put my head where my rear end should have been, and my rear end where my head was supposed to be. When we got our first TV in 1949, I had to reverse positions. The radio arrangement made the picture seem upside down.

Listening to the faceless voices on the radio made a kid’s mind work overtime. Imagine, what did Captain Midnight look like? Ovaltine, an awful kids’ drink that tasted like flat beer mixed with milk, sponsored the show. Tom Mix was easy to conjure up; he was a cowboy. The Ralston Cereal Company sponsored that program. They made another bad-tasting product called Hot Ralston. It was sort of like Cream of Wheat mixed with beach sand from City Point.

Whoa, I know what you are thinking. Why would kids plead with their mothers to buy this terrible stuff? We promised we would eat these things if we could have the labels and box tops plus a dime to get Captain Midnight Secret Squadron Decoder. Every afternoon the captain would give us a series of numbers. We would write them down and then set the decoder to the super secret key number and decipher the message. Usually the message told us to drag our mothers back up to the A&P on Centre Street and scream and cry until they bought us more crappy Ovaltine so we could send away for the Captain Midnight Atomic Bomb Ring. Jeez!

Tom Mix had a similar scam going. He had a Whistling Sheriff’s Badge. It had a built-in whistle. We would pin it to our shirt and blow on it if we were in dire trouble. Hell, I blew into it until I passed out and still the neighborhood bully, “Cupcake”, beat on me. Where were you when I needed you, Tom Mix?

Other radio pals included Superman. We knew what he looked like from the comics. Straight Arrow was an Indian crime fighter in the Old West. The toughest one to draw a mental picture of was The Shadow. I just couldn’t visualize an invisible crime fighter. When he wasn’t invisible, he was “Lamont Cranston, wealthy man about town.” Cranston Street in Jamaica Plain was named after him (just kidding.)

My mother finally threw out the Ovaltine when I got married and moved out of the house but the Hot Ralston never went to waste. She used to put it on the icy stairs in the wintertime and in the spring the birds would eat it.

Saturday matinees were what we waited all week for. We had two movie houses on Centre Street. The Jamaica Theater was located in Hyde Square and the Madison between Chestnut Avenue and Estrella Street.

The Jamaica Theater was OK, but it cost twenty-five cents to get in. The ushers had uniforms and it smelled just like the movies theaters in downtown Boston. The movies were fairly new and the popcorn cost fifteen cents while candy was five cents.

The other choice was the Madison. We called it “The Maddy”, “The Spit Box” and five or six other names that can’t be put into print. How we loved that place. The usher worked on an ice and oil truck and smelled of kerosene, which wasn’t so bad because it covered up the other odors that rose off the floors that were wet most of the time.

The routine was to get there early because we didn’t have any occupancy laws back then and no kids were turned away. If a good movie was showing, they would make us double up, two to a seat. The first seat in the second row on the right side was reserved for Joe Murdock the usher/oilman. Out of fear, no one would sit in that seat, even if Joe wasn’t there. He was about as big as Frankenstein (a movie that they managed to show a couple of times each month.)

First stop before getting in line was to stop next door at Sarlari’s to load up on one-penny candy. He had these long glass and wood cases loaded with candy. Now I’m not talking about a penny each. I mean two, three, or five for a penny. We bought Kits, BB Bats, Mary Janes, and Mint Juleps. We could fill a half-pound bag with a cornucopia of candy for five or six cents.

The line by now was almost down to Rocco’s Barbershop on the corner of Chestnut Avenue. A cheer that started at the back of the line grew louder with every step of the “ticket lady.” We didn’t know her name but she sold the tickets to get us into “The Maddy” and she was great. After we paid our nine cents at the booth, we filed in and presented our ticket to “Dutchy” who ran the show. He was an old gent with a constant scowl etched on his face. I think he hated kids and Saturday Matinees. On second thought, when my mother went to the show on “Dish Night”, he scowled then too. I guess he just didn’t like working at The Madison.

After “Dutchy” gave us our stub, we proceeded to the popcorn machine and plopped down seven cents for a bag of just about the best popcorn I’ve ever had. What a way to spend a few hours! We would watch two cartoons, a Three Stooges serial, a never-ending episode of Superman, and two full-length movies. We got all of this for the astronomical price of twenty 1940 cents. As an added bonus, if we had just seen a war movie, Joe the oilman/usher, would act like we were all Nazis and chase us out of the show while gunning us down with his finger.

Richard Goolsky can be reached at 912 Canvasback Rd., Rio Rancho, NM 87124 or by e-mail to:

Reprinted by permission of the JP Bulletin.

Early in September a resident in our area found two boxes of ledgers and letters in her cellar and after inquiry turned them over to the JP Historical Society. The ledgers needed cleaning and so caught our attention quickly. Four job account books and three individual account books of father and son carpenters, Thomas and Wallace Ross, had survived half a century in a corner until catching the eye of a person who did the best thing for them.

Though not all-inclusive, the ledgers run from 1926 to 1941. Thomas Ross took his son Wallace Ross with him on his jobs, and in March 1933 Wallace took over from his father. Happily the names of his father’s clients continue to appear on the accounts.



The individual accounts are quickly dealt with, as they merely contain sums owed by clients, but their alphabetical listing at each ledger’s start is revealing. The easy-to-read penmanship of the Ross’s reveals their work for Irish and German homeowners in the Green Street area between the elevated and railroad tracks by Washington Street with an occasional jaunt to the Pondside area. Thomas Ross worked at Mayor Curley’s Hibernian Savings Bank downtown a few times, several times at local churches, and occasionally for a local business, JP Trust Co. (now Bank of Boston), Green Street’s Potato Chip Co. and Raffety Fruit Man. An aspect of a past era is Ross’ work at several stables that were located on Green Street.

The job account books flesh out the money accounts by telling where, for whom, and what job was done day by day with materials and labor costs itemized. For example, in January 1940 Mrs. Flanagan had a baluster replaced and painted for a total of $1.35. Ross’s ledgers show rents from $30 to $70 and include work done at his own house, where the ledgers were brought to light 50 years later. In winter, he shoveled snow for hire, and his work must have been fine as it attracted heady real estate moguls here like B. F. Sturtevant and the Meehan’s.



The Sturtevant’s made metal products near Green Street, and their prospering business long allowed them to buy property in the area. A young Vermonter Eugene Foss, who later became Governor (1911-14), one of the gentlemen Ross worked for, married into the Sturtevant family. Two other properties on Sumner Hill, the Alveston Street Estate and the Elm Street Estate (no address given), kept Ross busy on his six-day workweek, with holidays happily noted. It is interesting to note that Ross always wrote ‘rhode’ for ‘road’.

The Meehan Estate
Without a doubt the Daddy Warbucks that kept the Ross’s going through the Depression was the estate of Patrick Meehan, whose holdings look like a Monopoly board in the Washington-Green Street area. Meehan Place atop the Stony Brook culvert across from Doyle’s is named for this enterprising Midas from Ireland, who could make money out of purchases and to his credit kept a fine carpenter on hand to keep everything up to standard.

Born in 1834, Meehan came in 1846 to America after national schooling in Ireland and worked here and there. By the end of the Civil War he was settled in JP as a contractor and 20 years later was counted among Boston’s top taxpayers. Meehan’s magical Midas touch passed onto his heirs, for the ledgers show new additions to the empire. One anchor in this real estate fleet was the hotel chain of the Amory, McKinley, Morse, and Williams-perfect for immigrants starting out in the nearby breweries.

Plate 2 of Bromley’s 1924 real estate atlas shows Meehan’s name over and over. The ledgers are of the same era and give this map more life. Readers will recall last year that Channel 2’s program “This Old House” featured a house on Greenley Place, the cul-de-sac between Amory and Washington Streets off Green Street. Ross refers to that “rhode” and probably worked there on what was another part of the Meehan Empire.

Sources: Bromley, Atlas, Philadelphia, 1924
Landmarks Commission, JP Inventory Boston 1978

By Walter H. Marx

Reprinted with permission from the November 15, 1991 Jamaica Plain Gazette. Copyright © Gazette Publications, Inc.

