Untitled Document

27 April 2005

Combat Zone

I didn't think of it as I walked. It is a grand town, and construction is everywhere. There are people on the streets and cranes thrusting up all around. The old city is still there, at least some of it, and looking at it kept my mind off the pain in my knees radiated north and south, but it was a magnificent late afternoon, and I was headed for the welcome reception to the Conference at the Boston Museum of Science.

The Google Map told me it was only a couple miles, and the day was so pleasant that I just had to get out in it. I walked up State Street and turned on Congress Street past the old State House and followed it as it turned into Merrimack, past the Union Oyster House where Daniel Webster used to pound down a brandy-and water with each of the platters of oysters he had for lunch.

The restaurant has been there since 1826. I'm not sure, but I think most of his best work was done in the morning.

It was fitting. This conference is for the Research and Development crowd, and the emphasis is on the science that the Department of Homeland Security will need to protect us from the Bad Guys.

I'm over at the Wyndom Hotel, the place I like to stay when I am in town. It is a historic structure, nicely refurbished, that the plaque on the wall says is the first Art Deco sky-scraper built intown. The date is 1928, the year before Black Friday, which put a lot of things into the Deep Freeze until after the War was over almost twenty years later.

Boston made some predictably bad choices in the 1950s. Most of them were about highways and bridges, and a lot of the downtown hit the skids.

The hotel is located on Broad Street, just a couple blocks from Fauneul Hall and the Quincy Market.

I came into Boston for the first time courtesy of my parents, who took their three little ones to all the important historical places. I don't recall precisely what year we did it, but it would have been in the early sixties sometime, probably as part of a trip to visit my Dad's boyhood home in Maplewood, New Jersey.

I remember seeing Paul Revere's house on that trip, marveling at the planking on the walls and the gritty nature of the city. It was a little scary, for a suburban kid, and it is not fair to judge the place by that first long-ago impression.

I wound up there again after quitting my first real job in the book trade. Things had gone too well, I had made too much money, and my needs and expectations were too low. I thought things were easy, that the jobs would always be there, and I hit the road. I was living on a boat belonging to a friend of a friend in Beverly, one of the string of cities along the water north of town.

I didn't have a lot of money, but I had time. I would sometimes walk downtown, from blue-collar Beverly past stately Marblehead and through Swampscott, Lynn and Revere to the city.

That was in the early ‘70s, and the city was on the verge of a renaissance, thought you would not have known it to look at it. The Quincy Market ad only one commercial enterprise in it, the Durgin Park Restaurant, an ancient place where the banner of the menu claimed “Your grandfather ate here.”

The windows were broken out, and history aside, it looked like the town was on its last legs.

One place that was still going strong was the Combat Zone, the city's "adult entertainment district," located between Downtown Crossing and Chinatown, more or less. It had been a creation of the failing downtown, and declining real estate values during the war, and the press of sailors and soldiers who wanted to blow off steam on their week-end passes.

That is where I was walking last night, headed for the Museum.

I didn't recognize where I was until I turned a corner and came upon the Fleet Center, the athletic complex where the Celtics and the Bruins play. They opened it in 1995, part of the extraordinary boom that led to the Big Dig and the gentrification of the downtown.

The ripped down the historic Boston Garden in 1997, after moving the parquet wood basketball court over to the new facility. That was the age I remember, getting off at the train at the station under the Garden, and venturing out into the Combat Zone.

It is all gone now, not that I am sentimental about it. It was a place where you had to have your wits about you. This is where the Glass Slipper was, a strip club on LaGrange Street. And the Liberty Book, a video and peep-show complex adjacent to the Registry of Motor Vehicles on lower Washington Street.

Liberty Book had live peep shows and a 44-seat theater to its store in the back. The Naked i Cabaret moved from the corner of Washington and Beach Streets to a place on LaGrange, directly across from the Glass Slipper.

The Naked I is now a place called Centerfolds, and that is all that remains of the Combat Zone. Boston planners did not have a great deal of flexibility in managing their sin. There are only 48 square miles of dry land, as opposed to more that 220 in a place like Chicago.

It wasn't just the clubs that made the neighborhood. It was the street crime and the drugs and prostitution that went along with them. In my time here, and on adventure in the town, it was not an overly dangerous place, if you paid attention to what you were doing.

But now I am just an old guy, walking to the museum. I passed a knot of loiterers on the porch in front of the jail as I walked along, and some cars of young people who apparently had business with the city there. I could feel the sweat building under my shirt as I recognized the bulk of the Museum and the life-sized Tyrannosaurus built into the front wall.

The Department of Homeland Security had rented the place for the evening, and it was a pretty classy way to handle a big crowd of scientists. A nice women asked me for my credentials and if I needed validation for parking in the secure structure next door.

I told her I had walked, just like in the old days, when the Combat Zone was still there.

She looked at me and pursed her lips. “There are those who would like to bring it back. I recommend that you not walk there after dark.”

I thanked her for her concern, and after I passed out some business cards around the scientific exhibits, decided I needed some oysters. When I went back downtown, I took a cab.

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