At this year’s Old Colony Thanksgiving lunch, there sits a mix of mainly black and a few white families discussing recipes for pumpkin pie. They are straining to be heard over a roaring karaoke machine, the site of a cluster of young children singing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Samantha Juliano, who has lived all eighteen years of her life on the projects, is washing up in the kitchen, and telling her friend about a stabbing that took place outside her first floor window the previous week. These are some of the poorest citizens in Boston.
Since its doors first opened to 800 families in 1941, the Old Colony Housing Projects in South Boston have born mute witness to many of the most explosive chapters in Boston’s history.
The buildings are brickwork reminders of the neighborhood’s bleak record of racial violence and organized crime. Today, the projects are an oasis of poverty, in an otherwise rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
For much of its history, the 873 flats in Old Colony were the undisputed property of working-class Irish-Americans. In 1988, after an NAACP lawsuit followed by a winter of violent unrest, that at times threatened to ignite racial warfare, the projects were finally desegregated.
The often tempestuous history of Old Colony will come to an end in January, as the buildings are razed to the ground to make way for a new, state-of-the-art, green public housing project. As the remaining families pack leftover desert into bags and drift out onto the street, the location of next year’s Thanksgiving remains uncertain.
Old Colony has become famous as the childhood home both of Michael Patrick Macdonald and James, “Whitey” Bulger. The former is an anti-gun activist whose award winning autobiography, ‘All Souls: A Family Story From Southie’, hit the bestseller charts in 2000, shocking America with the scenes of public executions, drug dealings and racially motivated mobs, which have become synonymous with the projects. The latter is a notorious South Boston mobster, who is currently number two on the FBI’s Most Wanted List – second only to Osama Bin Laden.
Today the projects are a maze of squat, three-storey brick blocks, home to 3,000 occupants. The streets are punctuated by broken playgrounds and overflowing dumpsters, and littered with empty vodka bottles and weeds. Described by the mayor’s office as “the most physically distressed” public housing project in Boston, the seventy-year-old buildings are scarred by deep cracks, choked with weeds and flared with black singes from long extinguished fires. From the northern tip of the projects, looking up Old Colony Avenue, you can see the skyline of Boston’s Back Bay. On a clear day, from the south of the projects, you can look out over Old Harbor Beach to Thompson Island.
Desegregation
In August 1988 the first black families arrived on Old Colony surrounded by a swarm of police cars. It was a warm summer evening and the residents, many of which were still awake and out on the streets, watched cautiously as the new families received their keys and unpacked their belongings.
That week, fearing an explosion of violence, Boston’s cardinal issued a six-page plea for peace to be read out at all eight of South Boston’s parish churches.
That same month, the recently reelected mayor Ray Flynn was shouted down by 500 angry residents, as he put forward the case for integration. By doing so, he had forever lost the political support of his own neighborhood.
Meanwhile the letters page of the South Boston Tribune had been bursting for weeks with dark threats of racial bloodshed. On 3 December 1987 an anonymous letter admonished the mayor and warned of carnage: “You might have the police force, the national guard, or even the army and you might spill blood. But unlike a lot of other residents I don’t mind losing a little blood for our children to make sure they get what is theirs: the housing and the neighborhood.”
But, perhaps because residents feared a repeat of the busing violence of 1974, or perhaps because the wealthier families of South Boston, who had traditionally shunned Old Colony, refused to mobilize their support, the projects integrated peacefully.
Tracy Fitzpatrick, Jimie Carlins and Chanel Owens are sharing the same table at the Thanksigivng lunch. Together, they are three women who represent the face of Old Colony in 2009.
Tracy, 36, is one of the few remaining Irish American South Boston natives. Wearing a baggy grey hoodie emblazoned with the word ‘Southie’, she has two children and is looking for work so she can escape the projects: “I would always live in South Boston but I would like to go somewhere better to raise my kids.”