From the Boston Daily Globe, April 15, 1901

Jamaica Plain was visited by one of the most disastrous fires in its history early yesterday morning. It was in the extensive blower works of the R.F. Sturtevant Company, a three-story brick building covering a large area off Green St. and extending down nearly to the Jamaica Plain Station of the Providence Division of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad.

The alarm from box 511, at 2:58, was followed by a third and fourth in quick succession, the second being omitted.  So rapidly did the fire spread that the large main structure was one mass of flames within a few minutes after the fire was discovered. The concern manufactures various kinds of machinery and electrical goods as well as blowers.  Everything contained in the building, consisting of valuable stock and machinery, was totally destroyed.  One new planer not yet set up was valued at $4800, and this was a fair sample of the sort of property lost.

In the rear of the building destroyed was the big stable containing 28 horses.  This at one time was threatened, and the horses were removed to a place of safety.  After a half-hour’s hard work on the part of the firemen this building was saved. Extending back from the main building and connected with it were the boiler and engine room, the pipe shop and foundry.  These buildings were saved by great effort on the part of the firemen.

The fire is supposed to have started in the third story of the building known as the electrical department, next to the engine house.  At the time Hugh J. McMullen, the watchman, was on the third floor.  So rapidly did the flames extend that he had difficult work in making his escape.

All Over the Building
From here the fire seemed to shoot throughout the structure, and by the time the first stream was throwing water, the entire building was a seething cauldron.  Suddenly a terrific explosion occurred and the roof fell with a crash, sending up a mass of burning embers that came down in showers over an immense area.

The fire literally burned itself out.  All that is left of the big building are the walls and a smoldering pile of bent and twisted iron and bricks.  About 650 men will be thrown out of work. Estimates of the loss vary from $275,000 to $400,000. The company was fully insured, the policies having been renewed last week.  The risk was placed mostly in English companies, and is in the neighborhood of $500,000.

When the building was moved back three years ago from the railroad track, one story was added.  In this part of the structure the dynamo and electrical plant was situated. The building, occupied by R.S. Barrows as an insurance office, was threatened at one time, as were several buildings at the other side of Stony Brook, which is directly in the rear of the works. Crowds lined the platform of the railroad station, watching the destruction of the big building and house tops and windows were thickly peopled, wherever a vantage point could be had.

Watchman’s Peril
A reporter visited watchman McMullen at his home, 111 Call St., Jamaica Plain, yesterday morning, and found him in bed suffering from nervous shock and the result of having inhaled smoke. "After going over half of the building adjoining the one burned," he said, "I saw the light in the third floor, or electrical department.  I went to investigate and found a fire burning briskly there on the southwesterly side of the room.  I got a pail of water and threw it on the fire and started to get another when there was an explosion, and immediately the fire increased to such an extent and was followed by such dense smoke that I had great difficulty in reaching the stairway."

"The elevator well was near that stairway, and as I could not see anything on account of the smoke, and being afraid that I might fall to the basement through the well, I dropped on my hands and knees and crawled along the floor the entire length of the room.  In this way I reached the stairs at the north side of the building, and managed to descend to the second floor and thence to the first floor to the vestibule of the office."

"I went out, intending to pull an alarm from the box on Green St.  There was no fire alarm signal box in the building, but there is a special box, 511, located on the outside of the building near Union Ave., which I could not reach on account of the fire. I met a policeman when I got outside of the building and asked him if he had pulled an alarm.  He said an alarm had been sounded, as the engines were upon the scene and a line of hose was being laid.  I did not lose consciousness, but I was somewhat dazed. In a short time Supt N.B. Chamberlain of the blower works arrived, and, with him, I went back into the office and we saved some of the correspondence."

As to the Start
"The fire was burning over the floor when I saw it.  I think it started in drip pan near some barrels, which I believe contained alcohol and varnish.  There was sawdust on the floor in that room, and the only way I can account for the fire is spontaneous combustion."

Supt. Chamberlain was seen at his residence, 11 Burr St., Jamaica Plain. He said, "As yet we have no theory as to the cause of the fire. Our resources are such that we shall be able to continue our business with but slight interruption. I have conceived a plan of a new building which, if it meets with the approval of Eugene M. Foss, the manager and treasurer of the company, who is at present at Hot Springs, Virginia, but who is expected to leave for home tonight, will probably be built immediately." 

"I shall go to work this morning and clean out the engine pit and get ready to start up the other departments of the works not destroyed. The buildings not destroyed are: a foundry measuring 200 by 125 feet; a three-story building measuring 165 by 50 used for the building of heaters, sheet iron work, etc.; a building measuring 90 by 90 used for the manufacture of sheet iron blowers; another 75 by 50 building, two stories high; a three-story building measuring 40 by 90; another building measuring 100 by 90 used for storage and shipping; and a three-story stable measuring 75 by 50, all connected."

"The firemen did well to stop the progress of the flames as they did.  We had but recently added about $75,000 worth of tools and machinery, and we had a large amount of electrical work ready for shipment."

For U.S. Battleships
"We also had a large number of engines and blowers for the government, to be used on battleships and cruisers in course of construction in various ports of the country, nearly completed, all of which are destroyed. We employ about 650 hands, all of whom will be temporarily thrown out of employment." 

"The business was started by B.F. Sturtevant in 1864 and was located then at 72 and 84 Sudbury St., at which location we were burned out in 1875.  The present plant was established at Jamaica Plain about 24 years ago. Mr. Sturtevant died in April, 1889, and since that time the business has been conducted by his son-in-law, Mr. Foss."

William Bently, a machinists’ helper, who lives at 23 Union Ave. and is in the employ of the Sturtevant Company, said he heard the alarm from box 511.  "I dressed and ran into the street," he continued, "just as the engines arrived, and then the whole upper portion of the building was in flames.  Very soon there was an explosion, the roof went into the air, and the whole building seemed to burst into flame from top to bottom.  The rapidity with which the fire spread was surprising."

Sounded the Alarm
Ernest J. Sackrison, the young man who sounded the first alarm, was seen at his home at 43 Union Ave., which is directly in the rear of the destroyed building. He was awakened by his mother.  He quickly dressed and ran to box 511 and pulled in the alarm. "When I saw it," he said, "the whole of the third floor of the building was ablaze, and the flames were darting out of all the windows.  When the engines arrived the entire three floors of the building were a seething mass."

By Michael Guignard

Although I was raised in the State of Maine and always knew I was born in Boston and adopted, I had never inquired about the circumstances of my birth until I found out in 2003 who my birth mother was from her daughter, my half-sister. To make a long story short, I was adopted by my birth mother’s sister and her husband, so it was rather easy to make contact with the woman whom I had known all my life as my aunt.

At our first meeting after the revelation, I learned that my mother had spent five months in 1946 at a home for unwed mothers called Talitha Cumi (a phrase from the Bible meaning “Arise, young woman”) in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. One entry on the internet surmises, “I can well imagine that once the facility was built, few in Jamaica Plain would have been aware of it. Set off at the edge of a residential district that still was not filled in, it was probably out of sight as well as out of mind. Still, if not of Jamaica Plain, it was certainly in Jamaica Plain.” It was not unusual for these maternity homes to be in more isolated areas to keep a curious public from disturbing the calm and peaceful environment that was being created for the girls who were seeking secrecy and anonymity.

I visited Jamaica Plain in 2007 after doing some research on the Home. I found the building that had housed the Talitha Cumi Maternity Hospital and Home at 200-215 Forest Hills Street, which now housed the Parkside Christian Academy and the Parkside School of the Bethel AME Church. Talitha Cumi had been run by the New England Moral Reform Society, described as “an extreme wing of the American Protestant movement known as the Second Great Awakening,” whose members “believed in social action as a moral imperative and, in particular, conducted a vigorous crusade against the double standards of a male-dominated society” (Jamaica Plain Historical Society, http://www.jphs.org/photogallery/historic-jamaica-plain-photos-gallery-1/678575).

