The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [2]
The ferry, like the island community itself, was an inelegant, practical affair, a low-bottomed vessel with a long smokestack set amidships, belching a spume of black smoke into the air. As the ferry approached Battery Wharf, Joe saw the commerce of Boston in all its diversity. Joe’s immigrant grandfather Patrick had been a cooper, a barrel-maker. Wooden barrels full of foodstuffs and sundry items rested everywhere along the wharves, sitting on horse-drawn wagons or standing dockside waiting to be lifted onto the ships.
Joe’s wagon rolled off the ferry and moved slowly through the clogged streets of the North End. Here, where almost a century and a half ago Paul Revere had created his elegant silver pieces, immigrants sat in sweatshops sewing pants and shirts, often for more hours than the day had light. The North End was a foul, fetid area where more than twenty-five different nationalities lived in uneasy proximity. Over twenty-five thousand people were jammed together there as tightly as in any city in the world except Calcutta.
As much as Joe’s mother might have wanted him to discard much that marked him as Irish-American, that heritage was his free pass through these dangerous streets. The Irish were diminishing in numbers, but they still controlled the waterfront, and at night, if an Italian or a Jew dared trespass in these precincts, he might leave with a broken nose or a bleeding face. The ethnic groups struggled against each other, the Irish against the Jews, the Jews against the Italians, the Italians against the Greeks. Stick to your kind. That was the basic axiom of life.
Beyond these sad streets lay the commercial areas of downtown Boston. These stores drew their clientele from all over the city. Highborn ladies in expensive finery stepped gingerly through the crowded streets. Chattering shop girls hurried back from their break. Workingmen with wages in their pocket shopped for Sunday suits, and unemployed men wandered aimlessly along.
The wagon moved up these teeming roads, finally coming upon an open space that exploded with light and the appearance of freedom. Here lay Boston Common and the Boston Public Garden. The Common, founded in 1634, is a massive version of the public parks found in towns across New England, emblematic of the democratic ideals of the region. The gallows once stood on the Common, and until 1830 Bostonians reserved the right to graze their cattle there. The formal, elegant Public Garden, founded in 1839, fit in with the aristocratic ideals of nineteenth-century Boston and the Protestant elite that controlled it. Along the pathways even the weeping willows and beeches seemed as properly garbed as the Bostonians who strolled past the swan boats.
The elite walked sedately among the flowerbeds and statuary, but there was another world as well, a boy’s world full of danger. Outsiders like Joe knew that they had to be wary. In winter, Boston Common became a field of battle. The Irish boys made their way up from the North End to take on the highborn Protestant boys in epic snowball fights. The Irish toughs were a dark and terrible legend, merciless in their attacks against the young blue bloods who asserted their own young manhood and held their ground against assaults on their turf.
Joe was not much of a fighter himself, and he had not come here today to confront any of the boys who lived near Boston Common. His carriage moved on toward the townhouses and mansions spread along Commonwealth Avenue in the new Back Bay area and along Beacon Street. It was a world so different from the one below that it was as if life itself should have a different name here. So in a way it did. Here on these broad avenues the Protestant elite ruled over the space and grandeur of the city, over its elegance and art, and applied fine-sounding old English names to their streets and apartments. Clarendon. Exeter. Somerset. The names resonated like fine old crystal.