Jimie is an elderly African American woman from Alabama who traveled to Boston in 1964 and moved into Old Colony shortly after it was integrated. She said: “this area has improved a lot since 1991. Back then I was too scared to walk the streets but now I have found a great community. I have no family left. These people here are my family.”
Channel, also African American, is a former lobby attendant with five children who is looking for work. As the neighborhood has become more diverse in the twelve years she has lived here, her life has become immeasurably better: “When I first arrived there was still a lot of racism. I had rocks thrown through my windows at night. The tenants association would never tolerate that now. You would be kicked out.”
Most of the newest arrivals in Old Colony, however, are coming from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In Washington Village Library, which is contained within the walls of the projects, the number of Spanish books and DVDs grows every week. The two permanent librarians, Audrey Heppanen and Elaine Sullivan, have both enrolled in Spanish classes and the children who come and go from the library greet them both with choruses of “hola!”
Zero-tolerance
When locals are asked whether Old Colony is better or worse off now than it was twenty years ago, their answer will probably depend on the color of their skin.
Helen Gretude and Lisa Rafferty moved out of Old Colony in the last five years to different locations in South Boston. Both women are Irish American and both are Old Colony veterans. They maintain that the projects are a worse place to live now than they were twenty years ago.
Helen, who lived in Old Colony for 43 years, said: “Back then it was more of a neighborhood. People wouldn’t be afraid to sit out on the hallways and everyone was always in each other’s houses. Now your would be afraid to leave your kids outside for a minute.”
Lisa currently lives two blocks away from the projects, and is resisting pressure from her children to move to Milton: “I love South Boston. But everything in Old Colony has gone downhill. I had to leave.”
This story is starkly different from the one told by the non-white community in the projects, who have mixed memories of racial prejudice in the years after desegregation. Despite the relatively peaceful process of integration, the Irish community in Old Colony have voted with their feet over the last twenty years, and the projects are now almost entirely African American, Hispanic and Vietnamese.
Susan Lenardis is president of the Old Colony Tenant Task Force, an organization almost as old as the projects themselves. She is mixed race but refuses to disclose her precise ethnic background: “I’m multi-cultural. I like to keep people guessing.” Often visibly tired and inundated with phone calls, Susan describes herself as a full-time volunteer and works for more than nineteen different organizations.
Until four years ago the board of tenants was dominated by an Irish American clique that, according to many residents of the projects, would turn a blind eye to incidents of racism. Now, a group that once organized pro-segregation protests outside the Boston Housing Association, operates a zero-tolerance policy on racism.
Susan has packed the board of fifteen tenants with representatives of the different ethnic communities that live on the projects. Sitting at the table are Irish Americans, African Americans, Jamaicans, Peurto Ricans, Vietnamese, and Italian Americans: “Sometimes it just takes a handful of people willing to stand up to a few small minded folks to make a difference.”
For Susan, a community should be about a shared sense of space, rather than a common ethnic background: “I would never criticize the proud Irish heritage of South Boston, but it takes more than wearing a shamrock or a green tee-shirt to create a meaningful community.”
A silent killer
Ask any South Boston local who doesn’t live in the projects and they will tell you the same story: the drug problem is over. The projects, which were once notorious for heroin abuse in the 80s and 90s, are now said to be clean, following a string of police crackdowns. However, the projects have since been gripped by a new and deadly drug.
Oxycotin, known on the street as ‘hillbilly heroin’, is a powerful prescription painkiller that comes in a pill about the size of penny. Since being approved by the FDA in 1996, Oxycontin has cast a dark shadow over Old Colony.
According to Susan Lenardis, addicts living in Old Colony have tried everything in recent years to get hold of this highly addictive drug. There are stories of residents smashing their knees with hammers, throwing themselves down flights of stairs and even stabbing themselves to get that much needed prescription.
Lenardis said: “Its the silent killer. Your child can be sitting in a classroom on Oxycontin and no one would know. People round here take it because it has none of the stigma of heroin – the all important difference is that you are taking a pill rather than shooting up.”
