While federal officials are seizing immigrants on the streets, Boston’s streets have installations that celebrate long-ago immigrants.
Boston Bricks, Winthrop Lane
A small and easy-to-miss tribute to Jewish immigrants and Jews’ contributions to Boston consists simply of Jewish names: Berger, Cohen, Epstien (sic), Fried, Ginsberg, Greenberg, Hellman, Israel, Jaffee, Jung, Katz, Kaufman, Marcus, Paul, Rabb, and others.
The Jewish names appear in an installation called Boston Bricks: A Celebration of Boston’s Past and Present by Kate Burke and Gregg Lefevre. It was installed in Winthrop Lane in 1985. Boston Bricks comprises 77 pieces of bronze, by my count; most of them are the size of a brick.
Various “bricks” recognize, for example, the Boston Marathon, Old North Church, and the invention of the telephone in Boston. The bronze “bricks” are set into Winthrop Lane’s brick walkway.
Seven “bricks” are filled with ethnic names: Italian, African American, Hispanic, Jewish, Chinese, Irish, and English names. It’s a way of recognizing that all those groups have played a role in Boston’s past and present.
Also appearing on the “brick” with Jewish names is “Einstein,” which may be a complete name or a truncated “Weinstein” or “Feinstein.” “Fein” may be complete or truncated. Other incomplete names are almost certainly Alpert, Barron, Berkowitz, Goldman, Golden, Grossman, Guggenheim, Krakow, Levenson, and Saltzman. Still other incomplete names may be Adler and Horwitz. “Rabb” on the “brick” may be a tribute to the Rabb family (whose members shortened the name from Rabinovitz), which founded and ran the Stop & Shop chain.
If your GPS doesn’t get you to Winthrop Lane, it’s between 20 Winthrop Square and 80 Arch St. As of this writing, you can also try putting Boston News Café Express into your GPS; that store is on Winthrop Lane. What is a nearby site that you might be familiar with? The Milk Street Café. Close MBTA stations: Downtown Crossing on the Red and Orange Lines, State Street on the Orange Line.
The Jewish “brick” is easy to miss because it’s small and hidden in a shaded lane. Another tribute to Jewish immigrants is easy to miss, even though it is part of a block-long installation on a route that often bustles with pedestrians, because who stops to read plaques, let alone a block-long plaque? Which leads us to…
Block-long timeline of North End populations, Hanover Street, leading to North End
Just outside the North End and leading to it is a timeline presenting the evolving demographics of North End residents. Stops on the plaque’s timeline, mounted on a railing, are 1600, 1630-1642, 1700, 1800, 1870s–1890s, 1900, and 2000.
In the 1870s–1890s section, part of the plaque reads:
EASTERN EUROPEANS
During this period many Eastern European Jews settled in the North End, seeking freedom from religious persecution in their homelands. They inhabited a triangular area extending from Hanover Street to Endicott and Prince Streets.
Another part of the plaque has a quote:
“Salem Street is for the Jews what the Plaza is for the Spaniards and Italians in their native countries. There the people meet and congregate.” – Horace Kallen
Kallen was a Jewish immigrant, a philosopher, and an academic who taught at Harvard University, Clark University, Princeton University (the first Jew to teach there), and other institutions.
Still another part of the plaque reads:
“My home was a strictly kosher home. My people ran a strictly kosher restaurant in the North End for 20 years…the most expensive meal I remember was 65 cents, and that was for a five course meal.” – Sam Gurvitz
Gurvitz was born in the North End in 1904 to immigrant parents from Russia. He was interviewed around 1975–1976, a transcript of the interview was preserved by the City of Boston, and the quotation is from that interview. His family ran a meat restaurant.
The installation apparently is not titled. Construction plans for the Rose Kennedy Greenway call it the Hanover Street Leaning Rail with Inscriptions. It was designed by Crosby|Schlessinger|Smallridge and installed around 2007.
The timeline railing is on Hanover Street, between Cross Street and Blackstone Street. At that point, Hanover Street cuts across the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. The timeline is a stone’s throw from the New England Holocaust Memorial. Close MBTA station: Haymarket on the the Green and Orange Lines.
We think of the current North End as an Italian-American neighborhood. And we think of Roxbury as an African American neighborhood. A century ago, both neighborhoods had their shares of Jews. Which leads us to…
Letter from Roxbury to Poland, outside Ruggles Station, Roxbury
This tribute to Jewish immigrants consists of a letter from an immigrant, Morris Kontravitz, living in Roxbury, to his parents in Baniocha, Poland. The letter is fictitious. It is carved in stone on a stele, a slab, and is huge in comparison to the Jewish “brick” in Winthrop Lane.
Morris reports on his life and Roxbury in a somewhat contrived fashion. The letter is one of four fictitious letters, descriptions of Roxbury from residents to their families whom they have left: a letter to Maine in 1834; to Ireland in 1886; Morris’s letter in 1929; and a letter to Georgia (the southern American state) in 1960. The installation is a tribute to Roxbury, rather than to immigrants; only two letters are from immigrants.
