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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1966, Joan Colebrook on urban renewal in Boston's South End
The Church of Saints Peter and Paul in South Boston has had its share of both bedevilment and blessings. A grand gray building, a pile of granite chunks pierced by Gothic arches and topped with a copper-clad bell tower, was erected in 1844 and dedicated with extravagant ceremony; four years later, it burned to the ground. After it was rebuilt, it was so popular that another parish had to be established nearby to handle the overflow. But in time South Boston started to empty--slowly at first, and then like a bathtub with an open drain--and Saints Peter and Paul emptied, too. On New Year's Day, 1996, the Boston Archdiocese desanctified the most eminent Catholic church in the area and shut it down. But last spring Saints Peter and Paul was reborn once more. Cleaned up and cleared out, with additional windows cut through its three-foot-thick walls and the new, secular name of 45 West Broadway, it went on the market as thirty-six luxury condominiums suspended in the building's soaring open space.
The church is not the only thing in South Boston that is experiencing a resurrection. Across West Broadway, a ratty gangster bar--for years the South Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger's favorite place for a cold drink--reopened a few months ago as a polished-wood-and-granite sports cafe. Now, instead of being known as a convenient drop-off spot for dead bodies, the bar is known as the 6 House, which is the nickname for the local police precinct, and among its customers are scrubbed and well-shaved managers from the Gillette Corporation, whose offices are a few blocks away. Next door to the 6 House, a former Irish bakery has risen again as a sushi bar. Not far away, the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center--the largest building ever erected in New England--opened last June on what had been sixty acres of cracked blacktop and obsolete factories. All of South Boston is bristling with construction cranes, growling with backhoes, stickered with for-sale signs and building permits. Up and down Broadway, weary old stores are emptying out and being renewed.
All of Boston, in fact, is as hale as it has been in decades--its economy fit, its residential areas sprucing up, its eternal traffic mess finally straightening out--just in time for its spotlight moment this month as host of the Democratic National Convention. Thomas Menino, the mayor of Boston, made sure that the state delegations' welcoming parties would be held in an array of neighborhoods around the city, to show off how much they have improved. He was reportedly most excited about the venue for the New York party: Carson Beach, beside the old L Street Bath House, in South Boston. The churn of gentrification in old city neighborhoods is not a novel story, and recently gentrification has arrived, for better or for worse, in neighborhoods no one would ever have expected to revive--Washington's Capitol Hill, Brooklyn's Williamsburg. But it is an especially surprising turn in South Boston, a place that had always seemed cut off from the cycle of city life, and whose character was, for a century or so, rooted in a mighty, and sometimes violent, resistance to change.
One recent afternoon, I met up with Patrick Lynch, a blond, bright-eyed man who is one of the three brokers for the church condominium project. Lynch was showing Saints Peter and Paul to a lawyer who lived in downtown Boston but was considering a move. Lynch grew up in the housing projects near the church, and his sister was married and his nephew christened there. So far, he and the two other brokers have sold twenty-eight of the church's thirty-six condos, along with all the apartments...
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