A walk on the seamy side
Touring the sites of murders, fires, and illicit activities provides an enlightening look into Boston history
As the world knows, the Freedom Trail weaves through Boston, connecting places that played a key role in the progress of liberty and equality. But just steps from those hallowed spots are others that mark much darker moments in history.
They include the store where wife killer and race baiter Charles Stuart once worked. The home where the last Boston Strangler victim died. The location of the infamous Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire. The Combat Zone.
Call this the "unfreedom trail."
Two local criminal experts created this "Immoral Boston" tour for a recent sociology conference - and it may be no less insightful than walking along the red bricks of the Freedom Trail. James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice, law, policy, and society at Northeastern University, sees the tour as a way to understand the influence major crimes have had on the city. Tour cocreator Jack Levin, a Northeastern sociology and criminology professor, has a slightly different perspective: "Crimes can be very abstract," he said. Real crime "isn't something you see on prime-time TV, like in 'Law & Order,' 'CSI.' I think what a tour does, by focusing on the particular spots where crimes have occurred, is lend some reality."
The men, who have collaborated on books such as "Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder," may offer the tour to interested parties, but anyone with a fascination of the macabre and a love of history can visit Immoral Boston. No bricks will guide you, only your imagination.
The tour starts near the corner of Newbury and Clarendon streets, the former location of Kakas Furs. "The signs [of the store] are there, slyly hidden behind bushes," Fox noted. In 1989, Kakas manager Charles Stuart claimed a black man shot and killed his pregnant wife, Carol DiMaiti, and injured him while the couple was driving from a childbirth class. As Stuart's brother was preparing to reveal that Stuart himself was the murderer, Stuart leaped to his death from the Tobin Bridge. He used a gun taken from Kakas to kill his wife.
The Stuart case had "a tremendous impact on race relations in Boston," Fox said. Yet there were positive effects: "I don't think it was a coincidence that after the Charles Stuart case the Community Disorders unit of the Boston police became a model for dealing with hate crimes," Levin added.
Next up, past the former Boston Police headquarters, now the Jurys Doyle Hotel, is the location of the horrific Cocoanut Grove fire in Bay Village. The 1942 fire, which took the lives of 492 people, including two distant relatives of Fox's, had an impact on burn treatment, fire safety codes, and manslaughter law. The inferno revealed a "level of deliberate behavior to circumvent fire codes and to lock doors that should not have been locked," Fox said. People react emotionally just standing near the small sidewalk plaque that marks the site, now a parking lot, he added: "If you just talk about [the fire], it doesn't have the same impact."
From here it's not far to the Combat Zone, a warren of strip clubs, peep shows, and X-rated activities created in the 1960s after Boston's randy Scollay Square was razed for urban renewal. The area, roughly bounded by Washington, Boylston, and Kneeland streets and Chinatown, helped lead to the downfall in 1974 of Rep. Wilbur Mills, of Arkansas, who took the stage in the seedy Pilgrim Theatre with stripper Fanne Foxe.
The Combat Zone (now a shadow of its raunchy self) may not seem like much of a tourist destination, Levin acknowledged, but "it tells us something about city planning and policy, which congregated the more untoward aspects of urban life into one area so it wouldn't overlap with the affluent residents of Boston."
The next stop is the John Adams Courthouse, home to an exhibit devoted to Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, two Italian-American anarchists executed for murder in 1927 at the Charlestown Prison, a case widely viewed as a miscarriage of justice. Levin sees parallels between the Sacco-Vanzetti case and today's anti-immigrant sentiment. Said Fox, "It's hard to think of a case where [American] justice fell so low, where we let justice be ruled by public opinion."
Near the courthouse, on Somerset Street, is the Garden of Peace, created in 2004 as an homage to victims of homicide. Set in a kind of riverbed are stones etched with the names of victims: DiMaiti, Molly Anne Bish, and Jeffrey Curley, among them. It is a moving spot, and Fox takes note of the blank stones awaiting names.
A walk to Charles Street brings you to the home of the last "official" Boston Strangler victim: 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, found on Jan. 4, 1964. "It was the first episode in the country when a whole community was gripped with such terror," Fox said.
The last stop is at the former Charles Street jail (1851 to 1990), now a luxury hotel with a restaurant named Clink. The joint once housed both petty and hard criminals, as well as the occasional protesting suffragettes and birth-control advocates. The place recalls a time when politicians debated ways to rehabilitate prisoners, not just warehouse them, Fox said.
The men acknowledge their tour caters to the public's lurid interest in terrible crimes. "For most people, Hannibal Lecter is as real as Jeffrey Dahmer. It's a fascination, an escape," Levin said. But "if what you know about crime is based on books, on television, movies, sometimes, it's difficult to distinguish . . . an actual trial from 'Boston Legal,' " Fox said. "Therefore [we have] a very glamorized perception of what's happened.
"By going to the sites, it reminds us that people actually died," he said. "It is difficult to glamorize something when you remember how many people were killed." 