Reality is frequently stranger than fiction, isn’t it? This is very true here. On this tour of the Dark Side of Boston, you’ll hear stories of crime, disease, death, and disaster… For starters , Boston is one of the oldest cities in the US, and it has a very chequered history. It had its own witch trials years before the more famous ones at Salem. It also has tons of atmosphere. Let’s start with...
Diseases You might have heard of the Great Influenza of 1918/9. This flu epidemic killed thousands of Bostonians, hundreds of thousands of Americans, and some 75 million people across the world. It was a true pandemic, and started its global trajectory in the Port of Boston. In August 1918, the first sailors fell ill. Some stayed in Boston, passing the virus onto locals. Some left for other cities and transmitted the lethal disease around the US, and the rest of the world.
Crime and Punishment The tour takes place in Boston’s oldest neighbourhood , the North End. Traditionally, many of the immigrants in the North End were Italian. This tour is also a great opportunity to explore the labyrinth of the North End’s small streets and alleys . In 1950, the infamous Great Brink’s Robbery took place here. Over 27 million US dollars in today’s money were taken. The “Crime of the Century” was American Irish-Italian teamwork .
Today the Italian population here is much reduced (it’s now about 30 per cent), but there are still plenty of famous Italian shops and restaurants. And at night Little Italy appears particularly atmospheric. By the light of the replica gas lamps, you can see an innocuous redbrick house next to a beauty parlour . This is where not so long ago one of the Mafia’s most infamous bosses had his headquarters . The Patriarca family is still active today.
(PLAY THE AUDIO) INTERVIEW: wild women of boston Today Boston and its neighbouring city Cambridge are considered the centre of American intellectual life. This is because they are the home of Harvard, which was founded when Massachusetts was still an English colony, and MIT. But the area also has its dark side, as Dina Vargo, a tour guide with Boston on Foot and author of the book Wild Women of Boston , explains. For example, it is well known, thanks to Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible , that another Massachusetts town, Salem, had brutal witchcraft trials in the late 17th century. What is less well known is that Boston did, too:
Dina Vargo (Standard American accent): Salem, where I actually live now, doesn’t corner the market on the witches, on the witch-killing industry! In Massachusetts there were three women killed, hanged for witchcraft in Boston, beginning with a woman who claimed also to be a healer , so I like to say, you know, if it works, you’re a healer, if it doesn’t work, you’re a witch! And pretty much that’s what happened to this woman named Margaret Jones, she was hanged. Another woman comes along and essentially had an argument with her neighbours and with the town. Actually, what she did was she had a contractor , a carpenter , who didn’t perform the work at her home, you know, like so many of us today, how many of us have hired a contractor that didn’t quite work out? She, unfortunately, made the mistake of speaking out about this man and didn’t leave that to her husband to do. So she was excommunicated from church. Whenever her husband died , she was immediately accused as being a witch. And she was eventually hanged for witchcraft.
white riot And violence continued to be a part of Boston life:
Dina Vargo: I wrote another tour called “Bostonians Behaving Badly” and it was about riots in Boston’s history. And Boston was actually the most riotous city in the colonies in those early colonial, pre-revolutionary days. I think we had 28 riots, compared to New York having four, and Philadelphia having six in the same time period, so the mid-1600s to, let’s say the Revolutionary War, 1776.
And they all are very much lined up with social justice issues that we would consider today, you know, poverty, not having enough food to eat, religion, later on immigration, later on labor unions , all of these same issues that the United States grapples with today, they had been dealt with in Boston’s history in some way or shape or form.
pope’s NIGHT And, as in England, Bonfire Night, or Pope’s Night, on November 5th, was a violent affair:
Dina Vargo: Two rivalling street gangs would build a cart , would build their own carts, build a bonfire in the centre of town, probably spend the day getting liquored up on rum . They would build an effigy of the Pope and they would build an effigy of the Devil, put them on their carts and then, after they were good and liquored up, they would meet at the centre of town at the bonfire and fight and see who toppled the other’s Pope first. And that was Pope’s Night. And that celebration didn’t stop until George Washington came to town in 1775, whenever he took over the Continental Army that was located over in Cambridge, and he put the kibosh , or ended that celebration, knowing that it wasn’t going to do us any favours whenever we asked the French to help us out with the Revolutionary War. And also because I believe he said that that celebration was childish, which... it’s more than just childish, it’s pretty awful ! But I think he knew that. So, visionary leader, George Washington, I suppose there’s a reason he’s the first President of the United States of America. So!
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