The letter is outside the Ruggles Station on the MBTA’s Orange Line. It mentions a local shul, Congregation Neveh Zedek (Abode of Justice) on Ruggles Street. In her list of Massachusetts synagogues for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston, Carol Clingan lists the shul as Novey Zedek, located at 113 Ruggles St. The property was foreclosed on in 1936 and sold to a church.
Morris’s fictitious letter to his parents has its origin in a highway. A controversial highway project, the Southwest Corridor or Southwest Expressway, was finally killed in 1973.
But construction had begun and a wide barren swath ran through Boston neighborhoods. It took years, but the swath of unused land was given a new purpose, or purposes, actually. The Orange Line of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which was an elevated line for the portion it ran above ground, was shifted to the Southwest Corridor. New stations were built and the elevated line was torn down. This new part of the Orange Line opened in 1987. And a linear park opened two years later, the Southwest Corridor Park, with paths for cycling, running, and walking.
The two purposes, the Orange Line and the park, are in turn linked by a literary project. The park contains installations of prose and poetry carved into stone. Nine installations, one at each of nine Orange Line stations, have both a poem and a short story or other prose piece. The prose piece at Ruggles Station comprises the four letters, including Morris’s.
Here’s the letter:
Ruggles Street
Roxbury, Mass. U.S.A.
October 29, 1929
Abraham Kontravitz
Baniocha, Poland
Dearest Parents,
We rejoice in your letter which came last week. We hope that Baniocha will continue to escape the worst repressions. We pray Uncle Isaac will recover from his sickness before winter.
Dear Etta is well and again with child, but Baby Sadie remains weak with the diarrhea and coughing. David is almost four. He is very bright, and we are sure he will be a scholar and a good man.
We have a four-room apartment in a brick building on Ruggles Street. It gives us more room than we had in the West End, and there are grass and trees. Jews, Irish, Armenians and some Protestants live in mostly older wooden tenements and get along quite well. Negroes are living just north near Northampton Street. We have streetcars on Tremont Street to Boston in about 25 minutes.
There are many factories in Lower Roxbury, building pianos and organs, brewing beer, and producing cigars, paints, medicines, and such. Large shoe factories are in Jamaica Plain, up the Stony Brook valley. In the other direction it is not far to the Back Bay with its wealthy gentile families, museums, concert halls and grand hotels. The Boston City Hospital is toward Boston in the South End, a dreary area of rooming houses.
I am now selling hardware wholesale to small stores in towns south of Boston. When I worked in the shoe factory I couldn’t go to Synagogue on Sabbath. I get my goods from a large firm in the South End, Bay State Hardware Company, and I sell entirely on commission. I use the trains and streetcars to make my calls, carrying samples and catalogues in large cases. Business is not as good because the economy is faltering. I have to put in very long hours to make a small living. Stores are closed on Sundays, by state law. Etta does piecework, making paper flowers or doing finishing work on garments. Sometimes she cares for children of neighbor women who have to go out to work.
We attend the Congregation Neveh Zedek on Ruggles Street near our home. The members are Polish and Russian families who are very devout Jews. I can sometimes join the minyan at the Synagogue for daily morning or evening prayers. I take David to Friday evening services while Etta prepares the meal and candles. Worship and study occupy long hours each Sabbath.
Many Jews are moving into Roxbury from the West End and South End. The City of Boston, of which Roxbury is a part, has a population of about 775,000. The Mayor is a colorful Irishman named James Michael Curley who lived near here as a boy. We hear that the public schools are good and Jewish boys, with hard work, can learn well and even study for the professions. But it is said that there are more opportunities in New York, Chicago and other cities.
David has several young Jewish friends. Etta shops and visits with women from our Synagogue. On Sunday we try to do something together by traveling on the streetcar. In warmer weather we can go to the Boston Common, Franklin Park or Carson Beach, in South Boston. We enjoy the Yiddish movies in Grove Hall. At home we have a winding phonograph to play our Yiddish records.
There are many more automobiles, and some wealthy people are moving to Newton, Milton and beyond. We often see aeroplanes in the sky, and it is said that before long one will be able to travel by air much more rapidly than by train.
Your son,
Morris
The fictitious Morris’s life was about to change drastically. His letter was dated Oct. 29, 1929. Almost every real American’s life was about to change on that date. That was Black Tuesday, the day that the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.
Of the four letters in the installation, Morris’s is the second from the left. The installation is behind Northeastern University’s International Village, 1155 Tremont St. To get to the installation from Ruggles Station on the Orange Line, face the gates to the station. Go left. Follow the covered walkway to its end. You’ll pass large panels depicting the history of Roxbury in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. As you leave the station, four gray stone slabs are on the right.
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