Alison Barnet's Two October Presentations of her Recent Book, "Once Upon a Neighborhood: A Timeline and an Anecdotal History of he South End of Boston," Drew Crowds Passionate about Their 'Hood'

Author and urban historian Russ Lopez, who introduced Alison Barnet (right)

Ann Hershfang introducing Alison Barnet on October 15

In a first for the South End Writes author series, local history chronicler Alison Barnet had such an overflow audience for her scheduled talk about Once Upon A Neighborhood: A Timeline and Anecdotal History of he South End of Boston on October 8 that a follow-up event was held a week later. South End neighbors and friends passionate about the local scene filled the library’s community room on October 15 as well, reminiscing about the neighborhood as it was then (“a sense of community,” “people recognizing humanness,” “multiculturalism,’ “people easier to talk to”) and, perhaps less so, as it appears to be now to at least some (““coldness,” “distancing,” “gentrification,” “$5,000 baby carriages”). The emotions reached such a pitch that someone felt compelled to caution the audience that “history can become nostalgic. We shouldn’t idealize ‘our moment’ and not see the potential in ‘this moment,’” the attendee said. “Without denigrating history, there is our moment here, too.”

The author wearing a Hite Radio and TV t-shirt

The author of a series of perceptive, original and passionate analyses of the South End as both a place and a character, Barnet landed in the South End in the 1960s when, as a transfer student to Boston University, she was not offered dorm space. She found room in one of the “approved” living spaces for women at the time, the Franklin Square House on East Newton Street, where her love affair with the South End began as she walked from the South End back and forth to BU every day. As she reported in a previous book, South End Character, “I liked it when people spoke to me, and I found what they said witty, offbeat, profound, poetic, right on target, and never boring.” One of the founders of the South End News in the 1980s, Barnet also wrote Extravaganza King: Robert Barnet and Boston Musical Theater and Sitting Ducks.

Urban historian, Russ Lopez about to introduce Alison barnet on October 8

Pages from Once Upon a Neighborhood

Longtime South End resident Ann Hershfang, founder and board member of WalkBoston and a member of the South End Library’s History Collective, introduced Barnet on October 15 while urban historian, Russ Lopez, also part of the Collective, had done the honors for Barnet’s talk on October 8. Copies of the book were hot off the presses on the first night, and sold out at both events. At each reading, Barnet wore a series of T-shirts with logos of historic South End organizations.

The time line format in Once Upon a Neighborhood

Writing Once Upon a Neighborhood began five years ago, Barnet recounted, inspired by another Boston historian, James Vrabel, author of When in Boston: A Time Line & Almanac. Initially believing it would be a few short pages, she became obsessed by its potential and, with the continued support of the Collective, completed it after four-and-a-half years. Helpfully organized as a time line, Once Upon a Neighborhood is a treasure trove of South End history with references to, among other items, an amazing list of publications, some of which survived but many not. They included, for example, the Midtown Journal; the Boston Chronicle; the South End Sun; the Boston Guardian; a newsletter called Hi Neighbor; the New South End; the South Bay Union; the SEPAC newsletter; the People’s South End News; The Neck. and many others.

Alison Barnet with a t-shirt from Chico’s Variety & News Co.

FOSEL has received a number of inquiries about where to purchase a copy of Once Upon a Neighborhood: A Timeline and Anecdotal History of the South End of Boston. Since the South End library is closed for an upgrade until sometime in February 2020, the traditional location for the book’s acquisition is not available. The author has emailed us to say that buyers can call her at 617-267-7018 and leave a message with a phone number. She will then arrange a sale, for $30, cash. When the library reopens, the book will be available at the counter.

Meredith Goldstein, the Boston Globe Advice Columnist, Says She's More Likely to Watch TV Shows in her Pajamas Than to Go Out on Dates

Meredith Goldstein, the Boston Globe advice columnist, was fighting off a case of “chair anxiety” in early October, just before the audience began to file in for her talk about her recent book, Can’t Help Myself: Lessons and Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist. Would anyone show up and fill the chairs? Or would there not be enough of them? As a good crowd had settled in, she said, hopefully, “Library events always bring out the best questions.”

She began writing for the Boston Globe 15 years ago, doing features for the living arts and entertainment sections, covering the North Shore. She became “charmed” by what she called the ‘weird’ attachment people in New England have to this being their “home,” not something she found as much in Maryland, where she grew up. But after a few years reporting on the North Shore, she talked then-Boston Globe editor, Marty Barron, into what she described a “more voyeuristic exercise” to benefit Boston readers, namely an advice column. When she first broached the subject, Barron asked her, “What are you talking about? I am closing foreign bureaus and you want me to pay you to start an advice column?” Goldstein argued that, as with the very popular Ann Landers, the letter writers will tell you “what’s playing among people.” Barron agreed, but said she’d have to do it “on top of her regular assignments.”

The rest is history, of course. Goldstein was never asked about her qualifications for an advice column but then again, who would be the right person to answer readers’ heartfelt questions, she asked? “Therapists would be too responsible to advise strangers about personal problems in 300 words,” she pointed out. The first five years of writing the column coincided with her mother dying of cancer and a boyfriend who had dumped her. “The column is what pulled me through. It was a life line,” she said.

Describing herself as someone who, at 42, is more likely to watch tv in her pajamas than going on dates, she has noticed there is a sort of dating fatigue developing in general, perhaps as a result of the availability of so many dating sites. “You tend to have to check it all day long,” she pointed out. And she finds there are fewer letters about people snooping in their partners’ emails and discovering something upsetting, which then has to be revealed by admitting they were snooping, itself a transgression. Goldstein thinks the decline in snooping-related problems is due to “better passwords.”