At the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, I found more information about the Society in the rare book room which housed the 56th Annual Report of the Society (1892 and some statistics for the year 1900). The group had been organized in 1836 by “earnest Christian women” who longed to open a “door of hope” to “those hopeless and helpless girls who found themselves facing the sadness and shame and wrong of unwed motherhood.” The Home “has been opened all these years to such girls in the hour of their despair, when they know not which way to turn.” Thousands of girls had been helped and “encouraged to seek forgiveness of the past and strength for the future.” Many were very young when they “made the terrible mistake which might lead to a suicide’s death or an abandoned life.” Some were “helplessly ignorant of the gravity of their wrong,” and were able to avoid the “publicity of hospital care.” They needed a place to hide before their condition began to show. Hospitals would discharge them after a couple of days, while the Talitha Cumi Home cared for them for four weeks after delivery.

Critics of the Home argued that the Society encouraged promiscuity, but members of the Society pointed to the fact that the girls who received care did not know of its existence prior to their crisis pregnancies. And the girls admitted to the Home had to present a doctor’s certificate showing that this was their first pregnancy and that they were free of venereal diseases. The Home apparently did not admit patients facing a second pregnancy. The 1892 annual report states that, “It is not the mission of this House to deal with degraded women who have been promiscuous sinners, but rather young girls who have slipped through ignorance and unguarded surroundings … and are in need of care for the first time.”

The constitution of the Moral Reform Society summarizes the philosophy of its members (any woman who paid $1.00 a year dues could belong). Article II stated its objectives: “Maintain a home for the shelter and salvation of erring girls;” “to receive and instruct them during the waiting period bringing such influences to bear upon them in their sorrow that they are led to God’s forgiveness and hope;” “to follow them with Christian love and care as they go forth to begin life anew,” and “to assist them in finding suitable occupation if they are without funds.” Article V discussed the goal of the Home in placing the girls in suitable employment. The 1892 annual report states that domestic work in the homes of Boston’s prominent families was considered ideal employment because it allowed for mother and child to live together. At the Talitha Cumi Home, the young girls were encouraged to keep their babies, in the 1890s at least. The Home’s founders believed that helping the girls meet “the sacred obligations of motherhood” would lead them to a more productive and happy life, and help them avoid the mistakes of their past.

The Home made a special effort to keep in touch with its former patients. The 1892 annual report notes that the Home stayed in touch with 18 of the 22 girls living “nobly and purely.” Twenty-four women had babies at the Talitha Cumi Hospital 1891, two of whom had died of “puerperal fever,” it was noted, because they were very ill when they made their way to Jamaica Plain. The report stated that they were the first maternal deaths at the Home in 20 years. Fifteen of the babies born there in 1891 lived with their mothers; four had been adopted; two were in the care of the State of Massachusetts, and 3 had died. The Home, by the way, did not provide adoption services. The four children who were adopted were presumably the result of private adoptions or state-assisted procedures.

In 1892, the average stay at Talitha Cumi was 12.5 weeks, including four weeks after delivery. In the appeal for funds, director Caroline Hastings cited statistics for 69 young woman admitted to the Home in the several years before the fund drive of 1892. Fifty-four were Protestants; 15 were Catholic; 20 were from Massachusetts; 37 were U.S. born; 19 were from Canada; two were Black and three were from Ireland. Fees were $3.50 a week, but 30 girls were charity cases; 19 had paid in full and 15 had paid part of the room, board and hospital costs. (A total of 64 girls are accounted for by ability to pay – I do not know how the other five girls were classified.) The ones who were able to pay in full had probably been placed there by middle- and upper-class parents who wanted to avoid the social shame of an unmarried pregnant daughter.

In the fund-raising section of the 1892 annual report, a more frank and informal description of the “guests” is presented. To allay any fears among potential donors, patients at Talitha Cumi were portrayed as the girl next door. Phrases such as, “So many are like the girls we know,” and “Some of them even look touchingly like that sweet girl at home, daughter or sister,” give the 1892 report its tone. Some of these “girls betrayed by boyfriends” came from homes where a parent had died and were banished from their own homes by angry and embarrassed parent(s) to fend for themselves. (The annual report notes that one young girl arrived at South Station in Boston and had to rely on the kindness of strangers for directions to the Home.) Twenty-eight of the 64 girls were under twenty years old: one, a victim of rape, was thirteen years old; another was 14 years old, and 18 girls were between 15 and 17 years old. There was seldom a mention of the fathers except for the betrayal comment noted above, but this section of the report did note that 16 fathers were under age 20. It was also noted that some of the residents had been victims of sexual abuse and violence, but that they were a small minority. For the most part, wrote the administrators of the Home, these girls had yielded to temptation.

The purpose of the 1892 fund drive was to move the Home from its Shawmut Avenue address because it was too small. The Moral Reform Society had set about raising $25,000 “for this work so that it may be carried on in a ‘Home’ suited to its necessities.” A 1910 Boston Globe article quotes Dr. Julia Plummer appealing for funds for “unfortunate girls, most of whom have come to their unhappiness through no fault of their own and many of whom are under 16 years of age.” Dr. Plummer said the work of the Home embraced not only the hospital work, and the educational work to which many people preferred to give their money, but it “healed the broken hearts of helpless young women, who nowhere else in the state could find tender, sympathetic care in their time of awful need.” The fund-raising campaign was successful, and by 1912 (according to an article in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy), the new home and hospital were in operation on Forest Hills Street in Jamaica Plain.

I searched for information about what the girls did at the Home while awaiting the birth of their children. In 1900, the girls were given tasks to perform in the kitchen and laundry, and were required to keep their rooms clean and clutter free. They were given cooking lessons and taught the domestic arts such as sewing and mending. They were taught higher standards of behavior that inculcated a “vision of womanhood,” stressing “dignity of Christian purity.” “The girls who leave our Home,” it was written, “will have had a share of our home life that can remain with them in the future. The goals and philosophy of the Home were repeated: “We believe that although they have been wronged, the best hope for the future of these women lies in mother love and mother responsibilities. We expect our girls to support their child either as a maid where the child lives with her or by paying the child’s board in some suitable place.” Apparently, not all prospective employers were keen on having their household domestic bring an out-of-wedlock child with her to live in the family hearth. But given what has been written about Homes for Unwed Mothers in the post-World War II period, and the trauma suffered by mothers who were for all intents and purposes forced to surrender their children, the system at Talitha Cumi in the 19th century appeared more enlightened.

The Library’s rare book room at Copley Square also had statistics for the Talitha Cumi Home from March 1, 1900 to March 1, 1901. Of the 65 births that year, none were adopted, at least not by the time the statistics were compiled. Fifty babies were kept by their mothers; six became wards of the state; five babies died (soon after birth I assume), and four were still-born. No maternal deaths were reported.

Administrators that year stressed that each girl was given a Bible and were helped to use it intelligently. “Somebody cares” was the message imparted to each patient. As noted above, the Home did admit Catholics but only if they promised to read the Bible and participate in religious activities.

Fast forward to 1946. I was born on July 1. My mother’s roommate had her baby on July 5. Although they were almost 10 years apart in age, they were paired because they were both French speakers of French-Canadian origin. My mother died in 2003 before I had started doing research on the Talitha Cumi Home, and before I had the opportunity to ask her about her stay there. But Mom did remember knitting baby clothes for me during her stay in Jamaica Plain. Her roommate remembers knitting baby clothes also and performing kitchen chores as part of her daily routine. She also read a lot, she told me, but not the Bible, as that was no longer a requirement for Catholics at the Home. Nor were compulsory religious services. And the girls were allowed to receive visitors. Mom’s roommate also remembers going as a group to visit the Franklin Park Zoo and remembers the railroad trestle that crosses that park. But they did not take many day trips since they travelled as a group. There was nothing inconspicuous about a group of seven or eight pregnant young girls visiting any local landmark.

I was baptized on August 6 at Our Lady of Lourdes church in Jamaica Plain, not far from the Home. In speaking to the pastor there in 2007, he told me that the Home would regularly bring three or four children to the church for baptism. The pastor would scurry to find sponsors. My grandmother was one of my sponsors. She probably came down to Boston to discuss adoption arrangements with her daughter who, I surmise, was still residing at Talitha Cumi. Her roommate stayed at the Home until September because of unsettled conditions with the baby and at home. So the Talitha Cumi Home was still extending its care and hospitality to its patients long after they had given birth. My Mom’s roommate also gave her child up for adoption. She does not remember any offers of domestic employment during her stay. The Home, which after 1948 was called the Hastings House, presumably named after Caroline Hastings, closed in 1951. I have not been able to find out why, but I would surmise that the State of Massachusetts began to take a more active role in supporting unwed mothers-to-be, and that the cost of running the Home and providing top-of-the-line care proved to be more than private charity could raise.

