The Sound of Silence
The North End has survived the clamor of the Central Artery and years of Big Dig construction, only to find itself in a quiet struggle between Old World and new.
This is the first in a series of articles exploring area neighborhoods.
To a visitor standing at the corner of Hanover and Cross streets, the North End still feels Italian. Most of the businesses have Italian names, the smells of pastry and pasta fill the air, and you can hear Italian spoken on the stoops. But walk farther into the neighborhood and try to view it through the eyes of the people who grew up here, and a different picture emerges. Million-dollar condos rise where a community center used to be; fancy bistros replace neighborhood markets; a block that hosted countless stickball games is now filled largely with luxury cars. The gentrification of this small corner of the city - you can walk all the way across it in a leisurely 15 minutes - is nothing new; professionals, young and old, have been "discovering" the North End for several decades. But, now, the pace of that change is being driven ever faster by the return of something that was long absent from the neighborhood: silence.
"It felt like the day after a nuclear explosion, because there was no noise," says City Councilor Paul Scapicchio of the day in December 2003 when the Central Artery was finally shut down. "My whole life, there had been smoke, beeping horns, and noise and traffic, constantly, everywhere. And then, all of a sudden, it was gone."
And while North Enders hated the elevated highway, which leveled part of the neighborhood and cut off the remainder from the rest of the city, it can be argued that the "other Green Monster" also helped to preserve and extend the Italian era, creating a place where time didn't necessarily stop but definitely ran a bit slower, as it does even today. The commercial blocks on Hanover and Salem aren't only about commerce but about stopping and socializing, whether in Italian or in the unique North End variant of the Boston accent - unique not just in tone, in which Italian can be heard in the voices of those who don't speak more than a few words of the language, but unique also in its sense of formality and respect, its sense that conversations will not and cannot be hurried. Even the side streets, many just a block or two long, seem to be less about getting somewhere than about being somewhere. But that somewhere is fading, and what was once a place where interconnected families both lived and worked is becoming a bedroom community of increasingly wealthy strangers.
"When I used to walk down Hanover Street as a kid - I went to Boston Latin School - I would see my Uncle Frank over near the Caffe Vittoria, and I would walk farther down, and I would see my Uncle Joe down near the Green Cross Pharmacy. Maybe I would see one of my other uncles around the street," Scapicchio recalls, pointing out a place where he used to play pinball or a market that's now an upscale restaurant. "Every day, walking home: `Hey, what are you doing?' `What's in the bag?' `You staying out of trouble?' Then, when the first one of them died, I realized it's not where you live, it's the people that are in the place that make it."
These days, Scapicchio still sees plenty of familiar faces as he retraces those steps, but he's a visitor, not a resident. A 39-year-old father of two who represents his native North End as well as East Boston, Charlestown, and most of downtown on the City Council, Scapicchio reluctantly moved out two years ago when he and his wife needed more space for their family and found themselves priced out of the market. It's a story that's repeated too often, the story of outsiders coming in and "true" North Enders vanishing, pushed out not just by economics but also by an even more unstoppable force: time.
"The biggest change is a lot of people are dying. That's really what's happening in the North End," says Jimmy Rion, known as Jimmy on the Waterfront, who rents and sells apartments and condos at Boston Harbor Realty on North Street. "The older residents who I grew up with - I'm 40, so they're 60, 70, 80 - they're not moving out, they're moving on, to a better place. That, I think, is the biggest hurt."
For a businessman, says Rion, things are good: This past fall, his lowest-priced studio listed at just under $200,000, while a one-bedroom condo could approach the $900,000 mark. But to someone who spent much of his life playing and then working in the North End, the changes are less positive. Take, for example, the chairs he sets out in front of his office most days - "community chairs," where people sit down, take a breath, take things in.
"You won't see that on Fulton Street, because it's been gentrified and because that's not as appealing to someone who's 30 years old, just opposed to the old North Ender," says Rion. "That's their little piece of paradise. The gentrified person will do a roof deck; the North Ender's going to do the sidewalk, because they want to see people, too. They want to speak to people."