A Boston Globe feature Goldstein wrote in August examined a rise in respect and the increasing popularity of romance novels, which she said was especially noticeable after the 2016 election. “Getting respect for romance books took way too long,” she said. “It’s true it is formulaic, but so are mystery novels.” In line with the closely related quest for personal happiness she addresses in her advice columns, she recently started a podcast which focuses on one subject per season. The first three are: the best way to get over a breakup; how to meet people; and how do you know someone is The One.

Breakups are really problematic, Goldstein reported. And there’s a gender difference in how people react: Men are told the “man up,” and women are advised “to take your time” to get over it. She discovered that there was a “breaking-up summit for teens” in the Boston area, which made her think that such seminars could benefit adults, as well.

Her Love Letters advice column has been running online and in the paper since 2009. Can’t Help Myself is based on the author’s column in the Boston Globe and includes stories about work romances, millennial friends, sickness and health, and grilled cheese. The column runs Monday to Friday on Boston.com, and in the print edition of the Boston Globe on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Previous novels include Chemistry Lessons, a young-adult novel about a young woman who uses science to manipulate her love life; and The Singles, about a group of dateless guests at a wedding. Goldstein has been interviewed by – and written for –  the Washington Post, Bustle, Elite Daily, Apartment Therapy, Shondaland, and Real Simple.

"Traces of the Trade," by Filmmaker Katrina Browne, a Descendant of the Largest Slave-trading Family in the US, Lays Bare New England's Complicity in Slavery and its Institutional Amnesia About It

When filmmaker Katrina Browne read her grandmother’s words two decades ago about the illustrious and prosperous Rhode Island family she was a part of, she noticed a brief reference to the ‘unpleasantness’ of the family’s trade in slaves. What she suddenly realized could be the true story of her ancestors rocked Browne to the bottom of her soul, said Dain Perry, her cousin, and led her to produce the documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.

Shown to a packed audience at the South End library in September, Perry and his wife, Constance, who descended from slaves, facilitated the movie’s discussion, and described it as the unvarnished history of the largest slave-trading family in the United States, the DeWolfes, of Bristol, Rhode Island. “What happened then is not taught in schools or discussed at the dinner table,” Dain Perry said. “We suffer  from institutional amnesia, but Katrina wants us to discuss it. Slavery is a cancer on the soul of our nation. We have to build the muscle to talk about it. We don’t look for finger-pointing or guilt. We want to better understand how we became so stuck over race. It is not a problem of our own making. It is a terrible legacy. Our job is to figure out how to move forward as a nation.”

The DeWolfe cousins preparing for the trip that retraced their ancestors’ slave routes.

Browne had never made a movie before but delved into the archives of her ancestral home, now a museum, in Bristol. With ten of her cousins, including Dain, she traveled to re-trace the route the slave ships sailed, from Bristol to Cuba to West Africa, with rum to trade for African men, women and children. The documentary tells the story of how West-Africans were captured, baptized, made slaves in the name of God, and taken to DeWolfe plantations in Cuba. They were sold at auction in Havana and Charleston, while sugar and molasses were brought from Cuba to the family-owned rum distilleries in Bristol. In the movie, another DeWolfe cousin sarcastically described the “brilliant vertical integration” of the DeWolfe empire on three continents, with slaves, ship-building, industrial processing of rum with molasses and sugar, as well as trade in textiles. Another of the cousins remarked upon the stomach for violence slave-trading required: A letter in archives requested a whipping pole be moved from in front of the writer’s store as it caused “blood to be splattered on the window panes.”

FOSEL board member, Gary Bailey, introducing Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North

The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, and was nominated for an Emmy for Excellence in Historical Research. FOSEL board member, Gary Bailey, an assistant dean for Community Engagement and Social Justice at Simmons University, introduced the Perrys and, referring to his own family’s history, said, “Three of my great grandparents had been enslaved. There can be no reconciliation without acknowledgment of slavery. The descendants of the DeWolfe family have begun to do the hard work of telling their story.”

Files in the Bristol Historical society show that slave-trading was supported by the whole town of Bristol and all the coastal towns along the New England shoreline, even when slave-trading had become illegal. The DeWolfe family sold shares to finance their voyages, and founded their own banks, insurance companies, distilleries and shipbuilding enterprises. They transported as many as twenty thousand enslaved Africans and amassed a fortune, together with enormous political power. By the end of his life, James DeWolf had been a U.S. Senator, receiving dispensation and favors from Thomas Jefferson, whose brother was installed as a customs official in Bristol to made sure the illegal slave trade could continue in that town.

Dain and Constance Perry, former South End residents, one descended from slave traders and the other from enslaved Africans, respectively, facilitated an audience discussion after the screening.

 Dain and Constance Perry lived in the South End four decades ago, he on Rutland Square, and she on Dilworth Street, once part of the New York Streets area, which no longer exists. She remembers “Mr. Crite” painting pictures of the neighborhood, a reference to Allan Rohan Crite, the now-famous painter of South End scenery. In the post-movie discussion, Constance Perry said that “my Jewish friends celebrate and remember their difficulties. They emphasize the importance of remembering. It is not the same here when it comes to those who were enslaved. We want to forget, not remember. We should remember through a lens of truth. Kierkegaard said that “we live our lives moving forward but we understand our lives by looking back.” 

She and Dain Perry asked the audience for one word to describe their feelings after seeing the movie, which produced a long list: Frustration; Sadness; Loss; Grieving; Hope; Anxious; Urgency; Disconnected; Terrified; Learning; Legacy; Gratitude; Truth; Aware; Anger; Shame; Despair; Lucky; Greed; Power; Useless; Time; Unknown; Ache; Resilient; Forgiveness; and Uncovered. Asked to elaborate on their words, one member of he audience said that after seeing the movie the idea of a white person’s ‘proud ancestry’ as the foundation of his life is somewhat ‘shakey.’ Another said that “white privilege is not about money, but about power.”