Many addicts are children or teenagers who are stealing the drug from the handbags and medicine cabinets of elderly relatives. Unlike heroin the drug is discreet, technically legal and therefore concealed from everyone living outside the projects.
Dr. Carol Boyd, who is leading research funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse at the University of Michigan said: “Because Oxycontin is legal, expensive and hard to get hold of, it has a higher status than heroin among users. Many Oxycontin addicts would be appalled at the idea of taking heroin.”
For Dr. Boyd, widespread Oxycontin addiction is the result of poor oversight on behalf of the Federal Drug Administration: “This drug is a breakthrough in the treatment of cancer pain and its vital that we have it on the market. However, when the drug was first approved by the FDA they had no risk management strategy. No system for ensuring that this new drug didn’t fall into the wrong hands."
Back in Old Colony, the problem is invisible, even to many of those who work every day in the projects. Elaine Sullivan, who has worked for more than a decade in Washington Village Branch Library, on the southern fringes of Old Colony, said: “the drug problem is okay now, much better than it used to be. The police cracked down on it many years ago.”
State legislators have been grappling with a narcotics problem that, between 2002 and 2007, has claimed 3, 265 lives in Massachusetts. This is more than forty times the number of servicemen and women from the state who have lost their lives in two overseas wars during the same five years.
Earlier this month the Massachusetts Oxycontin and Heroin Commission issued a 71-page report describing the state’s Oxycontin problem as a “serious and dangerous epidemic.” The report recommended following other states in suing Perdu Pharma – one of the largest pharmaceutical companies involved in the manufacture of Oxycontin.
Future
Development, on what many claim will be America’s first green public housing construction, is likely to begin as soon as January. The current residents of Old Colony will be moved out in stages and temporarily housed elsewhere, as the ten-year project gets underway.
The new, state-of-the-art, buildings will be better insulated, smoke-free and fitted with low-energy lighting. Currently each family is costing the city $4,000 dollars a year in heating and water. Meanwhile the landscape of the projects will change, from a sprawl of three-story low-rises to a diverse panorama of mid-rises and townhouses. Plans to explore wind and solar energy have been tentatively floated by the Boston Housing Authority.
Much of the new additional housing to be built on the projects will be middle-income rent-controlled housing. Currently the projects are entirely made up of low-income public housing, with residents paying 30% of their salary in rent.
Perhaps most importantly, in the words of Mayor Thomas Menino’s statement earlier this year, the new projects will be “architecturally integrated into the larger community.” Currently, the muddy-brown brick structures of Old Colony jar conspicuously with the forest of white and blue clapboard houses that encircle the projects. The new developments are an ambitious plan to narrow the enormous gulf of class and race that separates the residents of Old Colony from the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood around them.
Donna Brown, executive director of the South Boston Department of Neighborhood Development, claims that the new plan for Old Colony will rectify a planning decision that was flawed from the beginning: “If you look at the projects they all face inwards. Because they have no buildings facing the street they have become a city within a city.”
The money is coming, in part, from a $22 million federal grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which will be subsidized by a public-private partnership. It is a small part of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, passed by Congress in February, and will be awarded to 36 housing projects across the country. As a dire indication of Old Colony’s current state, the project received the largest of these 36 grants.
Back at the Tenants Thanksgiving lunch, the mood is optimistic. Samantha Juliano, who sits on the board of the Junior Tenants Task Force, is taking a break from encouraging a reluctant circle of elderly men to join her at the karaoke machine: “I know the development is going to take a long time but I think things are going to get much better in the future.”
While we were speaking, an ambulance pulled up outside, followed by two police cars. It is a measure of how far this community has to go that paramedics still refuse to enter the neighborhood without police protection.
These six streets were once the locus of South Boston’s heroin trade, a paradise for organized crime and the site of some of the most appalling racial feuds in America. Old Colony, as Boston knows is, is about to change beyond recognition. The projects are as much a part of Boston’s history as the State House or Fenway Park. Their history has an arc that has closely followed that of post-war America, and outlived many of the first families who arrived nearly seventy years ago.
