South End Sunday

Hi Friends!

This week I discovered that, like the rhythm, COVID is going to get you. It was my first date with Vid and I have to say: What. A. JERK. Lose my number, pal. Thankfully it’s been very flu-like; science is real and vaccines work and I am grateful.

Much like the Death Star, I am not fully operational. So, this week I’m sharing a little writing and photography from some time I recently spent in Boston’s South End. This neighborhood is known for its tree-lined streets containing beautiful historic Victorian row houses—the largest district of these types of residences in the country. There are also numerous lovely parks, charming boutiques, upscale eateries, cozy cafes, and a growing arts community. A series of industrial buildings have been restored and converted into studio and gallery spaces. Each weekend through the mild seasonal months you can find food trucks and artisans of all types at the SoWa Open Market, an outdoor farmer’s an artisan market incubating in the converted galleries. You would never know this area was once pretty derelict and known more for its seedy elements than for the designer selling artfully hand knotted rugs and the candle store where each individual candle is tucked underneath an elegant glass cloche. A neighborhood is a book of many chapters.

The South End is south of the Back Bay, northwest of South Boston (different place), and southwest of the sliver of neighborhood jammed between Back Bay and the Theatre District known as Bay Village. The South End is not actually south of the center of downtown Boston. I like to point this out as proof of just how very few “EFFFS” Boston gives about making it easy for anyone to locate anything anywhere ever. Abandon all GPS, ye who enter. The South End literally rose up out of the mucky, smelly tidal flats that rudely occupied most of Boston since it’s resettlement in the 1600s. That sentence is the complete history of the creation of Boston. Just about every neighborhood was generated sandbox-style—a group of developers scooping dirt and materials from one place in an effort to keep the ocean from taking back what it already owned. I won’t say this is also a formula for imperialism, but I can’t not negate saying that neither (What? You heard me). It is a small wonder the city is not underwater, which I think has less to do with the feat of engineering and urban design than sheer stubbornness on the part of its residents.

Nevertheless, Boston somehow tricked the renowned urban architect Charles Bulfinch, also responsible for designing the state house and parts of the Capitol in D.C., to lay out the first developed streets and green spaces. Initially the area appealed to white middle-class Bostonians until a series of economic and cultural shifts, such as the financial Panic of 1884 and the creation of the sexier (geographically and architecturally speaking) Back Bay neighborhood sparked a kind of mass exodus. The turn into the twentieth century saw many of the grand Victorian homes turned into tenements. Immigrants, Black, and LGBT individuals resettled the neighborhood. By the close of WWII, The South End would become a welcome haven for many LGBT people thanks to its numerous rooming houses that provided residence, connection, and social cover for the community.

Butter light bathing a typical South End street. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

A city is an accordion’s bellows—stretching and contracting, filling up and emptying out, always in flux even when those changes are happening out of sight. Over the second half of the twentieth century, the South End entered a period of decline. Infrastructure crumbled, crime and neglect rose, industry moved elsewhere. My friend David Josef is a renowned fashion designer from New England who was a young, gutsy, fast-rising talent in the 1970 and 1980s living and working out of the South End. Were there drugs and crime and maybe a suspicious looking pool of something dark and viscous on the sidewalk from time to time? Yes (step lightly and check the bottom of your loafers--ofen!). Were there also artists and makers like himself able to afford ridiculously spacious lofts, churning out exciting work, building support networks, celebrating and generating a delicious stew of multicultural awesomeness—also YES. People make the place, not the other way around.

As delicious as the name sounds! ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

City efforts to intervene into the South End set the neighborhood on a new path of becoming something else, again, taking decades to arrive. Though I had been all over the city many times in all the years I’ve lived here, I somehow never found my way to the South End. Gorgeous images of sunlit streets of regal brownstones lured me for the first time in March of 2020. It was a nasty, raw early spring day, not really conducive to strolling, but from the short time I spent wandering, I was smitten. Five days later the world skidded to a halt. It wasn’t until this September that I was able to get back and take my time exploring further.

It was as I had remembered it, but in such a very different season. I walked around feeling like I had slipped into Wonderland. Predictably some businesses had not survived the pandemic. Undoubtedly some residents were also forced out by inflation and rising rents or maybe a disenchantment with city life experienced during a global health crisis. Still, every tranquil, leafy street sprouted a fresh crop of those incredible Victorian homes that had attracted Bostonians in the 1830s. The doors of these residences deserve their own art gallery. I became a little obsessed trying to catch them all and briefly worried I looked like a lunatic cat burglar dashing quickly from stoop to stoop with my camera. Families gathered in many of the neighborhood parks, groups of people sat out at sidewalk cafes for brunch, vendors began staging their tents at the SoWa Market. The morning spread its arms embracing all as another South End Sunday rolled in like the tide.

When it’s always October on your doorstep. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Or your neighbor really leans into those other holiday colors. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Goals! A pair of pliers, a pick-up truck, and an airtight alibi are all I need….©SheilaMoeschenPhotography