The museum feels their pain

For nearly four decades, the lot at a corner of Staniford Street and Lomasney Way was an empty, weedy monument to the destruction of Boston's old West End, torn down and its 7,000 residents scattered in the 1950s in the name of urban renewal.

While much of the area was built up as high-end Charles River Park, the Staniford Street lot remained undeveloped until 10 years ago, when developers built an 187-unit apartment building.

But now, there is a small museum dedicated to preserving the memories of the old West End and its former residents on the edge of that long-undeveloped lot in a street-front space on Lomasney Way. And after struggling along as a two-days-a-week place for some five years, the West End Museum is doubling its schedule and celebrating with a grand opening next Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

In addition to being a traditional, if small-scale, museum with photographs and a few artifacts suggesting the vibrant neighborhood in the years before it was destroyed, the museum has a way of stirring up the strongest of memories.

On a recent day, several men in their late 60s, who had been teenagers when they and their families had been displaced from their West End homes, gathered to enjoy coffee and to argue over who could make the best potato salad for the museum's grand opening.

Showing a visitor around the exhibits that have been spruced up for the event was James Campano, who has been a custodian of neighborhood memories in a quarterly newspaper, The West Ender, which he began publishing in 1984. Among its subscribers was the late Jane Jacobs, who wrote about "unslumming and slumming," with reference to the West End, in her classic study, "The Life and Death of Great American Cities."

Campano said he was 19 when his family was evicted from their apartment on Poplar Street - now both gone, the building and the street.

"It was like being shoved out of your womb," said Campano.

His family settled in Somerville, where he still lives and was, until recent years, a familiar newsdealer at the Davis Square T station.

Campano explained that the exhibits were originally assembled for a show organized by the Bostonian Society in 1992, and then put in storage until there was a place to rehang the items.

What visitors will see are dozens of photographs of daily life on streets that no longer exist, and summer days on a beach along the Charles River that is also long gone. They will find, too, artifacts including a door in its frame and a fireplace mantle with an array of framed family photos.

The exhibit continues into the period when the West End was being demolished, with photographs of angry community meetings, tenements coming down, and families loading household belongings for the move away.

Though the buildings have vanished, the bitterness remains.

As Bruce Guarino, one of the volunteer guides to the exhibits, put it, "They told us not to fix up our houses. They just wanted to turn it into a slum, and then they took pictures to prove that it should be torn down."

The "they" in Guarino's comments refers collectively to Boston city officials in the 1950s and other promoters of urban renewal who also cleared out the bustling, if seedy, commercial district of Scollay Square that now makes up Government Center.

That part of the West End story is documented in a 1962 ABC News program, "The Lost Neighborhood," that is screened on a TV in the museum's large meeting room.

Also on view are videos made from grainy home movies taken by West End residents. To one of them, Campano has added a soundtrack of popular songs from the late '50s and early '60s. He mixes in Don McLean's 1971 "American Pie," with its all-too-appropriate reference to "the day the music died" - Feb. 3, 1959, when a plane crash took the lives of Buddy Holly and three others.

Campano also shows the ABC documentary every year to an MIT urban planning class. The museum holds thousands of documents related to the West End clearance. Among them are Boston Redevelopment Authority reports, letters, notices of community meetings, and hundreds of photographs from the collection of sociologist Herbert J. Gans, whose "Urban Villagers" chronicled life in the West End.

They are all stored, mostly uncataloged, in cabinets and corrugated cartons in a back room, awaiting the attention of students researching how good intentions destroyed a neighborhood.

The West End Museum (thewestendmuseum.org) is at 150 Staniford St., with an entrance at Unit 7 on Lomasney Way. Starting Oct. 30, it is scheduled to be open Tuesdays through Fridays, from noon to 4 p.m. For information, call 617-723-2125.