Gatekeeper's day is done
Boston politics will not see his like again and that, on the whole, is a good thing.
James M. Kelly was a man of his time and his place, both of which have changed irrevocably since the veteran Boston city councilor first came to public notice more than 30 years ago as a virulent opponent of court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation.
With Kelly's death yesterday, Boston loses one of the last links to an insular era in which a stubborn resistance to change and a fierce fidelity to neighborhood defined what it meant to be an Irish pol from Southie.
It was an era a long time in the passing.
South Boston isn't even Irish anymore, not that it ever exclusively was. But the Poles and Lithuanians who have called the neighborhood home for as long as the Kellys and the Murphys now share the sidewalks with Asian immigrants and the young, well-heeled professionals of indeterminate lineage whose real estate renovations have brought tony new restaurants and higher rents to the once-modest enclave.
They might live in South Boston, but the yuppie careerists were never Kelly's real constituents. He waged a zoning war against their roof decks and their sidewalk cafes with the same zeal he applied to his antibusing efforts at the South Boston Information Center. "I just don't see why the neighborhood has to change," he once said. "I don't see why it has to be any different than when I was growing up there."
That myopic view endeared him to longtime Southie residents, who rightly mourn the man who could get a stop sign installed at a dangerous intersection or an abandoned car removed from an empty lot. Only Kelly could have made a national crusade out of battling Mayor Thomas M. Menino's ban on the time-honored practice of using ironing boards and lawn chairs as parking-space savers after a snowstorm.
But, the truth is, Kelly took better care of his constituents than he did his city. His demand for more linkage money from waterfront developers for South Boston demonstrated a willingness to shortchange Roxbury and Roslindale. His efforts to push his people to the front of the line betrayed a blind determination to keep others out of the line entirely: black children out of Southie's schools in the 1970s, black families out of Southie's public housing in the 1980s, and gay people out of Southie's St. Patrick's Day parade in the 1990s.
He could be petty, refusing to support benign City Council resolutions that praised the late Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the United States Supreme Court, or denounced the burning of black churches. He never lost the chip on his shoulder that, remarkably in 2007, still allows some Boston Irishmen to think of themselves as victims of pervasive discrimination. "Never has this body condemned anybody in this city unless the person is white and from South Boston," he complained a few years ago when the City Council considered a resolution to chastise a Southie barkeep for displaying stuffed monkeys in his establishment to mark Black History Month.
Busing defined him, and his bitterness about the judge who issued the court order never abated. When US District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity died in 1999, Kelly laid all of his neighborhood's ills at the jurist's feet.
"I don't know if it is possible to calculate how many lives he destroyed, how many marriages he broke up because husbands and wives didn't have good jobs because of good education, how many people turned to drugs and alcohol," Kelly said then. "I have no reason to be sad that he died."
Jimmy Kelly's family and friends and neighbors have reason to be sad now that he, too, has died. Name a park or a recreation center in South Boston after him, not something as ironic as a bridge to the rest of the city that he tried so hard to keep at bay.
Eileen McNamara is Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
