Dover Street (Berkeley Street), South End

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IMAngry

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What a difference a century makes, huh?

Read below what Harrison Avenue looked like, circa 1898.

Source: The Promised Land - by Mary Antin. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912 (book is online; I assume it is in the public domain)

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/antin/land/land.html

Outwardly, Dover Street is a noisy thoroughfare cut through a South End slum, in every essential the same as Wheeler Street. Turn down any street in the slums, at random, and call it by whatever name you please, you will observe there the same fashions of life, death, and endurance.

Every one of those streets is a rubbish heap of damaged humanity, and it will take a powerful broom and an ocean of soapsuds to clean it out.

Dover Street is intersected, near its eastern end, where we lived, by Harrison Avenue. That street is to the South End what Salem Street is to the North End. It is the heart of the South End ghetto, for the greater part of its length; although its northern end belongs to the realm of Chinatown.

Its multifarious business bursts through the narrow shop doors, and overruns the basements, the sidewalk, the street itself, in pushcarts and open-air stands.

Its multitudinous population bursts through the greasy tenement doors, and floods the corridors, the doorsteps, the gutters, the side streets, pushing in and out among the pushcarts, all day long and half the night besides.

Rarely as Harrison Avenue is caught asleep, even more rarely is it found clean. Nothing less than a fire or flood would cleanse this street. Even Passover cannot quite accomplish this feat. For although the tenements may be scrubbed to their remotest corners, on this one occasion, the cleansing stops at the curbstone.

A great deal of the filthy rubbish accumulated in a year is pitched into the street, often through the windows; and what the ashman on his daily round does not remove is left to be trampled to powder, in which form it steals back into the houses from which it was so lately removed.

The City Fathers provide soap and water for the slums, in the form of excellent schools, kindergartens, and branch libraries. And there they stop: at the curbstone of the people's life. They cleanse and discipline the children's minds, but their bodies they pitch into the gutter. For there are no parks and almost no playgrounds in the Harrison Avenue district, ? in my day there were none, ? and such as there are have been wrenched from the city by public-spirited citizens who have no offices in City Hall. No wonder the ashman is not more thorough: he learns from his masters.
Click to expand...

Today Dover Street, now Berkeley Street, is a street almost empty of any buildings, residential or otherwise.

The street starts from under the Southeast Expressway, toward the South End, past Albany Street, Harrison Ave, Washington Street, and Shawmut Ave, and bisects Tremont Street, where it becomes East Berkeley.

Here are some photos from the book.

184.gif


Union Place (West End)

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Wheeler Street (South End)

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Harrison Ave (South End)

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Bates Hall (Boston Public Library, Copley Square branch)

Union Place is gone, presumably, along with the rest of the West End.

Wheeler Street is gone, too, I assume as part of the same "urban renewal" plan of the 1950s and 1960s (within the New York Streets neighborhood, perhaps?).

Harrison Ave is still here, of course. I'd make a radical guess that the photo is from Berkeley Street, looking down Harrison Ave, and that the elevated train track is coming out of the (now-abandoned) MBTA storage building.

Bates Hall is still here, looks about the same, I'd say, right down to the lampshades (I don't recognize the balcony, though).
 
Based on the location of the elevated railway, the Harrison Avenue photo is looking south towards Beach Street. Today we'd call this area Chinatown rather than South End. The Atlantic Avenue el turned right from Harrison to Beach.
 
Does anyone have old pictures or info on the Charlestown El? Specifically, the 1975 closing? Yada Yada Yada, I know, it's off topic.
 
Dover Street had such a bad reputation that the city actually changed its name to East Berkeley Street in the 1970s. The T station was still called Dover until it closed in 1987.
 
Porter, Wheeler, and Kirkland streets were leveled for the Mass Pike Towers housing project.
 
And ...

What about Pleasant Street? I can't find a thing about it.
 
Just can't let it go ...

If Ron is correct that the photo of Harrison Ave is south-facing, toward Beach Street, then here is a current day view in the same direction, taken from the corner of Essex Street and Harrison Ave.

Beach Street is right about where the bright street light is.

Beach Street is the street with the grand arch entrance to Chinatown. What is so shocking is that the street is so narrow, yet was wide enough for, I assume, two rail tracks.

It looks as though one of the buildings (the tan one) might match up, not sure.

harrisonbeach.jpg
 
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