In the North End, community grows by itself–but for how long?
Five years ago, when I first told my Cambridge friends I was moving to Boston’s North End, they said I would be disappointed. My Italian grandmother notwithstanding, I wouldn’t find the sense of community and civic life I was looking for, they said, because the old North Enders wouldn’t “let me in.” To the oldtime Italians and Italian-Americans, I’d be just another yuppie.
It was not the first time Harvard lawyers and academics have been wrong.
From our first days, my wife and I were welcomed. To begin with, Armando, our landlord, who occupies the apartment two floors down and has lived in the building all 66 years of his life, noticed my curiosity about the neighborhood, and took every opportunity to give me local history lessons. “These buildings,” he informed me about our standard four-story renovated tenement, “were called sixteeners, because they usually had 16 families living in them, and each of those families had six or seven kids. On a summer afternoon there would be literally hundreds of kids on the streets. We didn’t have nuthin. When it got really hot we slept on the roofs.”
And the stout sixtyish Sicilian couple across the hall was no less engaging. Tony and Katerina, whose booming, rapid-fire exchanges in Italian initially alarmed us, soon offered us unlimited use of their basil plants, solicited my wife the doctor’s medical advice on a range of ailments, baked us Sicilian Easter bread, and invited us up to the roof for summer-evening coffee. We got to know them so well that we visited them after they returned to Sicily with their 25 years of savings from his job at the Necco factory and hers sewing wedding dresses. We had Sunday-afternoon dinner with their entire extended family, and Katerina cried when we left for home.
My wife immediately discovered Salvi. Almost emaciated by emphysema, this wisp of a man has nonetheless managed every summer to transform his narrow concrete alley into a flourishing garden of potted plants that gives everyone who walks past enormous pleasure. He’s like a plant himself, each afternoon finding the sunniest spot on the block and settling himself there to absorb the heat and light, leaning quietly against the warm bricks. “Nice to seeeee you,” he exclaims hoarsely when I stop to talk.
The list goes on from there. There’s Theo, the Brazilian who spent 11 years working as a dishwasher at the corner diner until he’d saved enough money to buy the place. And Manny, a sharp-tongued Greek-American who used to teach school for the hearing-impaired. And Rebecca, who manages to run her antique shop from a seat at the diner across the street. And Al Natale, a sanguine and articulate ex-big-band trumpeter who spends much of his time tending to what seems to be a building-full of aging siblings. One of them, a ninety-something retired boxer also named Al, didn’t let crippling arthritic knees keep him from making his way up the stairs one afternoon to show me photographs of the trotters he used to own.
Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam may be right about the decline of civic life in America. But in the North End, at any rate, a powerful instinct for spontaneous association seems to be thriving at a level that may elude his research. While none of the interactions I have described qualifies as civic involvement, strictly speaking, they are nonetheless a valuable form of social capital. Within a short time of moving to the North End, my wife and I have been naturally and gracefully enmeshed within a remarkably easygoing, undemanding, unpretentious but nonetheless comforting social network.
I¹m no libertarian, but my time in the North End has convinced me that they’ve got one thing right. Their leading 20th-century theorist, F.O. Hayek, advocated something he called “spontaneous order.” Against government-driven efforts to shape society “rationally” from above, he argued that it was better to leave the full variety of local communities to follow their own paths. An overarching legal structure was necessary to protect fundamental rights, he granted, but most other social needs and aspirations were best addressed and articulated at the local level. Informal and spontaneous forms of local association were not only intrinsically less threatening to human liberty than centralized state agencies, he argued, but they also more sensitively and subtly registered the unique problems and promise of specific populations.
To walk into the North End from the Museum of Science bridge or Government Center is to encounter a striking illustration of Hayek’s point. South of North Washington Street and the Big Dig, Government Center itself and Charles River Park loom as notorious examples of arrogant and insensitive big-government planning. Vast, lonesome plazas and featureless towers seem to have been dropped from on high, flattening and evacuating the old organic jumble of West End shops and streets and squares.
North of the Big Dig, the narrow curving streets, the tilting iron fire escapes, the religious statues, and storefront benches remain intimately expressive of the character of the Italian immigrants who made this neighborhood their own a hundred years ago. The familiar features of Italian-American culture–its aesthetic sensitivity, its folk-Catholic piety, its family orientation–are present and recognizable in the built environment. In the North End, the personality of a people seems to have worked itself into the very stones.
But will the stones soon be all that remains? My wife and I have been let in–indeed, graciously embraced–by the North End and its people. But it is also true that North Enders regard the increasingly numerous young professionals in the neighborhood as a threat. Their anxieties are well founded. Rents have risen so high and the units chopped up so small that it is difficult for lower- and middle-income families to stay here.
The buildings that once housed 16 families now rarely hold 16 people, and many of these are young professionals who work high-paying but time-consuming jobs that leave them little time to participate in the community’s civic life, spontaneous or otherwise. Most see the North End as a way station, a place to live while establishing themselves in careers and saving enough money to buy a house in the suburbs. It is part of the ironic fate of this community that an environment built by working families has become so attractive that working families can no longer afford to live there.
So even as I gratefully enjoy our North End welcome and participate happily in neighborhood life, I become increasingly aware of its fragility. It strikes me that the North End’s curving streets and cafés might soon become little more than an aesthetically pleasing shell, a smiling communal folk-mask covering the starker ethos of an individualist marketplace.
And here, I suppose, is where I part company with the libertarians. It’s true that no government agency or official could have designed a community with the organic depth, distinctiveness, and spontaneous flair of the North End. But perhaps the time has come for government to take steps to protect it.
Neal Dolan is a lecturer in American history and literature at Harvard University.