My mother had very pleasant memories of the Home even though she had been there under very trying circumstances. Although my grandfather would not let her bring me home, she had refused to surrender me. I actually lived in a foster home in Caribou, Maine (with a very nice family, she told me) for the first six months of my life, while she continued living at home 35 miles away. She visited as often as she could. In telling this story to my kids, they have asked, “Your mom was almost 26 when you were born, why didn’t she just get an apartment somewhere and a job and just keep you?” The research that I have done on out-of-wedlock births in the post-World War II era gives one a clear understanding of why I was surrendered for adoption: no job, no money, no support system, no government aid programs. Mom could not go back to her hometown (hey, who’s that little kid with you, anyway?). And my grandfather had what he considered a perfect solution. “Let your sister (who can’t have any children) and her husband, who live in Maine, adopt your baby.” Six months later I came to live in Biddeford, Maine.

My first post-discovery opportunity to speak with my Mom came on February 24, 2003, four months before she died. One of the first things she said to me was that she had not wanted to surrender me. But in retrospect, she was present at my high school graduation, my college graduation, my wedding, and our three children’s baptisms. I was even at her wedding in 1948. We spent Christmas together for many years as we travelled to my grandparents’ house where my birth mother and her husband lived and cared for my maternal grandparents. Her roommate, who was from Massachusetts, tells me that they would often meet in Biddeford, Maine for family gatherings where I was present. In short, my birth mother saw me growing up.

My kids ask, “Your parents died in 1987 and 1988 respectively. Why didn’t your birth Mom tell you then,” especially since her husband had always known who I was. “Shame? Embarrassment?” My half-sister found out the secret by accident and she was the only one of my four siblings who knew my true identity. The State of Massachusetts now makes one’s real birth certificate available. Listed under “mother” is my birth-mother’s maiden name. I am listed as Michael with Mom’s maiden name. My baptismal certificate lists me as Michael Guignard, but Church authorities note that I was not legally adopted until 1953, when I made my First Communion. I am sure there is a story behind that fact pattern.

But I am indebted to the Blue Bloods and Boston Brahmins who founded the Talitha Cumi Home and gave my birth-mother refuge in her time of need. It is ironic that the French newspaper in Biddeford, Maine often railed against the Yankees, who the editor said were a dying breed losing their religion and closing their churches. Those Yankees saved many children – and mothers too – when they were abandoned by their families, communities, boyfriends and fiancés, churches, pastors and local governments. The Social Gospel and Christian compassion were alive and well at 215 Forest Hills Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Michael Guignard, Ph.D
Alexandria, VA
July, 2014

The Jamaica Plain Historical Society archives contain a hand-written nursing certificate certifying that Miss Alberta Ray Wright had completed a six month course as an obstetric nurse and was signed by Julia Plummer M.D. at the Talitha Cumi Home when it was located at 206 West Brookline Street in Boston. The certificate is dated April 12, 1894 and was donated in January, 2015 by William H. Jenkins of West Brookfield, Massachusetts to the Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

This article originally appeared in the April 29, 1918 edition of the Boston Daily Globe. Production assistance provided by Kate Markopoulos.

Three firemen were hurt at the fire that destroyed the residence of Rudolph F. Haffenreffer on Mt. Walley Ave., Jamaica Plain, near Pond St., at the Brookline line, at 4 am yesterday. Because the residence, one of the landmarks of the district, stood on the top of a hill slightly higher than the wa-ter level in the Brookline Reservoir, from which the water supply had to be taken, the firemen were unable to get any water. But for the chemical streams the fire would have had its own way. When the pressure failed, Engine 45 was called upon by the members of Engine 28 to act as a relay pumping station, but even this extra work was without avail.

Laddermen Gillespie of 10 and Griffon of 30 were overcome, but revived. Ladderman Scheidel of 10 sprained an ankle and was taken away in an automobile.

The fire started in the rear of the second story near the chimney flue and quickly worked into the attic and through the roof. The cause is unknown.

Mr. Haffenreffer, who discovered the fire, after summoning the aid of the other six occupants, at-tempted to extinguish the flames with a hand extinguisher, but seeing the fire spreading, sent a still alarm, which was followed by a box alarm from box 2492. The damage was set by police at $50,000.

After the fire at the Rudolph Haffenreffer home in Jamaica Plain yesterday morning had been ex-tinguished, the only article of value found intact was a Liberty Bond of the third loan, bought by Mr. Haffenreffer a few days ago. While the bond was soaked in bicarbonate solution, the markings on it were plainly recognizable.

Firemen said that the bond must have had a charmed existence to withstand the tremendous heat, and are at a loss to explain how it escaped.

The planning and construction of the first phase of Woodbourne took place during a period of time when Boston changed from a bustling, chaotic, industrial 19th Century city and entered the 20th Century. It was a period when the strong mayor form of government and professional city planners came into being which would do so much to shape Boston after the Second World War. Seeds were sown for the modern City of Boston between 1909 and 1913 by a pioneering - if paternalistic - effort of a large group of Boston business leaders to transform the way Boston was governed, planned and developed.

Called the Boston 1915 Movement, it was largely the vision of Edward Filene, the moving force behind the Boston Dwelling House Company. Filene and five others formed an executive committee early in 1909 to address the needs of the new automobile age in Boston. These men were James Jackson Storrow, Louis D. Brandeis, Bernard Rothwell and George S. Smith. Filene, one of Boston's most important retail merchants, was concerned with housing for the working classes. Storrow was an attorney who specialized in corporate law and managed investment trusts (he later went on to save and restructure the General Motors Corporation); Brandeis was an attorney whom President Woodrow Wilson would nominate as the first Jewish judge on the Supreme Court; Rothwell was President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce; Smith was a wholesale clothing merchant and President of the Boston Merchants Association.

Filene and his colleagues held a dinner for 230 of Boston's business, industrial, financial, educational, religious, and political leaders on March 30, 1909 at the Boston City Club. The dinner was the unveiling of the Boston Plan; a "far reaching plan," wrote the Boston Herald the next day," for making the Boston of 1915 the finest in the world."

Fifty years later, another New Boston Plan would be presented by Mayor John Collins and his recent appointment, the first Director of the new Boston Redevelopment Authority in 1960. This Plan was created in a Boston of despair and near bankruptcy; its tax base eroded by migrating industry to regions with lower wage scales and a vanishing middle class taking Eisenhower's expressways to the suburbs. The first New Boston Plan - on the other hand - was announced in a time and spirit of great optimism at the dawn of a new century. Indeed, it was a celebration of the end of the 19th Century. The unplanned industrial and transportation growth and overcrowded, unregulated and unsanitary housing conditions were choking Boston. Unchecked and uncoordinated capitalism was threatening to weaken industrial and business growth. The business community intended through Boston 1915 to put its own house in order and create an efficient and planned 20th Century Boston in its own image within five years.

"Your hosts," spoke Mr. Filene in his opening remarks," have asked you here ... to consult with you. We believe that the growth and welfare of our city can be immeasurably helped by coordination and planning ahead. We are allowing slum conditions, a repetition of the old conditions of overcrowded housing to be recreated even in the outskirts of our city. We must tackle this problem and we can find a way."

"In the headquarters which will be opened tomorrow morning at 20 Beacon Street we will call to our aid experts and all the other help needed. [We will] bring to Boston in addition to what we already have here a knowledge of all the best things that have been done by any other city in the world and combining all these best things in a Plan for Boston."

Mr. George Smith said that the mission of the Boston Plan would be "to bring about mutual understanding and cooperation among the agencies in existence to the end that they may unite their forces in support of a common program." The Program proposed was a sixteen point five-year plan which the executive committee had drawn up and which was approved by a voice vote at the dinner.