Urban Historian, Russ Lopez, Entertains a Room Full of South End Residents with Remarkable Tales from his Latest Work, "The Hub of the Gay Universe"

Urban historian, Russ Lopez, greets new South End resident John Thomson

South End author Russ Lopez found a room full of admirers and some local luminaries at the library on May 25, all ready to hear about his latest work of urban history, The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown and Beyond. The reading took place close to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City, the event that provided the fuel for the civil rights battle that led to the legalization nationwide of gay marriage.

Russ Lopez answers questions from the audience

David Scondras was there, the first openly gay Boston City Council member, elected in 1983, now living in Worcester. Open Source radio host Chris Lydon found a seat up front, preparing for his own show commemorating the 1969 Stonewall uprising, Beyond Stonewall: From Power to Pride. State Rep. Jon Santiago, the freshman legislator from South End’s 9th Suffolk District, who succeeded Byron Rushing earlier this year, introduced Lopez, and reminded the audience of the important role his predecessor played in making gay marriage legal in Massachusetts.

Open Source host Christopher Lydon speaks with David Scondras, the first openly gay Boston City Councilor elected in 1983

Lopez, whose earlier books include Boston’s South End: The Clash of Ideas in a Historic Neighborhood and Boston 1945-2015: The Decline and Rose of a Great World City, worked on the Hub of the Gay Universe for five years. Compiling facts for the region’s LGBTQ history was a challenge. The lack of written records from before the first Europeans arrived made establishing prevailing gender norms tricky, although some native nations welcomed what we now call LGBTQ people, he said. But nothing is known about how Boston-area tribes treated LGBTQ people before those arrivals. “Another major challenge for any LGBTQ history is who to include in it,” Lopez said. “Even those who were regularly having relations with people of the same sex, did not consider themselves to be gay or lesbian.” That is because the idea that someone who has sex with members of own gender was a “distinct type of person,” i.e. gay or lesbian, emerged only in the 1890s, according to Lopez.

Facts about accepted gender norms were further skewed by class and educational differences among LGBTQ people. Those who could write described their relationships in journals and letters, accessible to researchers now, but those who could not left no trace. “That is why my regional history of LGBTQ people begins with the arrival of the Europeans in the 17th century,” Lopez said.

Lopez commented that it sometimes seems as if the LGBTQ community consisted of “newcomers” to the region, and that in the early days of the colony there were no LGBTQ people. But they were always here. How does he know? Laws prohibiting sodomy and cross-dressing, occasionally punishable by death, existed from the time the first Pilgrims set foot on the shores of what is now Massachusetts.  “If nobody was doing it, there wouldn’t be any laws against it,” Lopez postulated. Moreover, Pilgrims and Puritans had left England, in part, because they frowned upon the “rollicking pleasures of seventeenth-century England, with its ribald entertainments, sensuous lifestyles and conspicuous consumption; excess that guaranteed damnation.”

Yet, even though homosexuality was considered a grave sin, the definition of homosexuality was flexible and relationships among men (and for that matter, women) could be far more intimate and intense than today’s heterosexual norms would suppose. For example, Daniel Webster referred in his letters to male friends as “dearly beloved” and “lovely boy” and described his close friend, James Harvey Bingham, as the “partner of my joys, griefs and affections.” Others shared a bed and slept in each others’ arms. Painter Washington Alston, moreover, had a romantic relationship with Washington Irving when in Rome in the early 1800s. 

From the 1800s on, it was acceptable for the LGBTQ community to meet in numerous places, including poetry readings on Beacon Hill and the Back Bay and, later, in various private venues and places in Bay Village where popular gay venues attracted large crowds from the mid-1900s. Bostonian class distinctions kept apace, according to Lopez’s research, because those cruising in the Public Garden reportedly wouldn’t stoop to getting intimate with those “lower-class types” from around the Common.

MA State Rep. Jon Santiago introduces South End urban historian, Russ Lopez, who grew up in California but settled in the South End in the 1980s after attending a party here.

Police records provided another source of information about prevailing attitudes, from comments that “we don’t have those kind of people here” to the time around World War I when gay venues were raided and many arrests were made on street corners in and around Scolley Square and East Dedham Street. “But until the advent of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, no one fought back,”  Lopez observed; It took a while for the news about Stonewall to even get to Boston. The Boston Globe didn’t report it until 1972.

People of Massachusetts nevertheless became the pioneers of nationwide gay marriage and early supporters of civil unions. As was the case with the abolition of slavery in MA, Lopez says, the change in attitude toward tolerating the LGBTQ community began with the lack of enforcement of certain laws discriminating against them, just as laws protecting slavery had become unenforceable when the idea that people were not property and couldn’t be owned had become accepted.

Chris Castellani's Latest Novel, "Leading Men," about Tennessee Williams and his Lover, Frank Merlo, Was Inspired by an Endangered Resource of the Instagram Age: People's Personal Letters and Journals

Chris Castellani presented a slide show of “real and imagined'“ characters in his latest novel, Leading Men

Prize-winning novelist and South End resident, Chris Castellani, returned to the South End library on April 9 to read from his widely praised latest novel, Leading Men, about the relationship between playwright Tennessee Williams and his lover and muse Frank Merlo, as it may have played out in Portofino, Italy, in the early 1950s. The novel, for which Castellani researched the personal letters and journals of the playwright, received stellar reviews from the New York Times and and the Boston Globe, among other publications. The Boston Globe calls it a “seductive, steaming novel.” The New York Times book reviewer, Dwight Garner, describes it as a novel that casts "a spell right from the start” and “vividly reimagines” the relationship between Williams and Merlo, while offering “intricate thoughts about the nature of fidelity, the artistic impulse, and estrangement.” 