Across the way, 67-year-old retiree Butch Dasaro is happy to speak to people, provided they're not "infiltrators," as he jokingly suggests when Rion steps out of his office and calls up to Dasaro's second-floor window. A father of four and grandfather of five, Dasaro is one of the rarest of the rare: After leaving the neighborhood at age 32, he moved back recently after spending the last 30 years in Michigan and now rents a place across the street from his boyhood home.
While many greet the changes with anger and sadness, Dasaro's attitude could better be described as philosophical, as he holds court at a pizza restaurant downstairs from his apartment. Once the home of Scola's, legendary for its sandwiches and the "grub boxes" of food that his father and other fishermen would take to sea, the place is now called diMio, and the specialty is thin-crust pizza, delivered for a dollar by Dasaro's brother Bobby, who lives nearby. Although dressed casually, Butch Dasaro himself is the picture of North End working-class elegance: Shoes are spotless, pants are pressed, and not a hair is out of place - not dressed up, but not dressed down, either, because that's not what people did back when the street was a stage.
"All this neighborhood, you look out the window, everybody knew each other. Within 10 years, it'll be the North End, but it won't be the North End the way it used to," he says. "But that happens, it's evolution."
People have been leaving the neighborhood for years, says Dasaro, even when he was growing up, but the difference now is that no one's sticking around. "There's a lot of tradition here, but what carries on tradition? All the younger children, the youngest ones, like the generation today in their 40s? They're gone, they're out; they moved out," he says. "If their families were fortunate to have money, they bought a home in Medford, Somerville, or Everett or whatever, which we would call the suburbs. What I call the suburbs."
Census figures back him up: From a high of more than 16,000 in 1950, the population of the North End and the waterfront fell to just over 11,000 in 1970. That number crept back up over 12,000 in the 2000 Census, but that included residents in former warehouses on the water and on the southern edge of the neighborhood that were converted into condominiums. It also included newer, luxury highrises farther down the waterfront and on the edge of downtown, buildings that aren't generally considered to be part of the North End.
Forty years ago, nearly 70 percent of North Enders were Italian, and the neighborhood was home to more than 5,000 children. Now, fewer than 700 children live here, and, in maybe the biggest sign of change, less than 40 percent of those who live within the traditional neighborhood boundaries are Italian.
For Butch Dasaro, the silence of the streets where his generation grew up does not have anything to do with the sudden end of Artery noise. "There were friends I had, the acquaintances - there are very few that are left; a lot of them have passed away and passed on," he says, lowering his already deep voice. "Paul Revere's home, the Old North Church, the Freedom Trail - that probably will go on. I don't know; I won't be here."
At Sacred Heart church a few nights later, there's a bit less philosophy in the air. The mood is one of determination - witness a certain gleam in the eye of some of the parishioners - brought on by having faced down and won at least a partial victory against outsiders. Here, though, the outsiders aren't yuppies and empty nesters; it's the Archdiocese of Boston, which tried to kick the parishioners out and consolidate Sacred Heart with other nearby parishes. Tried, that is, but failed, thanks to Sacred Heart's forward-thinking founders.
"The archdiocese thought they owned it, but they don't," says lifelong North Ender Rosemarie Romano London, 67. "Years ago, before it was a Catholic church, it was a Protestant church, and Italian immigrants came here, and the St. Mark's [Italian Catholic] Society bought it. And then [the archbishop] got wind of it, and he didn't like the idea. He wanted the deed turned over, and he didn't get it; he got it in trust. Thank God, the Italians had a few brains."
Perhaps fittingly, the topic of money came up at the Mass on the Monday before Thanksgiving, in which the Rev. Claude Scrima drew a parallel between the people of Sacred Heart and the widow in the Gospel of Luke, who only had a few pennies to offer the temple. It's a story that many of the mostly elderly parishioners in the pews this night lived themselves, growing up poor but giving what they could to help fund new church buildings decades ago, only to have the archdiocese later sell them to the highest bidder.
"Listen, we didn't think we were going to have our church until [we said] a lot of prayers," says London, who brings a combination of fire and faith to that fight. "We had an overnight vigil here, me and my friend were here all night, and we got our church. It didn't close!"