Some of the points included, as quoted in both the Boston Globe and Boston Herald the next day, were:

• First, by 1910, to have an expert accounting of the financial condition and resources of the city present and prospective.
• Second, by 1910, to understand clearly the waste in public resources and service.
• Third, by 1915, to have the best public health department.
• Fourth, by 1910, to have made a careful accounting of the human resources of the city to include the skill level of the workers and the executive abilities of industrial leaders.
• Fifth, by 1910, better working conditions.
• Sixth, by 1910, extension of existing industries and introduction of new enterprises.
• Seventh, by 1915, to have a system of public education that actually fits the boys and girls of Boston for their life work.
• Eighth, by 1915, to have well along the execution of an intelligent system of transportation for the whole state, electric, express, freight and passenger.
• Thirteenth, by 1915, to increase the number of branches of the public library.
• Fifteenth, by 1912, to have more music in the parks.
• Sixteenth, by 1910, a comprehensive system of wage earner insurance and old age pensions.

Other speakers made additional recommendations for the new Boston of 1915. "We ought to move all our public schools to the borders of our city parks. There is no better way in which we can get our children the good of the country... good pure air and proper outdoor play."

Another floor comment raised one of the most important issues of the Boston 1915 movement, one which led directly to the creation of Woodbourne, that of stricter building codes." We need to compel builders to allow a decent amount of light and air in tenements."

But it was the statement of Mr. George W. Codman which admitted the real meaning behind the Boston 1915 movement." Have we not misconceived the true nature of our corporate city life? We have tried to run the city as a political institution and have made a dismal failure at it. We think now that we want a business administration of our cities with businessmen in command."

And that was exactly what was attempted in the 1909 election for mayor when James J. Storrow, executive committee member of Boston 1915, ran against John F. Fitzgerald, who was seeking his second term in office. Before (and after) Boston 1915 there was the Good Government Association, and both were made up of the same people: The Associated Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants Association and the Boston Bar Association. The Good Government Association (GGA) was created in 1903 by Louis D. Brandeis and other business leaders. Its first president was Lawrence Minot, son of William Minot Jr. who lived at Woodbourne. (Lawrence Minot, as chief executor of his father's estate, would sell the property to the Boston Dwelling House Company.)

The GGA was formed mainly in response to the conviction of State Representative James Michael Curley for fraud in Federal court because he took a civil service exam impersonating a constituent in 1902. This was the final blow for business leaders who had watched in horror at the political rise of the Irish Democratic ward leaders and their art of patronage. Curley was anathema to the business leaders of the GGA; he represented all that was going wrong in elected city government. City affairs, in the eyes of these men, were being directed from Irish Democratic clubhouses in the North End and from Curley's base in Ward 17 in Roxbury. City agencies were being filled with often incompetent political appointments. What was worse was the increased taxes levied on business property due to the soaring costs of municipal contracts - particularly in construction - because of graft and kickbacks. All this caused the GGA to form and seek ways to correct these problems before commerce and industry moved out of the city. In this context it is easy to understand why a municipal financial audit and a study of waste and mismanagement in City affairs were the first two points of the Boston 1915 agenda.

The election in 1905 of John F. Fitzgerald (grandfather of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy), political boss of the heavily Irish Catholic Democratic North End, created panic within the GGA. In 1906, they lobbied through the press for an investigation into the corruption in the awards of city construction contracts, for which they held the Mayor personally responsible. Mayor Fitzgerald - hoping to avoid an investigation damaging to his reputation and political ambitions - called for an independent Finance Commission to review city expenditures. This was authorized by the Republican controlled State legislature in July of 1907. Yet, although the Mayor appointed the seven member Finance Commission (including the progressive former Mayor Nathan Matthews, who had always worked well with Irish political leaders), the negative press caused by the investigation into illegal contracts cost him reelection that year.

The Finance Commission (or FinCom) realized that reforms had failed in the past because the structure of government remained in the hands of ward leaders whose power rested with patronage and often graft. The FinCom also felt that the present form of ward- based city government was pushing property taxes too high because it depended upon increased city spending on municipal jobs and job generating capital projects in the wards. The FinCom felt that this was weakening the industrial and commercial base of the city. The FinCom devised a new City Charter that would be brought before the voters in November, 1909, during the first six months of Boston 1915. With the strong backing of Boston 1915 executive committee member, Bernard Rothwell, acting in his capacity as President of the Boston Chamber of Commerce, the FinCom introduced a strong mayor charter in order to dilute the locally based (and Irish - controlled) city government. The Board of Aldermen and Common Council would be abolished and replaced by a nine member city council elected at large city wide. The powers of mayor would be strengthened and the term of office extended to four years. (The new charter, wrote James M. Curley in his 1957 memoirs," was apparently designed to get rid of me." Just the opposite: Curley took full advantage of the increased powers of the mayor during his four terms in that office.)

Voters approved of the new charter in November of 1909 by 52%. Ironically, although the businessmen reformers won control of a weakened city council, they lost control of the Mayor's office. In a hotly contested race, which can only be described as a class and ethnic contest, the wealthy Storrow lost to ward boss Fitzgerald in January, 1910. More people voted than in any other election for mayor. Fitzgerald would be the first Mayor in Boston to serve for four years.

John F. Fitzgerald saw his victory over James Storrow as a vindication of his good name. (Decades later, his daughter Rose would equate the 1910 campaign with the one in which her grandson John waged against Richard Nixon for the presidency.) In the words of Doris Kearns Goodwin," the Mayor was more secure in his knowledge that he was indeed equal to the task of governing his city... a task, ironically, made easier in his second term as a consequence of the reform legislation he so vigorously opposed. By providing limits to the frenzied patronage seeking which undermined his first term, the new city charter protected Fitzgerald from his own vulnerabilities..."

The second Fitzgerald administration worked in harmony with many of the goals of Boston 1915. His campaign slogan of 1905. "A Bigger, Better, Busier Boston" fit in perfectly with the optimistic times of the second term. Business leaders would profit from a bigger and busier Boston, especially now that the ward boss system had been weakened by the 1909 charter reform law.

"Fitzgerald made it clear", wrote Goodwin, "that he intended to be judged his second term by one standard alone, his ability to advocate and enact legislation that would make the life of the average citizen more worth living; measures that would improve the moral and physical welfare of the people of Boston..." Words like ' moral' and 'physical welfare' were taken right out of the language so often heard from the Boston 1915 Movement.

The By Laws of Boston 1915 stated, for example, that it was organized "for the progress of Greater Boston; to promote by all lawful means the social, material, moral and intellectual welfare of Greater Boston."

Within the first six months of his second term, Fitzgerald took an action that encouraged the Boston 1915 reformers: he called for a monthly conference of all city departments so as to coordinate city services as well as to clarify the responsibilities of each department. In the fall of 1910, the Mayor appointed Louis Rourke, who had previously served as a chief engineer on the Panama Canal project, to the new consolidated office of Board of Public Works. The new Board combined the street, water and engineering departments into one agency under one commissioner. This was a "decided first step in municipal efficiency and economy." cheered New Boston magazine. "Harmony of action is absolutely essential if the public work of a city is to be properly prosecuted." The mayor, however, vetoed a city council ordinance passed in late 1910 which would consolidate the departments of parks, public baths and music into one Parks and Recreation Department. This didn't go far enough for the Mayor: he wanted to reorganize the entire system of recreation services to city residents. The Boston 1915 Movement had an apostle in John F. Fitzgerald. Like his predecessor Hugh O'Brien, the first Irish mayor of Boston, Fitzgerald could work with the business leaders of Boston.

II.

Soon after the founding dinner, the Directorate of Boston 1915 was expanded to include two members who would become trustees of the Boston Dwelling House Company, the banker Frank Day and the housing social worker Robert A. Woods. Three other trustees of BDHCo were among those invited to the founding dinner of Boston 1915, John Wells Farley, Charles H. Jones and James L. Richards. Richards, director of Boston Consolidated Gas Company, was one of the Filene Seven who organized the movement. In the spring of 1910, William A Leahy was added to the executive committee as a representative of the mayor.