Aaron Lecklider, Professor of American Studies at UMass, and author of Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture, introduced Castellani and remarked upon the unique richess of personal archives the novelist drew upon. Lecklider described how, when doing research himself in a trove of personal letters in an archive in Delaware, he found a feather hidden between some pages. The feather, placed there by someone many decades before, erased for him the distance between past and present, an experience that he suggested in our age of instant communications and Instagram may be lost forever. Lecklider, also a South End resident, described Castellani as a novelist who writes about “emotional truths and competing desires,” and someone who also is the “unstoppable force” who reinvented writing in the city of Boston as the artistic director of Grub Street, the independent creative writing center on Boylston Street.

Chris Castellani reading from Leading Men to a full house, including the author who introduced him, Aaron Lecklider, who wrote Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture.

In going through the personal letters and journals of Williams, Castellani discovered there was a gap in journal entries from the end of July until August 11 of 1953. He knew Truman Capote had invited Williams and Merlo to visit him in Portofino in 1953, by which time Williams had established his reputation with A Streetcar Named Desire, but he and Merlo were going through a rough time in their four-year relationship. Castellani wondered what might have taken place during the time of that hiatus in the journal when other characters also visited Portofino. These included John Horne Burns, the bestselling author of the first great post-war novel The Gallery, an alcoholic who passed away on August 11, the last day of the “gap’ in the Williams journal. Imagining what the answers to those questions might be formed the spine of the plot in which Castellani explored the emotional turbulence and shifting social undercurrents experienced by a post-war generation of mostly gay men in the seaside town of Portofino.

Playwright Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, the subjects of Chris Castellani’s Leading Men.

For his library talk, Castellani presented a slide show of real and imagined characters who inhabited the Portofino of his novel, which he described as “an idyllic place fraught with peril.” One of them, part of a Swedish mother/daughter team that always dressed alike, reminded him of he actress Liv Ullman. Castellani asked himself, “what if Williams was writing a play just for her?” This is how Castellani ended up writing a one-act play in the style of Tennessee Williams embedded in Leading Men. The author also used that literary maneuver to try and get at the relationship between Williams and Merlo, and the guilt Williams felt after Merlo died of lung cancer in his early forties. Williams, who had become estranged from Merlo, did not visit him until the day he died, although he paid for Merlo’s care. After Merlo’s death, Williams, who had been at the peak of his career, fell into a long depression and did not write any more hit plays, a relief for Castellani who read the less-than-stellar late plays to fortify himself trying to write a Tennessee Williams-inspired play for Leading Men.

Castellani said he was “in love with the character of Frank Merlo,” a working-class Italian-American truck driver who was the beating heart of the relationship, where Williams was more mercurial and sardonic. He was Williams’s muse, Castellani said, someone who organized Williams’s life and got him to where he needed to go. “He brought him down to earth and created space for him so he could write.” But, Castellani found out, he was never able to tell Tennessee Williams, “I love you.”

Castellani received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council to write Leading Men. He is on the faculty and academic board of the Warren Wilson MFA program and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. His previous work includes All This Talk of Love, part of a trilogy of an Italian-American immigrant family and The Art of Perspective: Who tells the Story.

Award-winning Writer and Harvard Review's Fiction Editor, Suzanne Berne, Makes a Passionate Case for Why Novels Matter: Privacy

Author Suzanne Berne in a talk about why novels matter.

Suzanne Berne, who won the U. K.’s Orange Award for her 2014 novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood, took a firm hand in talking about herself as a writer when she came to the South End library on March 19 to talk about her latest work, The Dogs of Littlefield. She didn’t really want to read from her latest book of crime fiction, but instead hoped to make the case for why novels matter. 

“I could have done any number of things in my life, and done them fairly well,” she told the audience. “But I decided to devote my life to being a novelist.” One reason to celebrate novels is that they offer privacy, she said. “When you read a novel, It’s between you and the writer. There’s no intermediary. As soon as you turn the page, you become ‘them.’ You’re alone in your chair with ‘them’ in a mysterious collaboration. You, the reader, dance to the writer’s words.”

Berne, who is the fiction editor of The Harvard Review, acknowledged that, nowadays, novels face stiff competition from other forms of storytelling, including the many excellent television productions. “Unlike novels, they offer fine transitions, swift character development, easy flashbacks and efficient productions. You don’t have to sit through long passages about dress and place and time,” she explained.  

“Art is inefficient,” Berk countered. “It takes a long time to make and to understand.” She added that in fiction “the process of perception slows down the acquisition of information so you slowly build up sympathy for the characters’ flaws and terrors.” The New York Times reviewer of A Crime in the Neighborhood described Berne as a master at the craft of psychological menace. 

Berne was influenced in her literary life by the 19th-century Russian writer and theorist, Viktor Shklovsky, who spoke of art as a technique that would complicate that very easy and quick perception of things we now expect. He favored slowing down speed and efficiency of the story-telling, resist the cliches and habitual ways of describing our lives that we, said Berne, in our times have come to rely on. Shklovsky spoke for the kind of writing that makes “the stone stoney.” 

Viewing her own work from the perch of the editor, Berne brought copies of the first couple of pages of a draft that eventually became The Dogs of Littlefield. The story is a social satire about a near-perfect place close to Boston where dogs are suddenly found poisoned to death. The Boston Globe said the novel was a near-flawless satire of middle-class America.  And Berne agreed her early draft wasn’t “terrible” as opening pages go: It had something to set the reader on edge, an ominous ‘it’ and an ‘attitude.’ “The sentences were smart and clever,” she added somewhat ruefully, “but this came at the expense of telling a story: The narration was not ok.”