The future at Sacred Heart is far from clear: It remains open as a worship space, but Mass is said by priests from St. Leonard's on Hanover Street, because the church hasn't had a full-time pastor since August. For London, who raised three daughters in the North End on her own, the battle to save Sacred Heart is part of a larger war to save the neighborhood itself. "We're not a neighborhood anymore, and when we were a neighborhood, it was much safer. I used to feel safe to go out at any time, and I don't do that now, because it's frightening," she says, explaining that when she was growing up, people used to look down on the North End. "Now we're `unique.' Now it's `charming.' And the reason it's charming is because of the flavor of the North End, the Italian flavor, and they're trying to take that away. When I was a kid, people said I lived in the ghetto. Give me back my ghetto. Yes, give me back my ghetto."
That place London yearns for won't be coming back. Rent control, which held down property values in the North End for decades, ended in the mid-1990s, while the median income, once lower than in the rest of the city, is now higher - in some sections, much higher. But there are signs that the North End could once again become, if not a home for immigrants and the working class, at least a place where people come to raise families and actually be a part of the neighborhood, even if that wasn't the original intention.
"The five-year plan was to live here, and then we were going to move," says 11-year resident and mother of three Barbara Peterlin. Now 39, Peterlin fell in love with the North End while living in New York and Philadelphia and conducting a long-distance relationship with her future husband, Doug Peterlin, who lived on the waterfront. After marrying, the couple tried the suburban life in Watertown but found that they both" missed the North End, where they bought a place off Hanover Street less than a year later. "And then I had my first child, and I had my second child. At the time, I was working and in graduate school and wasn't sure how I'd be able to stay from a raising-a-family perspective."
As it turns out, raising her three daughters in the North End has actually been easier than she expected, though there are trade-offs, which she jokes about frequently with her suburbia-dwelling sisters. "For every time they have to get in their car and drive their children to go get milk, I can walk out my door and go get the milk. It's a lovely sense to be able to go for milk and for produce and for meat, all within your neighborhood," she says. "So there is a give-and-take. The positive side is it's right at your doorsteps, and you're not throwing your kids in the car. You just have to be willing to lug the stroller up and down the stairs."
While Peterlin acknowledges being an outsider (despite being half-Italian, she has more of a Midwestern accent that gives her background away), she says that she was never made to feel like one. But, she adds, people on the street got noticeably warmer toward after her first daughter, Jennifer, arrived 61/2 years ago.
"There's a different dynamic between the DINKs, the double-income, no-kids phase, versus the married-with-children phase," she says. "The minute you have children, you have the young, the middle-aged, and the old kind of speaking with you . . . wanting to know how old the children are. From time to time, you'd be teased, `Oh, you're the yuppies coming in' or `the new wave,' and you would always hear the stories, `Oh, when we were here, years ago. . . .' But it was never a sense of being unwelcome."
Some of Peterlin's neighbors have probably noticed the active role she's taken in the neighborhood, whether it's getting involved with a local mothers' group or trying to revitalize the Eliot School, a project she became involved in years before her daughters were old enough to attend the public elementary school. Whatever happens, though, the North End that the Peterlin girls grow up in isn't going to be much like the one that Scapicchio, Dasaro, and London knew. "It's a very bittersweet time here," says Peterlin. "I think the gentrification hopefully is a gentrification toward continuing the family thing versus just toward young people. The irony is a lot of people moved here for that very reason, for that feeling of safety, that feeling of the Italian community."
For Scapicchio, at least, that sense of community lives on: The city councilor greets several dozen people by name during a brief walk around the neighborhood, and many of his boyhood haunts remain, even if they're now missing a soda fountain or two. But, still, there's more than a hint of sadness as he points out places where his friends used to live, where his father used to live, where he used to live. Does it feel strange, he's asked, to come back as a visitor? Or did it seem inevitable that he'd have to leave someday, like so many others did before him?
"It's tough, because I was one of the people that really stayed," he says, as he crosses from Salem Street over the now-buried highway and back toward Haymarket and City Hall. "The reason I ran [for office] was to try to make that place a little bit better, try to make it a place where families could still stay, so that if I ever came back in 10 or 20 years, it wouldn't just be, `Hey, I used to live here,' and not know anybody."
Will Kilburn is a freelance writer who lives in Brighton. E-mail him at wkilburn@globe.com. 