The Fence - Dick Lehr [23]
In the beginning, meaning back to the American Revolution, the grassy and hilly peninsula jutting into Boston Harbor was ideal for grazing livestock. In March 1776, the Colonial forces, led by General George Washington, used it as a base from which to drive the British out of Boston. By the early 1800s, South Boston formally became part of Boston, connected to the downtown by the new Dover Street Bridge.
Given its geography—nearby but separate and isolated—Southie became a convenient location to build the city’s prisons, hospitals for the mentally ill, and poorhouses. Iron foundries, machine shops, and shipyards on the waterfront all sprang up.
The potato famine from 1845 to 1850 that devastated Ireland triggered a massive exodus to the city, first to the tenements of the North End and then, in the decades following the Civil War, to Southie. The Irish eagerly took jobs in shipbuilding and along the waterfront unloading freight ships. The women traveled across the bridge where they cleaned the homes of the Brahmins on Beacon Hill. Life revolved around work, family, and the many new Catholic churches opening throughout a neighborhood that was only 3.1 square miles. In time, it was said that Southie was a “state of mind.”
“For those born and raised there, South Boston was a warm, friendly, comfortable community where people knew one another, shared the same values, enjoyed the same pastimes, and were safe from outside contacts and alien influences,” wrote the historian Thomas H. O’Connor, a history professor at Boston College. “Southie pride” became a powerful force embedded in the clannish, tight-knit neighborhood—an us-versus-them mentality between the neighborhood and the rest of the city, or world for that matter.
Kenny Conley quickly came to embody that pride and the neighborhood’s cultural emphasis on staying put rather than breaking away. “I did see myself growing old, sitting right down here, in South Boston. I’ve always said, and I think it’s the sentiment of everyone around here, Why leave God’s country?” From early on, in addition to working as a police officer, he’d say his dream was to marry and have a family. And his idea of making it was to find a house in the densely built neighborhood that actually had a garage and a driveway. “You know, something I could take a snowblower to.”
Kenny was nine years old when his parents realized their own dream and became Southie homeowners. His father paid $10,000 in cash for 78 H Street—the third in a cluster of six row houses they could see around the corner from their apartment. The house had white aluminum siding with black trim. There were four bedrooms—two on the second floor and two on the third—and two bathrooms, a luxury for a neighborhood where a single bath was the norm. The Conleys closed on the house on November 3, 1977, but could not move in. No one had lived in the house for years, and the inside was a wreck. “We did a total gut job,” said Kris, Kenny’s twin sister. They made the move three months later, just before the Blizzard of ’78, the nor’easter that dumped more than twenty-seven inches of snow on the city between the morning of February 6 and the next night. The renovation was not finished and the interior was always a work-in-progress. This was because Maureen Conley decorated the house herself, and then she’d do it over again.
Kenny’s bedroom was on the third floor at the top of the stairs. It had a sliding French door opening into a brown-paneled room his parents had carpeted wall-to-wall with navy-blue carpet. His mother chose a color scheme of red, white, and blue, and everything was matching. She decorated the room with ceramics she and her girlfriends made at a local shop.
The second bathroom was on Kenny’s floor. It had a rear window opening onto the second-floor roof. His parents stored an eight-foot ladder on it, and during the summer they’d climb out the bathroom window and use the ladder to get