So she began to think of how to “unmuffle” the opening pages. She wanted it to be a social comedy about a perceived menace that exists in a place like Littlefield that everyone considers ‘ safe.’ To narrate it for that effect she created characters who could judge the residents from the point of view of an outsider, including locals who were seen as outsiders for not fitting into the local corset of norms, or those who felt like ‘the other’ for a range of reasons. “I am intrigued by matters that locals are absorbed by, which are big to them but small to the world,” Berne said. “Certain places can be seen as safe, but can any place be safe, and is trying to feel safe a good idea?”

She wrote six drafts of the novel. “Things are never finished,” she said. “They are abandoned.” Berne is currently working on a novel set on a remote New Hampshire lake that involves a reclusive and difficult elderly woman from Amsterdam who summons her estranged daughter and her daughter's unhappy college-age son to help her when she sprains her ankle.  The visit does not go well.

 A Crime in the Neighborhood, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Book of the Month Club and a Quality Paperback Book Club selection. Berne’s earlier novels are The Ghost at the Table and A Perfect Arrangement. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in magazines such as Ploughshares, Agni, The Three-penny Review, Mademoiselle, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and The Quarterly.  She teaches creative writing at Boston College and the Ranier Writing Workshop.

In 1968, Architect Romaldo Giurgola Proposed a South End Library Building with a Lower-level Children's Room Overlooking a Sunken Courtyard; an Entrance on Tremont Street; and Two Large Reading Rooms

Dan Kelley, principal in MGA Partners, the Philadelphia architectural firm that succeeded the award-winning Mitchell/Giurgola firm when they moved to Australia. Kelley gave a presentation at the South End library on March 12 about the architectural history of the South End branch.

An early proposal by Romaldo Giurgola for a sunken courtyard next to the South End library, with a dug-out lower level

Some of the surprising details that came out during a captivating talk and PowerPoint presentation on March 12 about the architectural history of the South End library: Now located on West Newton Street’s corner, the building could have been sited on the Rutland Square side; the library entrance might have been on Tremont Street; the proposed design included a lower-level Children’s Room (now the basement) that overlooked a sunken courtyard; and there could have been two large reading rooms instead of the one cramped space the library offers today. What might have forced the decision to go for the current, arguably lesser, design? The 1960s budget, for one, suggested architect Dan Kelley in his presentation called Beyond City Hall. It was a grand total of $225,000.

A view from the interior of the library onto a proposed sunken courtyard

Kelley, a principal in MGA Partners, who worked closely with Romaldo Giurgola, the library’s architect, traveled to the South End from Philadelphia at the invitation of FOSEL’s advisor (and assistant professor of architecture at Northeastern) Michelle Laboy. Kelley’s talk focused on the genesis of the library’s architecture and the Philadelphia School, based on research he did in the Giurgola archives at the University of Pennsylvania. The award-winning architectural firm of Mitchell/Giurgola, which in the 1980s built the Parliament Building in Canberra, Australia, was part of a group of architects of he 1960s and 1970s that helped rebuild the city of Philadelphia. .

The 1962 Mitchell/Giurgola proposal for a new Boston City Hall. It came in second.

How Giurgola got the assignment for the South End library is a matter of some speculation, said Kelley. Giurgola, who was awarded the AIA Gold Medal by the American Institute of Architects in 1982, came in second in the competition to design a new Boston City Hall in 1962. Some think that the South End library assignment a few years later was the consolation prize. Progressive Architecture magazine wrote in 1963 that the Giurgola proposal should have won the City Hall competition as it succeeded better than the winner in proposing a design that was “an intimate part of the restructurization of the area, and not an isolated monument.”

Early designs for the branch showed the building on different sides of the lot on Tremont Street

In his talk, Kelley compared Boston and Philadelphia as two cities dating from America’s Revolutionary era that were similar in their once-upon-a-time history of wealth and glory followed by urban decline during the 1950s and 1960s. The Philadelphia School architects were recruited by George Holmes Perkins, dean of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. They were assisted in the realization of their so-called Post-Modern approach to urban architecture by Edmund Bacon, Philadelphia’s city planner, who wanted to rebuild the city in a progressive way. That meant, among other things, to take into account the context, surroundings and social needs of where the buildings were located, as if they were “a fragment” of a larger whole, rather than an isolated structure imposed on an urban environment, explained Kelley.

The final design for the South End library, approved in 1970; it opened in 1971.

The tight budget for the construction of the South End library probably reduced the chances for the more attractive but expensive options of the sunken courtyard and the two large reading rooms on top of a dug-out lower level. Deficient site preparation led to the collapse of a trellis that surrounded the green space in the final design, making it unstable within a short period of time. An abutter to the library attending the presentation reported that refrigerators and other debris were thrown “down there.” In the 1990s the green space was replaced with a park surrounded by an iron fence, which is still there, today. 

Romaldo Giurgola (L) walking past the South End library’s construction site

The presentation was well attended by a number of local architects, as well as David Leonard, president of the Boston Public Library. Leonard commented that three ideas struck him: First, the centrality of Library Park to the building’s design; second, the evolution of the library’s architecture and the possibility that the final version of the proposed designs was perhaps not the stronger one and, finally, the question of how the form that suited the function of the library then, is different from what would be the case today, now that libraries have changed so dramatically in how they provide services to library users. Other architects in the audience also expressed interest in Giurgola’s initial designs for the library, especially the ones that included the sunken courtyard, lower level windows overlooking green space, and a library entrance on Tremont Street.