The Board of Directors numbered eighty men and women and included Robert Treat Paine, the dean of philanthropists in Boston who developed the housing for working men in Jamaica Plain factory district (Paine died on August 11, 1910, so his participation in Woodbourne can only be speculated), architect Ralph Adams Cram, and the daughter of the Irish patriot and editor of The Pilot, John Boyle O'Reilly. Mary Boyle O'Reilly was involved with prison reform and served on the City Board of Children's Institutions. Other Boston 1915 Board members were Phillip Cabot of The Improved Housing Association, Ellen Coolidge, of the Boston Social Union, Meyer Bloomfield also of the Boston Social Union as well as the Civic Service House, James H. Fahey, publisher of the Republican Boston Herald and a Director of the Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Reverend John Hopkins Dennison of the Central Congregational Church on Newbury Street. The Catholic Charities was represented by its Director, the Rt Reverend Joseph G. Anderson, the Auxiliary Bishop of Boston and Reverend Maurice J.O' Connor.

The "single aim of the Boston 1915 Plan," as stated in New Boston magazine, the official organ of the movement, was "to apply the principles of business organization to a federation of agencies, to focus this combined effort by setting definite goals for early achievement."

It was the intention of the Directorate from the start to promote the aims of Boston 1915 through a widely advertised public program that would show what civic cooperation meant. It was called the "1915 Boston Exposition: a graphic display of the living and working city... a display of Boston as a going concern." The term 'exposition' was deliberately chosen because it was inspired by the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago from May through October, 1893. Indeed, the entire agenda of Boston 1915 was under the enormous influence of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. At the end of the 20th Century it is difficult to imagine the magic that the 1893 World's Fair cast over American cities for the first quarter of this century.

The World's Columbian Exposition was built over 686 acres of lakeshore parkland to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World for Spain by Christopher Columbus. The fairgrounds were landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted and the exposition halls - some of which were huge - were designed by the greatest living architects and artists of the day. The fair achieved almost universal acclaim because in the midst of the disorganized industrial city which sprawled over miles of congested if not squalid housing, serpentine transportation networks, and inept if not corrupt political machines in city halls, was a planned metropolis of wide boulevards, parks and waterfronts; spacious and handsome buildings of uniform massing and proportion, and an efficient transportation system. It was called "The City Beautiful" and Woodbourne was part of the solution first introduced in Chicago to create a beautiful orderly city.

The Chicago World's Fair was the triumph of the city planner; indeed the fair would make that new term a recognized force in the development of the 20th Century city. The fair was also the triumph of private investors and business leaders who largely financed and managed the exposition. (The fair was directed from an elegant, domed Administration Building in the center of the complex). This fact was not lost on the reformers who saw the World's Colombian Exposition as the future of American cities: a planned, rational, coordinated city, uniform in scale and design and directed from a central office rather than by political machines but by business leaders. (Not lost either was the fact that the fair barely made $400,000 in profit from an investment of $28 million. As the Woodbourne Directors learned, philanthropy does not make money.)

All the buildings at the Exposition were spray painted white which increased the sense of a unified whole over the vast campus of huge buildings, while giving it a celestial, futuristic glow which did not fail to impress fairgoers of the future city to come. The beauty and efficiency of the White City was in marked contrast to the dull brick and polychrome stone gothic buildings of the contemporary city and the barking disorder of urban life. (When the four apartment buildings on Hyde Park Avenue were completed their light color stucco walls caused the area to be called "White City" because they were the only buildings southwest of the Boston Elevated Terminal at Forest Hills. The name still lingers today, but it had far more meaning in 1914.)

The Boston 1915 Exposition opened to the public on November 2, 1909 at the old Museum of Fine Arts in Copley Square. This building was just the sort of fussy polychrome stone and brick pile of applied ornament to which the White City was in contrast. (It would be razed about a year later for the present Copley Plaza Hotel, completed in 1912). The new Museum of Fine Arts opened that same month. This elegant temple of art built on clean, classic City Beautiful lines was just the sort of future that the World's Colombian Exposition promised. Built of light grey granite, it overlooked the tamed landscaped swamp reborn by FL Olmsted as the Back Bay Fens.

The Boston Herald called the exposition, "not as much a show as an awakening. . . hung on the wall where the Valasquez painting once hung is the ' gist of it'," a banner which outlines the platform of Boston 1915.

"It is possible for the willing worker on an average wage to bring up his family amid healthful and comfortable surroundings. That they may become useful citizens... Boston 1915 is a City Movement. Cooperation of all people and organizations for the improvement of Boston; it is a City Plan, which will put all plans into one general program; it is a City Exposition, showing year by year the city's progress in its factories, stores, public departments, homes and health."

Over two hundred exhibits were broken down into three main themes: The Visible City, Educational, and Social and Economic. City planning, parks, streets and boulevards and housing were among the exhibits in the Visible City area of the exposition. "One of the most interesting exhibits," wrote the Boston Herald on November 2, 1909," is the contrast, actual size, between a model tenement and an actual 3 bedroom tenement in Boston's North End." Also included were extensive models and plans for houses of workingmen in England and the United States. This exhibit would have a direct and immediate influence on the design and construction of the first phase of Woodbourne.

Other models were the City of Boston "with every building and street correct" and a $75,000 exhibit of that holy land of the City Beautiful, Chicago. There was also, as the Herald noted, "much in the exposition that was spectacle, the Curtiss aeroplane, models of the Wright Brothers aeroplane and wonderful scientific moving pictures." Not to mention Italian marionettes. The 1893 World's Fair had 14 acres of sideshows and spectacles too.

A key exhibit for Edward Filene was The Catholic Church and Institutions in a portion of the hall devoted to organized religion in Boston. Filene recognized that the Catholic Church was on the verge of being a major political as well as social force in Boston because of the population growth of the Irish and- most recently - Italian communities. The Irish Catholic was no longer a subordinate minority and if Boston 1915 was to succeed it needed the support and the participation of the new Archbishop of Boston, William Henry O'Connell.

On September 30, 1909, Filene wrote to Archbishop O'Connell regarding the enlargement of the Board of Directors of Boston 1915. He requested a meeting to discuss" the inception, development and purposes of the Boston 1915 movement." O'Connell agreed to meet with Filene on Sunday evening October 3, 1909. At that meeting, the Archbishop delegated Reverends O'Connor and Anderson to help organize the exposition exhibit on the Catholic Church and its schools. But O'Connell himself was conspicuously absent (as the press noted) from the special opening night attended by 4000 people on Saturday evening, October 30,1909.

William Henry O'Connell became Archbishop on August 30, 1907 at the death of Boston's first Archbishop, John J. Williams. It was an auspicious time for Boston Catholics which O'Connell recognized and exploited completely. He was not the accomodationist like the gentleman Reverend Williams; he didn't have to be. The Irish Catholic was in the majority now. O'Connell's governing ideology was made perfectly clear on October 28,1908 at the celebration of the centennial of the founding of the Catholic diocese of Boston. Standing at the pulpit in the Cathedral of the Holly Cross, a building far bigger than City Hall and taller than the State House, O'Connell declared the new order in carefully chosen words." The Puritan has passed, the Catholic remains. The Child of the immigrant is called to fill the place which the Puritan has left." To the sons of the Puritans of Boston 1915 the message should have been crystal clear, "The Catholic is here. You must deal with him on his terms." Clearly inferred was the deeper message, "The Irish are here." After a century of discrimination against Irish Catholics at the hands of Protestants, O'Connell would have very little to do in cooperating with them unless it was on his terms; on terms suitable to Catholics. He demonstrated this time and again as he ran the Archdiocese with a strong hand until his death in 1944.

The Jewish merchant, Edward Filene, himself no stranger to ethnic and religious discrimination, believed in the cooperative spirit of Boston 1915 and he was determined to reach out and include the Catholic Church. He was also pragmatic: Irish Catholics were now a majority political bloc and they listened to the Archbishop. The success of Boston 1915 depended on a broad base of public support.

On December 3, 1909, Filene wrote to Archbishop O'Connell that the Exposition highlighted the serious need for better housing. In this letter, Filene set the groundwork for Woodbourne. "Among such problems [ facing the City ]." he wrote, "that of housing seems to be the most serious and pressing. Promiscuous crowding under depressing conditions of those least well armed to resist evil creates a moral issue difficult to deal with. Getting together the religious institutions for us [ that is the Boston 1915 movement, ed. ] would be desirable for dealing with the housing problem. I think it practically and reasonably possible that as much as $200,000 can be raised as a beginning for better housing. With that sum, new cooperative housing plans can be drawn up."

