BOSTON ADVENTURE
ad⋅ven⋅ture
n.
1. an exciting or very unusual experience.
2. participation in exciting undertakings or enterprises: the spirit of adventure.
3. bold, usually risky undertaking; hazardous actions of uncertain outcome.
4. commercial or financial speculation of any kind; venture.
Obs.:
5. peril; danger; risk
6. chance; fortune; luck
v.t.
7. to risk or hazard
8. to take the chance of; dare
v.i.
9. to take the risk involved.
10. to venture; hazard.
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Some places in some cities hold the promise of adventure: the Latin Quarter and Pigalle; Soho and Brixton; Central Park and Tompkins Square. New York?s Chinatown and the Cloisters are both places for an adventure ?the first because it?s so full of people, the second because it?s not.
Boston was once blessed with a plethora of such places. None of them were pretty, but they all had true grit. They were all more memorable than Newbury Street.
The Waterfront was once a place of nocturnal shadows, cobblestones and sailors? dives. Here, doors flew open propelled by yellow torrents of light, raucous laughter, and the bouncer?s rough hand on a seaman?s scruff. Fishing boats bobbed at anchor in the noirish cove that today abuts Columbus Park.
Beneath the El in Roxbury, nearly everything was available. For some it was an iffy place even in broad daylight. If you were squeamish, you could deplore its activities, its noise and dirt and human flotsam; but you couldn?t deny its vitality or its romance. It was like entering a Reginald Marsh.
A pale shadow of life beneath the El was also available till recent times just outside the Garden on Causeway Street. If you looked at all wimpy, this was the place to avoid when the fans spilled out. Stragglers were enticed to tarry by the West End Pussycat, which had flashing lights.
Outbound to the north, the El screeched and rumbled through aptly-named City Square. There you could watch a nightly parade of cuffed culprits led from squad car to police station (which had blue lights!!). This place seemed especially sinister; what did they actually do inside?
These places made you feel brave. Just being there, you were Gable in Red Dust.
After the early-Seventies rebuilding, Harvard Square lost almost the last vestige of its grit. It?s hard to believe people ever came to the square for adventure, but some actually connected from time to time. The technique was pretty primitive and depended on through-streets; it was before air conditioning invaded most cars, so you had to keep the windows rolled down and you could lean your torso out as far as you dared. If you were a crude kid from Acton, you?d make obscene sounds with your mouth; but if you were smooth, you?d park your car and head for the Algiers, where the tables were close. You could also do a little fox hunting at the Fogg.
Part of what made Harvard Square a magnet in those days was that ?like Times Square?it felt like going to the city, because much of it was so grubby. Mr. Bartley?s and Charlie?s still are, but where are Elsie?s, the Bick and the all-night Waldorf? Where are all the old-man bars where you could get a 15-cent draft? Where are the billboards? Where is the neon? Where are the street people? Where can you score some reefer? These days, if you want adventure, you have to settle for a guy on stilts.
Central Square could have filled the vacuum, but it was an exercise in ennui except at its fringe. There lurked the Plough and Stars: that place seemed dangerous and was dangerous. A couple of robbery/murders confirmed what everyone knew: the place was full of criminals. I can still remember their names; they were second-story men; when they got drunk they made no bones about it. Had a big adventure there.
But no place could even rival the South End for sheer, degenerate urban grit. This was Boston?s biggest no-fly zone of all. It was so amazingly decrepit and dangerous that people had actually abandoned their real estate for the security of Newton. The properties were worthless anyway; the BRA was selling them for $1.00 (yes!!) if you agreed to fix them up.
I knew one old European gentleman who took them up on their offer. He liked the idea of living without a car; he could walk to where he taught music. But he?d never really penetrated to the violence at the American psyche?s base; he was steeped in childlike idealism and love of fellow man. Shortly after moving in, he was trudging to his cold, dank digs when a mugger stepped from the shadows and demanded everything the kindly old gent had on him. In this case, that included all of his clothes including his skivvies; a shivering old geezer in the raw is better than the same guy in boxers. Needless to say, this gentle old soul reneged on his BRA contract and fled as soon as he could find a mover.
In the daytime, it was Hopper?s world, but you had to keep your camera hidden; a colleague didn?t and was asked to donate his Nikon in broad daylight. That same sun baked the area?s Arab groceries; their burlap bags of drying figs spilled daily onto the sidewalk in what seemed like Meditarranean atmospherics. (They had hardly any customers; were they really selling hash?) ?Gosh,? I used to marvel, ?what potential this place has! If only people could see it!?
Today, the South End is the poster child of Boston gentrification, and like much else in Boston it looks clean and fixed up and ?dare I say?a tad sterile; the je-ne-sais-quoi is definitely gone. House prices may have soared from a buck to over a million, but it was a long wait; as a client once remarked, there were so many advocates and bleeding hearts that it seemed to take forever for the poor to finally vacate.