The South End branch of the Boston Public Library is on track for a major renovation and expansion in the next five years, which will begin with a $100,000 Programming Study sometime after July 1, so the history of its current design comes at an appropriate time. In the immediate future, the library will receive a so-called “refresh,” with new carpeting, fresh paint, additional electrical outlets, a reconfiguration of the furniture and new seating arrangements paid for by FOSEL’s private fundraising last year.

Zeitgeist Stage's Director David Miller and Playwright Jacques Lamarre Take on Staging a Play about Mass Shootings from the Perspective of the Family's Shooter in "Trigger Warning"

How does a play go from the pages of a script to a full-blown performance on stage? Last February 26, award-winning director of the Zeitgeist Stage Company, David Miller, took a stab at answering that question. Seated in a semi-circle with Miller and playwright Jacques Lamarre, three actors cast in his play, Trigger Warning, read through scenes that took a look at how a mass shooting impacts one family, that of the shooter. Two of the actors were part of earlier Zeitgeist plays: Steve Auger in Vicuna; Kelley Estes in Far Away, Hiding Behind Comets, Cakewalk, and Tigers Be Still. For Liz Adams Trigger Warning will be her first Zeitgeist show.

Trigger Warning’s genesis was a Boston Foundation announcement that it wanted to award grants to the Boston theatre community for new work, explained Miller, who contacted playwright Lamarre to commission the play. Lamarre had just finished reading the memoir A Mother’s Reckoning by Suzanne Klebold, mother of Columbine’s High School mass shooter, Dylan Klebold. Lamarre asked Klebold if he could adapt her memoir. She declined. Zeitgeist did not get a grant from the Boston Foundation, either. But the play, Trigger Warning, will open on April 12 at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Lamarre lives in Hartford, CT, the town where Colt Manufacturing Company created the town’s gilded age by producing weapons for the Civil War and later, as Lamarre commented wryly, guns for the country itself, including mass shootings. He lives minutes from the site of the Hartford Distributors shooting where nine people were killed in 2010; Newington, where five Connecticut Lottery employees were murdered in 1998; and one hour from Newtown, CT,  the site of the Sandy School Elementary School shooting of 20 students and six teachers by Adam Lanza, who also killed his mother earlier that same day at the home they shared.

To demonstrate a play’s evolution, the three actors read from two scenes, the first followed by a discussion with the library audience about the main subject of the play, the role of guns in the American family and its consequences. In the scene, the parents of the shooter, Travis, who has fatally shot a number of people, injured his 16-year-old sister and killed himself, are alone for the first time at the home where the shooting took place. The father, a contractor, is a gun owner whose guns, though locked away, had been used by his son for the mass shooting. The injured daughter had left her parents’ house to live with her aunt.  The parents bantered back-and-forth in a manner that at some level felt surprisingly normal, the way any couple will go back and forth, but with comments and questions that alluded to the devastating turn their lives had taken and to their having entered the unknown territory of being shunned by their community, the fictional town of Plainville.

“What’s going to happen to us,” they asked each other, and “I lost two clients today” and “should we sell the house?”  and “did you love Travis?” and the answer: “Yes, but I wish he’d never been born.” Playwright Lamarre talked about the killers’ families, the other victims of shootings who generally are not acknowledged even though their lives, too, have been destroyed by the shooter.  They become families at war with themselves: What could they have done differently? The mother of Dylan Klebold, for example, went from a well-respected member of the community to someone who had to go into hiding to mourn the loss of her son who had killed the children of families in that same community. At some point, she had to acknowledge her son had become “a monster.” Likewise, the mother of Adam Lanza, Sandy Hook’s mass shooter, had lived in fear of her son. But the fictional parents of Travis in Trigger Warning had known something was wrong, and had taken Travis from therapist to therapist, without finding something that helped their son. No one had an answer. 

Director Miller, whose plays were nominated last month for nine Small-Stage awards by the Independent Reviewers of New England (IRNE), told the audience that Zeitgeist Stage always produced plays that reflect “the spirit of the times,” so mass shootings was a relevant subject. There had been numerous documentaries, and plays, but never from the perspective of the shooter, he said. The initial title, Thoughts and Prayers, as in the usual comments offered, was determined to be too passive. Trigger Warning is both a general warning for events that may trigger trauma but, in this case, the word “trigger” has a more appropriate duality, he said.

After the cast held a read-through of the play’s first draft in December, followed by an in-depth discussion with Lamarre, the playwright returned two weeks later with a revised draft. “It evolved organically,” he said. “You never see the shooter. He had added several characters who each represented another aspect of the story: A  minister, who asked the shooter’s mother not to come to church anymore to avoid upsetting the other parishioners; and a lawyer, to fend off the lawsuits by enraged parents.  The Klebolds were bankrupted by their son’s ass shooting at Columbine, as was their insurance company. Scenes evolved further with the mother talking to the minister and the father to the lawyer, each describing from different points of view being cast out from the community they were a part of.  The daughter, living with the mother’s sister, moreover, attends a “Never Again” rally in town, multiplying the arguments for a law suit against the parents. 

Lamarre said he wanted to capture the depth of the rejection by the community of the parents of the shooter: How can you go on when no one is on your side and there is no spiritual comfort or legal protection, and relentless media coverage turning the violence into entertainment? He noted that in Columbine, fourteen trees were planted to memorialize all the students killed, including the shooters, but those trees were cut down.

Director Miller said Zeitgeist Stage had once before staged a play about a school shooting, called Punk Rock. It was 2015 and the company was in rehearsal for it when the Marathon Bombings occurred. When the play went on stage, three weeks later, there were numerous discussions about mass shootings after the performance. “People felt they wanted and needed to talk about it,” Miller said. 

