Alan Lupo, chronicler of Boston, dies

Pulse of the streets propelled his reporting

To read an Alan Lupo newspaper column was to hear his voice, the Boston accent saturating every syllable.

He was no stranger to the inner sanctums of City Hall but was more at home with regular folks on Boston's stoops and sidewalks. He knew people - and people knew him - from the North End to Southie, from Dorchester to Doyle's pub in Jamaica Plain. And there, immortalized in a barroom mural, he forever soaks up stories amid the sandwiches and the elbow-benders.

"Alan Lupo brought the city streets into the newsroom," said Martin F. Nolan, former editorial page editor at the Globe. "This was a man who did it with shoe leather, the old-fashioned way. He was a street reporter's street reporter who really understood the neighborhoods."

Mr. Lupo, one of few columnists whose work appeared in the latter-day troika of Boston newsprint - the Globe, the Herald, and the Phoenix - died yesterday in hospice care at Kindred Hospital in Peabody. He was 70 and had been suffering from melanoma.

"He was a good friend of the people of Boston, a good friend of the neighborhoods of Boston," said Mayor Thomas M. Menino. "He was just a very special guy."

The Hub's Herodotus, Mr. Lupo captured the city's unfolding histories as they played out in courts, schools, and discreet handshake deals among the powerful. Reaching beyond the confines of newspaper stories, he left the Globe in the early 1970s to serve as an editor and reporter on the WGBH-TV show "The Reporters," which he helped found. Mr. Lupo also helped create WBZ-TV's I-Team of investigative reporters and turned his typewriter to longer projects.

His 1977 book, "Liberty's Chosen Home," provided a detailed context for Boston's racial strife during the years of busing and desegregation. Written between his first and second tenures at the Globe, it became a foundation for better-known books that followed, such as "Common Ground" by J. Anthony Lukas, who tipped his hat to Mr. Lupo twice in his acknowledgements.

"He was the archetype of a city reporter - in touch with all levels of the public, from the mayor to the homeless person, independent and fierce in his reporting," said Stephen Kurkjian, a former Globe reporter and editor. "We're losing an original part of our history."

Mr. Lupo's reporting on a proposed inner belt connector highway that would rip through Boston's neighborhoods also helped change governmental policy. With two other authors, he wrote "Rites of Way: The Politics of Transportation in Boston and the US City," which was published in 1971.

"His reporting helped to kill it," said Fred Salvucci, a former state transportation secretary. "He showed what the real, human costs were, in addition to the dollar costs. Alan was the guy who wrote the community side of the story, and he absolutely gave a voice to those who had no voice."

In 1981, Mr. Lupo charted a different literary course when he joined with his wife, Caryl Rivers, a Boston University journalism professor, to write alternating chapters of "For Better, For Worse," an amusing peek into their marriage.

But it was as a reporter from the old school that Mr. Lupo made his name when he wrote for the Globe in the late 1960s, forming the paper's first urban reporting team, and again after returning in the mid-1980s to pen columns for the opinion pages, then City Weekly, then Globe North.

"Alan stood out in a distinctive generation of reporters, activists, and politicians who will forever be identified with the era of [former editor] Tom Winship at the Globe and [former mayor] Kevin White in City Hall," said Christopher Lydon, a journalist and radio talk show host. "They, or should I say we, were interested in every inch of city turf, in the scoundrels and the saints, in the ancient history and all the present-day choices before the town. Alan stood for localism at maybe its all-time best."

Local for Mr. Lupo was Boston, where he was born, and Winthrop, where he grew up as an only child and returned to raise his own family. He graduated from Winthrop High School in 1955, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1959, and from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 1960.

Mr. Lupo met Rivers when they were students at Columbia. In an interview three years ago that is posted on the Internet, they told Henry Dane that as students they worked together on a public television documentary on New York's health hazards.

"He would hold my hand while I was out in the alley trying to find rats," Rivers told Dane, and Mr. Lupo quipped: "Holding her hand 'cause I was scared of rats!"

Yesterday, Rivers called her husband "my soul mate and my coauthor and my love for 50 years. His voice as a writer was urban and earthy and funny and warm, and that's what people cherished so much about him. He really cared about people, and people cared about him. His stories were taped to refrigerators all over Boston."

Having breathed deep the inky newsroom air as a copy boy at the Boston Sunday Advertiser, Mr. Lupo landed his first reporting job at the Middletown Times Herald-Record in New York. In 1963, he jumped to the Baltimore Evening Sun, then joined the Globe three years later.

In "The Messiah Comes Tomorrow: Tales from the American Shtetl," published in 2000, Mr. Lupo contrasted his early and later days in newspapers.

"When I started out, there were more big-city newspapers than there are today, and they were peopled mainly by white guys who wore white shirts, often stained, and wrinkled, ugly ties, and sometimes, yes, fedora hats - even indoors," he wrote. Some four decades later, "We are more educated and less street-smart. We are more thoughtful and less poetic in our speech."

That was not true of Mr. Lupo. Whether he was writing for the Globe, the Boston Phoenix, or more recently in the Boston Herald, the city's urban rhythms pulsed in his prose.

"He had a PhD in street smarts, that's the thing about him," Nolan said. "He was gregarious, and yet he could sit at that typewriter and make music with it."

Along with writing a book with his wife, Mr. Lupo also drew on his children for inspiration and, inevitably, column material. In 1994, he featured his son, Steve, now an FBI agent in Houston, in his column "My Son the Cop," and his actress daughter, Alyssa Lupo Zulueta of San Francisco, in "Acting to Make Parents Proud." Mr. Lupo also leaves two granddaughters and a grandson.

A memorial service will be held Monday at 5 p.m. in Marsh Chapel at Boston University.

Rumpled, affable, and quick with a joke or anecdote that could bring down the house, Mr. Lupo always looked the part of a reporter, whether he was taking notes in the mayor's office during the days of Kevin White or Tom Menino.

"He would always have a bunch of pens in one pocket and a reporter's notebook stuck in his back pocket, and he wore a sports jacket," Menino recalled. "He was never a fashion plate. He had a different fashion: He wanted to report the news of the neighborhoods correctly."

Jerry Burke, an owner of Doyle's, credited Mr. Lupo's writing with putting the Jamaica Plain establishment on the map. In return, Burke put Mr. Lupo on the wall of Doyle's, tucking his image into a mural of political notables, which only made sense.

"Nobody knew the city of Boston better than Alan Lupo," Burke said. "Period, end of story."