Instead of writing and recording a new episode, your humble hosts are going to History Camp this weekend. We’ll leave you with two stories about Boston’s weird neighborhood history from our back catalog. We’ll be sharing a story from Jamaica Plain about a politically motivated crime in the early 20th century that led to a series of running gunfights between the police and what the newspapers called “desperadoes.” Then, we’re going to move across town to Brighton, which — speaking of desperadoes — used to be home to saloons, card games, and hard drinking cowboys, when it hosted New England’s largest cattle market.
Battle of Jamaica Plain
We owe tremendous debt to Mark Bulger’s 2007 article on this subject for the Jamaica Plain Historical Society. He tracked down the sources and arranged the narrative that we shamelessly cribbed from for our podcast.
- See how the battle made headlines around the country.
- Read about the origins of the term “yeggmen.”
- See a badly OCR’ed article about the 1914 discovery that the perps had been killed in London.
- Watch British Pathé newsreel footage of the Siege of Sidney Street.
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Mashable collected photos of the London siege, including Winston Churchill on the scene.
Boston’s Wild West
- The Brighton Market: Feeding 19th Century Boston, David C Smith & Anne E Bridges.
- 1841 report on agriculture in Massachusetts.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne describes the Brighton market.
- A description of the Brighton Cattle Fair from a Louisville publication called The Dollar Farmer.
- A description of the Brighton Cattle Fair in an 1846 New England Farmer magazine.
- Our header image comes from this 1850 article in Gleason’s Pictorial.
- Turkey drives described by Paul Gilbert for VPR.
- Articles by William Marchione on the Brighton stockyards, the Cattle Fair Hotel, and the annexation debate. In that first article, he gathered several additional period sources that we quoted on the stockyard fires, stampedes, and lawsuits.
- For a broader discussion of Boston’s annexations of surrounding towns, check out our Episode 61.
Come see us at Boston Public Library
Hosts Nikki and Jake will be giving a brief talk at the main branch of the Boston Public Library on Friday, March 29 at 7:30pm. It’s part of a program marking the 150th anniversary of the Grand Peace Jubilee, held in Copley Square in 1869. You can get more details about the Jubilee in episode 102, but it was a giant musical extravaganza celebrating the end of the Civil War. The anniversary event is going to feature some of the same music that was performed at the original, as interpreted by a brass band from the New England Conservatory of Music. We’ll give the historic context, Boston’s poet laureate Porsha Olayiwola will give a reading, and the keynote address will be delivered by Theodore C. Landsmark. Because the event is being held at the library after hours, advanced registration is required.
Boston Book Club
Michael Patrick MacDonald’s memoir All Souls tells the story of a young boy growing up in South Boston during the 1970s, portraying a tightly knit community against the backdrop of the busing crisis, Whitey Bulger’s consolidation of power, and his own family’s heartbreaks. Here’s the flyleaf description:
A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston’s working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie’s Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: “[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define.”
But the threats-poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world-were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”
It’s a glimpse into a Southie that has changed a lot, but perhaps not enough, since 1974. MacDonald’s book shows a continuing affection for that world, while not shying away from its faults. He can express love for the people and experiences that made up his childhood, while recognizing the poverty, violence, and racism that shaped the neighborhood that made him.
Upcoming Event
For our upcoming event this week, we have a neighborhood focused talk at the Copley Square branch of the public library about, well, Copley Square. On March 27 at 6pm, Leslie Humm Cormier will be presenting about how to explore the history of Copley Square through its architecture. Dr. Cormier is an architectural historian who currently teaches at Boston Architectural College. Here’s how the library describes the event.
Copley Square is one of Boston’s most architecturally significant and instantly recognizable public locations. This urban square is home to Trinity Church, the Boston Public Library, Old South Church and the Hancock Tower, among other important landmarks. The square defines the city, as well as the evolution of American architecture and urban design, from colony toward the sophistication of global European squares, moving creatively from Beaux-Arts style to International Style and Modernism. Architectural historian Leslie Humm Cormier explores this contemporary place from its origins as an estuary to its vital significance as a stylistic link between old-world style and new-world design.
The lecture will be held in the Commonwealth Salon on the first floor. It’s free, but registration is required.