At the library’s Page to Stage discussion, several audience members brought up a 1,000-page book by Andrew Solomon, titled Far From the Tree. Miller and Lamarre had read it as part of the preparation for Trigger Warning as it deals with so-called expectations violation, when parents find themselves in a situation through their children that is not the norm. “No parent wants to be seen as a failure,” Lamarre said, but what do parents do when they experience expectation violation, whether through their children’s mental health issues, dwarfism, or mass shootings?

Trigger Warning will be performed at the Boston Center for the Arts from April 12 through May 4 and will be the last play of the last season of Zeitgeist Stage Company which has announced it will close. The staff and the cast will leave a big hole in the South End theatre community. Lamarre’s next play is an adaptation of Wally Lamb's holiday novella., called Within’ & Hopin.’

Joan Diver, a Subject of J. Anthony Lukas's "Common Ground," and Author of "When Spirit Calls: A Healing Odyssey," Found a Spiritual Common Ground as Faith Healer

January 15 was an auspicious day for claiming to be “on common ground.” It was the day of a reading by a distinguished former South End resident, Joan Diver, who returned to her former neighborhood’s library to read from her debut memoir, When Spirit Calls: A Healing Odyssey. The Divers were one of the three families profiled in the award-winning book by J. Anthony Lukas about the South End’s struggle with school integration and forced busing, titled Common Ground. January 15 would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 90th birthday and, as Rev. Tim Crellin of St. Stephens Church who introduced the author pointed out, also claimed “common ground,” for humanity regardless of the color of their skin.

Rev. Tim Crellin of St. Stephen’s Church introducing Joan Diver.

Father Crellin captured the anticipation in the room where Joan Diver explained her quest for a spiritual life after devastating pain from an injured back forced her to seek relief in non-traditional venues and methods in cultural settings of both East and West. “Some of you may be joining us this evening because you know Joan from her days living just around the corner from where we are right now,” Rev. Crellin said, “or from her nearly two decades leading the Hyams Foundation, or from her leadership on boards like the Associated Grant Makers, the United Way and countless others. Perhaps you came because you know at least part of her story from reading Tony Lukas’ now classic book.  Or maybe you came out tonight because you’ve heard about Joan’s commitment to healing: physical, emotional, spiritual. Regardless of why you’re joining us tonight, you’re in for a treat.”

Joan Diver answering questions from an engaged audience about her spiritual voyage

Diver, who with her husband Colin, had hoped to raise their two boys in the South End in the 1970s but was thwarted by the constant battle over street crime and school choice, said she will always be connected to the South End. Moving to Newton to access better schools for their sons was traumatic. They grieved over it and felt guilty for not staying to face the challenges of raising a family in the South End.  When Lukas sought them out to profile their experience for the book he was writing about busing, she was very reluctant at first but then relented. “Tony told our story, which was a healing experience for us,” adding, “I could never have written my story of healing without the Boston story.”

Longtime South End resident Ann Hershfang reconnecting with Colin Diver, who became Dean of the U. Penn. Law School after leaving the South End, and subsequently served as President of Reed College (OR)

She fondly remembers the rich diversity of the South End, and requested a few moments of silence. “I want to talk about why I left a job I loved to write my healing story,” she said. “It was both an adventure and a love story and a tale of discovery of universal love that connects us and is the ultimate common ground. The adventure took me from West Newton Street to Newton Corners, from convicts hanging out on our street corner to watching people led to their execution in China, from an operating room at Beth Israel to a healing room in Santa Fe. These were never planned events but ones that called on me.”

Her medical crisis led her to surgery, after which she experienced certain phenomena, like a blinding white light that came and went, and a growing psychic awareness of “some challenges that come from dimensions that we’re not familiar with,” as well as a growing sense of the existence of “a universal consciousness.” A friend, a psychic, suggested this was part of a re-balancing of physical, mental and psychological energy. Diver became convinced that turbulent times, in a personal and a broader sense, represented “a great breaking open,” something that is “coming up for its healing, like a boil.”

On various trips she took after her surgery she became familiar with members of  healing communities with whom she was able to communicate in a spiritual understanding. She  experienced a “crossing of boundaries” into previous lives she may have lived, including ones where she had been raped and committed suicide. “I felt love and forgiveness after that,” she said, “like I had become a different person, one with more confidence.”  Lurching from painful medical crises to recovery and back again several times, Diver traveled a parallel path of the mind that led her to want to train as a healer, hoping to help others who were in psychic and physical pain. She participated in healing initiations that took her to Egypt, India, China and Mount Sinai. She became convinced  that we were “all led in some way, in our mind or by something beyond our minds,” but kept wondering, “what was driving me?” 

 Diver began to connect a new-found spirituality to certain decisions she had made,  including of a medical procedure that she had suspected she did not need but left her in pain for nine months. She focused on whether there are “multiple messages” to help determine what one should do but concluded that “you need to open up to it.” 

Southenders standing in line to buy a copy of Joan Diver’s book and having her sign it…

Members of the audience asked her to expound on this, pointing out that some people may see signs that lead to good places and others to bad ones. “How do you know the difference?” they asked. Diver answered that “everyone has their own path but if each of us, and enough of us, open our hearts a whole population can shift. It’s a shift of consciousness.”

Diver described how a certain incident had caused her family to leave the South End: Husband Colin had hit a burglar with a baseball bat, and became terrified he would hurt someone even worse in the future.  “But now you see it as a call,” someone asked her. 

“Whether we are led or called, we all have these signals,” she said. “Some see it, others don’t.”

