Forget the tricorn hat and clanging bell

Before the morning had smoldered into the hottest day of the year, before the first cup of coffee had been gulped down, Stephen Fox was jolted into full consciousness by the latest assault on his sanity. Less than 100 feet away from his door , jackhammers were again raging against the South End pavement.

First he called city officials to get the story. Then, at 10:24 a.m., he did what he always does when something aggravating or intriguing or dangerous transpires in Rutland Square : He told his neighbors. He told the architect, the cop, the gay couples. He told the dog owners, the financial wizards, and the law school student and his South American wife.

``Brace yourself my fellow neighbors for another month of restricted parking and re-routing, temporary street closures, constant jackhammering and noise, plentiful dust and debris, and occasional loss of service," he e-mailed, his missive zipping through cyberspace to about 300 in-boxes of people who live along the neighborhood's brick sidewalks.

Fox, who moved into the neighborhood a dozen years ago, is a 21st-century town crier whose voice carries through cyberspace. He belongs to a growing movement of local activists around the city -- including those in other parts of the South End, Dorchester, and Brookline -- who believe the medium that changed the world by linking far-flung spots can also bind together people who live next door to one another. As neighborhood e-mailers go , Fox, chairman of the board of directors of the Rutland Square Association , is an unusually prodigious correspondent, sending out three to five messages a week. No one , it seems, is beyond his reach: He hand-delivers hard copies of his messages to a pair of neighbors who don't have e-mail.

``He takes it so seriously to make sure that we're all on top of things," said Carol Silk , 65, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1998. ``He keeps us up-to-date on everything."

Fox tells his neighbors -- those who live in Rutland Square and around the corners on Columbus and Tremont -- when the water will be shut off and when the jackhammers will be turned on. He warns when their mail will arrive late and when headlight thieves have struck. He announces when new restaurants open -- he heralded last month's Columbus Avenue debut of Petit Robert Bistro , where he is already a regular -- and when plays debut at Boston Theatre Works . Only one neighbor, drowning in messages, has asked to be dropped from his list.

``Neighbors who send e-mail to each other benefit hugely in terms of the neighbors they know," said Keith N. Hampton , who studied the impact of web-based communication in Greater Boston neighborhoods when he was an MIT professor. Hampton, now an assistant professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania , launched I-Neighbors , an online forum where neighbors can e-mail each other, post photos, and fax their elected officials.

Of late, crime often takes center stage in Fox's e-mails. Near Rutland Square, as in many other parts of the South End, low-income housing stands beside elegant brick homes that sell for seven figures, not far from dangerous streets and deadly crime. In the year's first seven months, 25 people -- mostly teenagers -- were shot in the police district that includes the South End, more than any similar period in a decade.

``Did you know?" began a recent e-mail Fox sent along from his association's safety group. ``Dialing 911 from your cell phone DOES NOT connect you to the Boston Police . . . " Since wireless 911 calls go to the State Police, the e-mail urged residents to program the Boston Police Department's number into their cellphones.

Police see Fox, and the rare activism of his association's safety group, as a model that could work citywide. Members of that subgroup speak often with police liaisons in District D-4 and report back on ways to fight crime. They learned that having several people call to report an incident, rather than one, bumps up its priority. And they urged residents to post their street numbers on the backs of their houses, so those calling to report crime from the alleys can give specific directions.

Carolyn MacNeil , community service coordinator for District D-4, which includes the South End, often talks to Fox weekly.

E-mail ``just gives you greater ability to communicate with more people," she said. ``With meetings, there's not the consistency that you have with e-mail."

Fox, a volunteer scribe, began collecting neighbors' e-mail addresses by approaching people on the street. But the list took off a few years ago, after the association combed the city's tax rolls to get the names of Rutland Square residents and sent letters to all, asking them to join and provide their electronic information.

Although the South End has changed dramatically over the past few decades, the recent spike in shootings is a solemn reminder that no matter how much people pay to live in the neighborhood, it still lies near some of the city's most troubled spots. That's not news to residents who moved to the South End decades ago, buying houses on the cheap and fixing them up in days when Hiscock Park brimmed with abandoned car chass is.

Joan Wood , an architect who paid $15,000 for a Rutland Square house in 1967, recalls when her family kept a baseball bat in the hallway to chase after muggers. Men from the suburbs -- the South End neighbors called them ``white hunters," Wood said -- would drive around the neighborhood looking for prostitutes.

``When we first saw Rutland Square," she said, ``there were prostitutes at noon and broken glass on the street."

Roger Ide moved to the neighborhood in 1976, when residents tended to avoid the streets at night. ``We had lawyers and architects and engineers and gay people and straight people and people from Barbados," he said.

``It was diverse in every possible way. Among the people who had moved in, the common denominator was they had a sense of adventure and were able to roll with punches."

But money changed the neighborhood. It grew whiter and less diverse. Wood's children, now grown, can't afford to live there.

And while nobody is complaining about their soaring property values, some long-term residents miss the old days. Recently, some in Fox's group debated whether to discourage a small yard sale, run by a few senior citizens, that sometimes appears near the corner of Tremont.

Ide was glad the yard sale continued. ``I would say the most reactive impulses are checked," he said. People ``move in from the suburbs, for instance, and expect it to be like where they moved from. And considering what they paid for their house, they have some reason to expect that."

Fox and his longtime partner moved to Rutland Square 12 years ago, seeking a neighborhood more diverse than their old home in the Back Bay. The two men dedicated a brick in the renovated Hiscock Park, behind their house, in honor of their dog, Campbell. Fox is a self-employed consultant, a refugee from corporate America who now spends his days in shorts and flip-flops.

He won't give his age, but allows that his first job was in the administration of former Boston mayor Kevin White, who left office as 1984 arrived.

Fox sees the electronic infrastructure of neighborhoods evolving to include technology such as blogging and MySpace.com, the social networking website that is now beginning to cultivate adult users.

Neighbors of the future, he believes, will harness the vast powers of the Internet in some of the same ways young people have pioneered.

``It's really kind of weird that you've got this megalopolitan kind of thing and really, the use is more much local, much more personal, much more next-door to you," he said. ``In some sense, that's predictive of how neighborhoods are ultimately going to be able to use the technology as well."

Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com

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