On Beacon Hill ?s crest at Myrtle and Joy there hulks a nine-story tower. When it was a single-room occupancy, it belonged spiritually to the Hill?s bad side. If you walked into the lobby you could hear all the old guys coughing who had come here to die. Taller than aything around it, it was like the Tower of Joy; today it?s probably condoed full of yuppies and their squawking kids. I had a friend who lived in a coal bin on the bad side of the hill. Half a block away was a neighborhood food shop. It was the only place in Boston where you had to count your change.
Quincy Market: from fly-infested carcasses to tourists gaping at jugglers like the ones back home in Norfolk. Adventure? Pshaw.
There is, however, a modest little survivor from the age of grit: Bay Village. It was where the Tremont car line looped its way up out of Hades, and where Kahlil Gibran maybe owned a bookstore. Bay Village seems so lonely and forlorn surrounded by Twentieth Century detritus. If anyone ventured there, it would be a great place for a mugging.
?Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you?. ?K.G.
* * *
A PART OF A HALF
?Howard Yezerski Gallery is pleased to present Boston: Combat Zone 1969-1978, an exhibition featuring black and white photographs by Roswell Angier, Jerry Berndt and John Goodman on view from February 12 through March 16, 2010.?
If I lived in Boston, I?d attend this show. I?m sure the images are of the usual Arbusian cast of exploiters and exploited, and I?m sure they?re printed in Wellesian contrasts of black and white. They are a genre. However ?
?Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.? ?Diane Arbus
* * *
Technically, there was no parking on Monsignor Shea Road, but it was never enforced; it functioned instead as informal street parking for the Zone. Turnover was fairly brisk --you just had to watch for men in furtive scurry and a turned-up collar-- so a little patience generally yielded a place.
You could then do a little fear-of-danger scurrying of your own up through the dark passage of medieval, crooked Knapp Street. At this short block?s northern end, when you got to Beach Street, the world unfolded in a wondrous burst of light and the promise of gaiety and warmth. For on the sidewalk beyond, in flashing red neon, the Stag Bar promised: Pussy Galore!
Though the Pussy Galore Stag Bar had a front door facing Beach Street, it connected inside to the larger and flashier Naked Eye, with its salaciously animated red neon on Washington Street. That entrance required a bouncer, because there were always shy folk milling about hoping for a glimpse of ecdysiast. Other characters of both genders leaned against walls or pretended conversation. As you passed, they murmured offers of various services.
The police kept a watchful eye on it all on behalf of the entrepreneurs; there was usually both a Harley and a squad car. There were so many lights and signs, it was almost daylight.
Dangerous? Nah?
Similar scenes spilled onto Essex Street, LaGrange, and Boylston. Richardson?s little granite gem hosted a well-stocked peepshow of live girls.
Then there was a homicide.
Though owned by the same management and operating under identical rules and for the same clientele, Pussy Galore and Naked Eye were quite different in atmosphere. Pussy Galore was built around a low-slung, intimate stage three-quarters in-the-round, intended to encourage what were called floor shows. It had fairly dim and unvarying lighting, low stools, and was favored by the gents from adjacent Chinatown ?perhaps because it enhanced their chances of discreet exit if a wife turned up.
The Naked Eye was much flashier. It featured a long runway beside a hundred-foot bar and the live jazz combo (drums, sax, organ); and it was equipped with both spotlight and strobes. Here the girls stayed mostly on their feet and performed stylized runway motions and an occasional pole dance. The bartenders wore bow ties and aprons. The same girls worked both rooms on about a ninety-minute rotation, and they were mostly knock-outs.
Like them, you could pass unhindered from one room to the other, and the bathrooms were just beyond. In spite of the heroic quantity of $2 beers consumed, the toilets weren?t used much --though every now and then someone would lose it from overindulgence, and then there would be a mess.
In the barrooms themselves, decorum reigned. The men behaved themselves; they were having private reveries with the dancers or polite conversations with the nice girl nibbling on their ear because she?d just been bought a drink. The atmosphere in both rooms was convivial.
The night of the homicide there was a ruckus. It started at the bar around 9pm, and came in on the heels of eight or nine well-built young men in tweedy sportcoats. They seemed more intent on milling about than settling down to the show. They appeared to be celebrating some common endeavor and determined to make their presence known. One of them ?the handsomest and the loudest?also seemed to be their leader. They yelled obscenities at the girls, while the bartenders urged calm.
Once in a while, they booed dissatisfaction with a dancer?s looks and migrated like a herd into the other room. There ?in the absence of vacant seats-- they stood boorishly blocking views and slurring words. They began to stagger.
?Half of what I say is meaningless??
In the evening?s course, the bathroom turned into a pigsty of toilet paper and urine. The door flew open ? and there was one of them pissing directly on the floor!
?Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.?
When a bartender tried to enforce order, words grew sharp. The bouncer stuck his head inside the door. People started to leave before midnight, though closing time was 2:00. The thought that seemed to grow inside this joint was: ?Somebody?s going to get killed tonight.?
That?s exactly what happened.