The Archbishop replied promptly on December 5, 1909 that he would participate on his terms." The plan you propose for the betterment of housing of the poorer people of Boston appeals to me very strongly. If I am to go into this movement personally it must be that I shall be at the head of it, for reasons you must understand."

The record does not explain those reasons but it was clearly a test to see how far the business investors - willing to put up $200,000 - were willing to go for the Archbishop's prestige and participation. Apparently, they would not go that far, even to prove that the venture was in the spirit of reform and the public good. But Filene kept trying. "The glory of the church," he wrote Archbishop O'Connell on January 20, 1910, "has always been in her curative and redemptive work... bad morals are caused by overcrowding in tenement districts. I am more than ever convinced that it lies in your power to inaugurate a work to remedy those conditions. It is here that the churches undertake as a part of their religious work the forming and carrying out of some plan by which the people of Boston will have better housing."

When on November 1, 1911 the Boston Dwelling House Co. Directors signed the deed of trust to create moderate income housing, Archbishop O'Connell's name was among them. But in a letter to the BDHCo trustees from his private secretary dated January 5, 1912, he made it clear on what terms he would participate: "the Archbishop has lent his name to the Boston Dwelling House project... but will not be able to attend any business outside his regular routine duties."

On November 15, 1913, the Archbishop resigned from the Board of Trustees stating to Board President Henry Howard that "I have not been able to attend the meetings nor give the matter the consideration and time it deserves." By then, as will be seen, the Boston 1915 Movement had ended.

III.

With or without Archbishop O'Connell (who was elevated to Cardinal in 1911), Boston 1915 steamed ahead. In May, 1910, New Boston first appeared. It was the self described "official organ of Boston 1915. A monthly record of progress in developing a greater and finer city."

New Boston ran until the end of 1911. Each issue had articles on a wide variety of social issues, some of which are still relevant today. These topics written by experts in the field ranged from housing and transportation to a spirited campaign to "Save the Fourth" designed to ban dangerous fireworks. Articles such as the improvements to the Charles River basin, wholesome milk, the evils of billboards, the character of moving pictures, Boston's garbage problem," public spirit and the tramp", schoolhouses as neighborhood centers, making wife desertion unpopular, "Americanizing our immigrant children" and "Five essential ways the automobile has added to the wealth of the city" show the very broad range of concerns the Boston 1915 movement enveloped.

The Boston 1915 Directorate was divided into committees. One of the most important was the Housing Committee which first met on February 28, 1910. It was made up of Philip Cabot, E.T. Hartman, Meyer Bloomfield, Matthew Hale (City Councilor from 1910 to 1912), Charles Logue, J Randolph Coolidge Jr., Richards Bradley, Warren Manning (a partner in the Olmsted firm), Henry G. Dunderdale, the architect William D. Austin (who designed the Jamaica Pond boathouse and bandstand in 1910) and the playground advocate and educator Joseph Lee.

Their report, The Boston House Problem, was printed in the first issue of New Boston and focused on the conditions of dwellings in the North End, West End, Charlestown and South Boston.

The goal of the Housing Committee was to improve the overcrowding and sanitary conditions of the existing housing in these districts. No new Woodbourne-type subdivision was proposed for the North End. "Boston 1915." the report recommended," will organize a bureau whose duty it shall be to investigate housing complaints registered from any portion of the city." In 1911 Boston 1915 supported a bill introduced by Mayor Fitzgerald that proposed to revise the current housing codes to apply to wooden 3 family houses. Boston 1915 proposed regulating what was understood by both business and government to be private sector role. It was still the business of businessmen to provide housing.

Slum clearance would come 25 years later when the Federal government made housing a public priority in the face of the fact that the private sector could not provide it. The Boston Housing Authority was created in 1935 to provide with Federal funds housing for the wage earner.

The January 1911 issue of New Boston ran a story written by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. which illustrated the design goals of housing beyond the central city districts that would be the model for Woodbourne. This was Forest Hills Gardens in the borough of Queens New York financed by the Russell Sage Foundation and planned and landscaped by the junior Olmsted. The story was appropriately titled "A suburban town built on business principles." The tenement districts could only be ameliorated with improved and enforced building and sanitary codes together with better public health services. The objective of the Boston 1915 Housing Committee was that these overcrowded unplanned residential districts should not spread out along the newly opened rapid transit lines linking the downtown core with the suburbs of Roxbury, Dorchester and Jamaica Plain. The planned suburban development would be built there and Olmsted Junior's article on Forest Hills Gardens was held up as the ideal for those suburbs.

The second Boston 1915 Exposition had housing as its main theme. It was held over the week of November 10 to 22, 1910 at Tremont Temple and the Boston Arena . More of a conference than an exposition, the event was called "The Civic Advance Campaign". The highlight was a dramatic pageant at the (recently opened) Boston Arena on St Botolph Street titled "From Cave Life to City Life." The intention of the program was to draw public attention to the problem of city building designed to show the development of homemaking. It was held on Thursday through Saturday, November 10 through 12, and had sections reenacting cave dwellers, the Indian village, the Colonial town and the bustling 19th Century city. The Civic Advance Campaign opened with "Mayor's Night" at Tremont Temple with Mayor Fitzgerald as the keynote speaker. The November 1911 issue of New Boston exclaimed that the fundamental meaning behind Boston 1915 and its second exposition "is to help create [a] state of mind. There is no reason why a municipality cannot be planned and made beautiful except through indifference and bad habits. [The city's] affairs should be conducted economically and in strict business principles, properly planned, decently ordered and economically administered." To achieve this, "its citizens have to get into a state of mind."

The Tremont Temple conference outlined what would occupy the Boston 1915 Directorate in the coming year: it would write, influence and advocate a legislative agenda that would push forward by force of law the state of mind desired by the reformers.

Fifteen bills relative to police, education, housing codes, public health and city planning which the Directorate had approved for action were reviewed in the March 1911 issue of New Boston.

These comprised the 1911 Program for the Boston 1915 Directorate; some of which are still relevant 88 years later:

1. Establish a proper public authority to plan and provide for comprehensive development of the city.
   
2. Federate cities and towns into one metropolitan district.
   
3. Organize larger uses of schoolhouses.
   
4. Create a civic center.
   
5. Establish more convenience stations and drinking fountains.
   
6. Better sidewalks ("to provide for 10 miles of paved sidewalk every year for 10 years.").

The most important Project of the 1911 Program for Boston 1915 was the first bill, House Number 1109," To improve the conditions of the metropolitan district. "The bill was "designed to provide Boston and the metropolitan district with a city plan developed on sound moral, industrial and social lines." It would create a 3 member commission which "would study and make planning recommendations for better homes, structural and sanitary safety of buildings, prevention of congestion and fire hazards and provide for reservations of land for public use."

Boston 1915 put all of its great prestige and energy behind passage of the bill which was largely the work of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber's 1911 Report," Real Boston: The Get Together Spirit Among Cities and Towns" stated the case to the legislature, the public and the press of the metropolitan district. Boston was actually part of a city made up of 40 cities and towns stretching from Salem to Cohasset and west to Framingham. The Chamber and the Directorate of Boston 1915 introduced the "Real Boston" bill that would create the Federation of Metropolitan Boston. In the April, 1911 New Boston, March G. Bennett, Chair of the Real Boston Committee wrote what a Federation could do for Metropolitan Boston, he argued that a federation already exists in sewer, water supply and parks. In language predicting the rise decades later of the Mass. Turnpike Authority, MassPort and the MBTA, he stated that cooperative action would be valuable for transportation facilities, industrial education, factory development, dock facilities, industrial railways, direct highways and uniform building laws.

The Chamber staffed the 10 person Real Boston Committee made up of men from Boston (the chair) Brookline, Newton, Cambridge, Malden, Lexington and Somerville. This committee included Boston Dwelling House trustee Robert Woods and the influential journalist Sylvester Baxter, Baxter was a major champion of the Metropolitan Park Commission (today the MDC), one of the first metropolitan governing agencies established in the Commonwealth. He was an ardent advocate of metropolitan planning and government.