Foreign Affairs Journalist, Stephen Kinzer, Believes Ayanna Pressley and Her Freshman Colleagues Need to Try and Change U.S. Defense Priorities to Pay for the Domestic Programs They Champion

Stephen Kinzer, a former bureau chief for the New York Times in the Middle East and current world affairs columnist for the Boston Globe, addressed a large audience at the South End library in December by saying he was “very impressed” with the new crop of Congressional representatives elected in 2018. A longtime critic of America’s interventionist foreign-policy, Kinzer’s talk focused on what would be a sensible US relationship with Iran and Syria. The concern he expressed, however, was that the new representatives are “too focused” on domestic issues and not enough on foreign policy. Taking as an example Ayanna Presley, the new congresswoman from the South End who defeated Michael Capuano, Kinzer said she “has not said a word” about the outside world.

“She defeated someone who did,” Kinzer added. “Her goals are domestic ones, free Medicare and so on. But the enormous outlays required for defense will be used to deny her the funding for the domestic programs she would like to see. We have to work on Ayanna Pressley to make sure she understands the linkage between domestic and foreign policies. Our job is to keep asking questions.” As a “refreshing example” of a new approach to world affairs Kinzer referred to Rashida Tlaib (D. -Michigan), the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress, who is not going to take the traditional freshman trip to Israel sponsored by AIPAC but instead hopes to take a trip to Palestine and highlight the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and provide an alternate perspective.

Kinzer was introduced by the widely admired radio host of WBUR’s Open Source, Christopher Lydon, who also reported for the New York Times, before he started The Connection on WBUR in the 1990s. Lydon said that during the 2016 presidential campaign both he and Kinzer thought Hillary Clinton’s approach to foreign policy was “a problem” and that Trump at that time seemed to be sending a different signal, among other things, by calling the Iraq invasion, and Hillary’s support for it,  ‘catastrophic.’ “He doesn’t seem so bad,” Lydon recalled they thought.

“But now,” he asked, “should we repent?”

The background for the invasion of Iraq, which Kinzer and Lydon agreed was the worst policy decision by any American president ever, was the Carter Doctrine. Laid out in the 1970s by National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, it proclaimed that the US would use military force, if necessary, to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf. The 1978 revolution in Iran, which overthrew the US-backed Shah, and the 1979 hostage crisis is what set the stage for a hostile relationship with Iran, as far as the US is concerned. But says Kinzer, for the Iranians, it began much earlier, in 1953, when the US overthrew their democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the Shah of Iran. 

Now, for the US, Iran is a red flag. “ They are considered the demons in the world. If a country is a friend of Iran, the US can lay waste to them,” said Kinzer. “The US is so deeply involved in Yemen because the Saudi and US justification is that there’s a group in Yemen that likes Iran.” Similarly, he said, negotiations sponsored by the United Nations under Kofi Annan and the Arab League to end the Syrian war early on didn’t proceed because Secretary Clinton would not sit down with Assad. There was little recognition that Iran supports Syria for fear that if it doesn’t, ISIS will take over Syria, remove Assad, kill his (Alawite) supporters, and Iran will next have a Sunni state on its border. “For Iran, there are two existential threats,” Kinzer explained. “Their environmental problems related to lack of water and droughts is one, and the Jihadists under ISIS is the other. This is why Iran would not allow for the destruction of Syria and Assad. We’re now six years into the Syrian war which might have been avoided.”

Kinzer’s position is that we should align ourselves with those countries whose goals are similar to ours. “Why are we in the Middle East at all, we should ask ourselves. Iranian society looks so much more like ours than Saudi society. We have similar goals: They hate ISIS and Al Queda even more than we do.” He suggested we need to “reassess our misunderstanding about Iran after two generations of misguided obsession.”  

Having taught journalism, political science, and international relations at Northwestern University and Boston University, Kinzer appreciates news sources that offer a broad and varied perspective on news. They include TomDispatch (for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our post-9/11 world and a clear sense of how our imperial globe actually works); Lobelog (A Different Perspective on Foreign Policy): and Consortium News (An Investigative Journalism and Political Review Since 1995). “The lack of agility in American foreign policy is remarkable,” he commented. “The world has changed but our foreign policy goals have not. Iran is a big country in the middle of the Middle East: We can’t ignore it.” He acknowledged that there are terrible dictatorships in the Middle East but the US has not been able to make better countries out of any of them by being concerned about human rights.

In 2006 Kinzer published Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq  which describes the 14 times the United States has overthrown foreign governments, why these interventions were carried out and what their long-term effects have been. He has made several trips to Iran, and is the author of All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Word has it, this book was part of John Kerry's library when he was Secretary of State under the Obama administration. It described, among other events,  how the CIA overthrew Iran's elected government in 1953.

Kinzer, a South End resident, said that Congress appears to be waking up from its “Iran coma” and show the beginnings of a rebellion against our involvement in the Saudi war with Yemen, as a result of the Saudi murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But, he warned, the US arms industry is very powerful and has Congress in its grip. “Not just the individual members of Congress are in their corner with contributions, but when Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors get a large contract, it is subbed out to many districts in the US and provides jobs,” Kinzer pointed out. “Cutting back on defense means loss of jobs and politically difficult decisions for politicians.”

Answering a question from the audience about how to make things better, Kinzer circled back to the newly elected members of Congress, including Ayanna Pressley. “We need to make sure that she will advance on her victory and articulate the foreign policy goals that she would pursue that would not be a waste of money. We have to build on their success by encouraging them to do so.”

Kinzer is a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, where he teaches International and Public Affairs. “I love my students,” he said. He is currently working on a ne book that will be out in October. It is called, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb, MK-ULTRA, and the CIA Search for Mind Control, about the American chemist and spymaster who was involved in the CIA's assassination and mind control program, known as Project MKULTRA, in the 1950s and 1960s. Kinzer promised he would be back at the South End library to talk about it. Stay tuned…

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