The Directorate of Boston 1915 staked all their considerable influence and collective reputations on the passage of this legislation. The bill failed to pass out of committee in April, 1910 and a different bill was filed again in May. It was strongly supported by Governor Eugene Foss who sent a message to the Legislature in April, 1912 urging passage of the legislation. But it was defeated in the Metropolitan Affairs Committee later in the month. It was a mortal wound for the reformers. The heart and soul of Boston 1915 was that only through rational city planning could the 20th Century city be realized. The Chamber and its allies in Boston 1915 stated that a plan for the City of Boston Plan could not be made and implemented without full cooperation of the surrounding cities and towns. City planning on a large and comprehensive scale would harmonize the physical city and reduce conflicts of purposes and waste of resources.

When this goal disintegrated with the defeat of the "Real Boston" bill, the reformers lost energy and Boston 1915 collapsed within a year. The business reformers failed to understand the dread of annexation in the hearts of the cities and towns on the borders of Boston. Try as they might, the Real Boston Committee and their legislative allies could not overcome the fear that if cooperation began today, annexation would follow tomorrow.(Writing at the end of his term, Mayor Fitzgerald stated that the Boston 1915 Movement was "a more altruistic and ambitious scheme than ever was undertaken in any American city. Although it has ceased as a tangible movement, its stimulus should be included in a list of causes for Boston's progress during this period of four years.")

Mayor Fitzgerald was a strong believer in the legislation. His speech before the 1910 Civic Advance conference was about the need for municipal planning. When the bill failed to pass, he blamed the towns of Newton and Brookline for their shortsightedness. But then he knew only too well that the ethnic immigrant power which he represented was the primary reason the suburbs rejected the Federation of Metropolitan Boston in the first place: they wanted no part of Boston's tribal politics. (In that same legislative session also came, in the words of the Boston Herald, "the annual attack on the Boston Charter by the Democratic machine", Senator Martin Lomasney, ward boss of the West End, proposed a bill providing for a City Council of 28 members.)

But Boston 1915 was victorious because it brought city planning to Boston. In 1911, the Commonwealth created the Homestead Commission to develop a long range, comprehensive housing program that included site planning and housing design, of which Woodbourne was an early example. The 1913 Report of the Commission contained language very similar to that of the Boston Dwelling House Company proposal two years earlier : all families deserved a wholesome home and only by conscious design, direction and supervision within a planned development could the working man have the housing he needed for his family. The Commission recommended that each city and town over 10,00 people be required to have planning boards. After the defeat of the "Real Boston" bill, Mayor Fitzgerald petitioned the General Court to authorize the City to establish the Boston Planning Board, which was approved on January 27,1914.

Discouraged by their legislative defeat and tired of all the parochial politics, the tattered remains of the Boston 1915 Directorate could take no pleasure in the establishment of the Boston Planning Board because in January of 1914, James M. Curley began his first term as Mayor of Boston.

Although a very popular mayor at the end of 1913, with strong support from reformers, the business community and the ward leaders, Fitzgerald at first declined to run for reelection. He planned instead to campaign for the United Sates Senate against Henry Cabot Lodge in 1916.

After Curley announced his candidacy for mayor, both the ward leaders (for whom Curley never had any regard) and the reformers prevailed on Fitzgerald to run for a second term to keep Curley from winning. But Fitzgerald's campaign was crushed and he resigned from the race in December, 1914 amid allegations (gleefully exploited by Curley) of an affair with a cigarette girl and cabaret singer, Toodles Ryan.

Mayor John F. Fitzgerald built an administration of cooperation between the public and private sectors. Reformers could work in that municipal atmosphere. Curley, on the other hand, thrived on conflict and the war he waged over the next thirty years between Yankee and Irish, business and politics was not a place in which business leaders or reformers could flourish. Moreover the parks and beaches, schools and hospitals which Curley built during four terms as mayor and for which he is fondly remembered even to this day, were built on the ever increasing property taxes which had to be paid by business and property owners. ("The Republicans of our glorious Commonwealth," wrote Curley in his 1957 memoirs," should admit that improvements which advance the health, happiness and welfare of all people cost money. Is a low city debt and low tax rate the price we must pay for human suffering?")

But the happiness and welfare of James Michael Curley and his associates came first. These improvements were vastly over budgeted because of political corruption. Contractors who wanted lucrative city public works projects had to pay the mayor first. Nothing symbolized this better than the construction of Mayor Curley's grand mansion on the Jamaicaway during his first year in office., So scandalous was the open graft, that in 1915 business leaders forced a recall election (as authorized by the 1909 charter) that Curley barely survived. But survive he did. Amidst all this turmoil, the business community simply retreated for forty years. They would not reemerge until the middle 1950's during the more benign administration of Mayor John B. Hynes. But the optimism had vanished then: Boston was in dire fiscal straights and Hynes needed all the help he could get. (Running against Curley in 1949, Hynes' campaign slogan was "The New Boston.")

IV.

Politics and planning have always been linked but never mix well. This was especially true during the thirty years of Curley's rule over Boston government (he was Mayor from 1914 to 1917; 1922 to 1925; 1930 to 1933; Governor from 1934 to 1936; and Mayor again from 1946 to 1949). These years of conflict within Boston's political life dashed the spirit of optimistic reform that created and motivated the Boston 1915 Movement and gave birth to the Boston Dwelling House Company.

The reform spirit which originally guided the efforts of BDH Co was gone when construction resumed on the second phase of Woodbourne coincidentally with the start of Curley's second term as mayor. (He replaced the choice of the business community, Andrew J. Peters, son of the owner of the Hosford and William's subdivision adjacent to the Minot estate).

The second phase was dramatically different from the first two years of construction not only in architectural styles but in ideology. In the first phase the architecture fit the ideology. The architectural style of the second phase changed because the reform spirit was replaced by profit and nostalgia.

The great optimism of the years before World War One in which reformers, such as Boston 1915, sought to reshape American society along the lines of their own material and social values, was replaced by pessimism fed by the disillusion of the messy peace which concluded the War to End all War. Moreover, the change from war to peace was sudden and violent. The years 1919 through early 1921 were marked by labor troubles (the great steel and coal strikes and the walkout of Boston Policemen in 1919); the severe recession that struck in October of 1919 which left 5 million men jobless in 1920; and the emergence for the first time in American culture and politics of anti - communism in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. (The American Communist Party was formed in 1919.)

With the return of Republican control of the White House in 1920 with Presidents Warren Harding and after his death in office, Calvin Coolidge, federal policies were introduced which greatly increased prosperity. The revolt of the 1920's was that against the reform ethos of President Woodrow Wilson which was crushed beneath the wave of the new profit culture and the dawning of the consumer era ushered in by Harding and Coolidge. The will for collective action against society's ills lessened with the prosperous Roaring Twenties. American business life looked very good indeed. There was nothing to reform. Moreover a new cult of individualism was growing too. Moral and ethical improvement, the ideology of the Boston Dwelling House Company, was replaced by the right of the individual to profit and enjoy himself. Consequently, the tribal property of the 1912 Pope plan for Woodbourne was hopelessly out of date by 1920 and thus not duplicated in the second phase of its development. In the words of the cynic H. L. Menckin, "Doing good [was] in bad taste."

Massachusetts was also swept up in 1920 with the historical nostalgia of the 300th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. The building styles of the 17th Century were rediscovered by architects and the Colonial Revival style - the gambrel roof and especially the 17th Century saltbox house - was in high vogue in the second phase of Woodbourne. Nostalgia replaced reform after 1922. It also fit the nationalism of the day. America was big and strong after the War. Colonial Revival was a pure American style. Forget the fact that British colonists brought it over to New England in the first place; it did not look imported such as the Kilham and Hopkins Arts and Crafts designs imported from England for the first phase of Woodbourne.

But more than anything else, it was a different world for the investors of the Boston Dwelling House Company in 1920. Reform and business did not mix. The business of Boston real estate was business not housing reform.

Richard Heath
February 23, 1998

Copyright © 2005 Richard Heath/Jamaica Plain Historical Society.