Scollay Square, Boston, 19th c. (after September 1880)

Scollay Square, Decoration Day, 19th c.(after September 1880)

Scollay Square (ca.1838-1962) was a vibrant city square in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was named for William Scollay, a prominent local developer and militia officer who bought a landmark four-story merchant building at the intersection of Cambridge and Court Streets in 1795. Local citizens began to refer to the intersection as Scollay's Square, and, in 1838, the city officially memorialized the intersection as Scollay Square. Early on, the area was a busy center of commerce, including daguerreotypist (photographer), Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808–1901), and Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, the first dentist to use ether as an anaesthetic.

History[link]

Detail of 1888 map of Boston, showing vicinity of Scollay Square

Scollay Square was located "at the junction of Tremont and Court streets, Cornhill and Tremont Row." Initially the city designated it Pemberton Square, but changed the name to "Scollay Square" when Phillips Square changed its own name to "Pemberton Square." The building that gave the area its name, Scollay's Building, was "at one time a wedge-shaped row of wooden buildings, extending from the head of Cornhill to opposite the head of Hanover street, separated Tremont row from Court street (see Bonner's map, 1722); at the southeasterly end the second schoolhouse in the town was erected, 1683-84; at various times portions of these buildings were removed, leaving only the Scollay brick building, supposed to have been built by Patrick Jeffrey, who came into possession in 1795; ... removed about 1870."^[1]

Culture[link]

Old Howard Theatre

Among the most famous (and infamous) of Scollay Square landmarks was the Old Howard Theatre, a grand theater which began life as the headquarters of a Millerite Adventist Christian sect which believed the world would end in October 1844. After the world failed to end on schedule, the building was sold in 1844 and reopened as a vaudeville and Shakespearean venue. Later, in the 1900s and 1910s, it would showcase the popular minstrel shows.^[2]

John Winthrop Statue

To mark the 250th anniversary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the sculptor Richard Saltonstall Greenough was commissioned to create a bronze sculpture of John Winthrop, the first Governor of the state. The statue was installed in September 1880.

By around the 1940s the Scollay Square area began to lose its vibrant commercial activity, and the Howard gradually changed its image and began to cater to sailors on leave and college students by including burlesque shows, as did other nearby venues such as the Casino Theater and Crawford House^{[disambiguation needed ]}. "Always Something Doing" became the Old Howard's advertising slogan. The venue also showcased boxing matches with such old-time greats as local Rocky Marciano and John L. Sullivan, and continued to feature slapstick vaudeville acts, from likes of The Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello.

But it was the success and prominence of the burlesque shows that brought the Old Howard down. In 1953, vice squad agents sneaked a home movie camera into the Old Howard, and caught Mary Goodneighbor on film doing her striptease for the audience. The film led to the closure of the theater, and it remained closed until it caught fire mysteriously in 1961.

The square was also the home of Austin and Stone's Dime Museum.

Militia tries to maintain order in Scollay Square during the 1919 Boston Police Strike.

Abolitionism[link]

Scollay Square was also a flashpoint for the early abolition movement. Author William Lloyd Garrison was twice attacked by an angry mob for printing his anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, which began publication in 1831. Sarah Parker Remond's first act of civil disobedience occurred in 1853 at the Old Howard when she was refused the seat she had purchased but was instead seated in the 'black' section. Many of the buildings in the area in and around Scollay Square had hidden spaces where escaped slaves were hidden, as part of the Underground Railroad.

Destruction and redevelopment[link]

As early as the 1950s, city officials had been mulling plans to completely tear down and redevelop the Scollay Square area, in order to remove lower-income residents and troubled businesses from the aging and seedy district. Attempts to reopen the sullied Old Howard by its old performers had been one of the last efforts against redevelopment; but with the theater gutted by fire, a city wrecking ball began the project of demolishing over 1000 buildings in the area; 20,000 residents were displaced.

With $40 million in federal funds, the city built an entirely new development on top of old Scollay Square, renaming the area Government Center, and peppering it with city, state, and federal government buildings: Boston City Hall, City Hall Plaza, Government Service Center, Edward W. Brooke Courthouse.

References in popular culture[link]

• In the Kingston Trio song "M.T.A." (written by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes), Charlie's wife goes down to the Scollay Square station every day, at a quarter past two, to hand her stranded husband a sandwich through the open window. The same scene is repeated with different characters in scenery set about 40 years later in the Dropkick Murphys song "Skinhead on the MBTA".^[3]

• Sam Savage's 2006 novel Firmin, a magical-realist account of a literate Rat, takes place in Scollay Square at the time of its destruction.

Scollay Square, Boston, after September 1880

See also[link]

• Edward J. Logue, Boston Redevelopment Authority, ca.1962
• William Scollay

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• David Kruh. Always something doing: Boston's infamous Scollay Square, rev. ed. UPNE, 1999.
• David Kruh. Scollay Square. Arcadia Publishing, 2004.
• Daniel A. Gilbert. "Why Dwell on a Lurid Memory?": Deviance and Redevelopment in Boston's Scollay Square. The Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 9, (2007), pp. 103-133.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Scollay Square

• http://www.joeandnemo.com The Scollay Square Web Site
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/2350725919/ Scollay's Building, 19th c.
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/2350724709/ Scollay's building, 19th c.
• http://www.thehenryford.org/exhibits/dpc/history/billboard1.asp Henry Ford advertisement, ca.1900
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sargent/249104349/ Aerial photo, 1946
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mit-libraries/tags/scollaysquarebostonma Photos by Nishan Bichajian, 1950s
• http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2009/04/09/once_a_relic_of_the_past_earthy_art_form_sees_a_revival/ Burlesque revival, 2009
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/gigharmon/sets/72157606318827540/

Coordinates: 42°21′34″N 71°03′29″W / 42.35944°N 71.05806°W / 42.35944; -71.05806

Sam Savage (born November 9, 1940) is an American novelist and poet, best known for his 2006 novel Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife. Other published works are The Cry of the Sloth and The Criminal Life of Effie O.

Life and work[link]

Sam (Samuel P.) Savage was born in 1940 in Camden, South Carolina. His father, Henry Savage Jr., a lawyer by profession, was also an author, publishing several books of history and natural history.

Savage graduated from Yale University in 1968. He subsequently studied philosophy at Yale and at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, receiving a Phd from Yale University with a dissertation on the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. He also taught at Yale, in his words "briefly and unhappily."

Prior to attending Yale he was poetry editor of Reflections, a small literary magazine published in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the early 1960s and was active in the Civil Rights Movement. After leaving Yale Savage spent several years in France. He returned to South Carolina in 1980, settling in the small coastal village of McClellanville. In 2004 he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he now lives. Before writing, he worked as a bicycle mechanic, carpenter, crab fisherman, and letterpress printer.^[1]

He is married to Nora Manheim, daughter of the noted literary translator Ralph Manheim. They have two children. Savage also has a son by a previous marriage.

Savage is the author of three novels. The first was a novel in verse, The Criminal Life of Effie O., published in 2005 and described as a “children’s book for adults.” It is illustrated by Virginia Beverley (Savage). In 2006 Coffee House Press published Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, a darkly humorous story about a bookstore rat in difficult times. In 2007 the Spanish publishing house Seix Barral purchased the world rights to Firmin, including English-language rights. The novel subsequently became a bestseller in Europe^[2] and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. The Cry of the Sloth, published in 2009, is a tragic-comic novel that recounts the downhill slide of a failed literary man. The novel is composed of every word the protagonist writes over a period of four months, including letters, novel drafts, newspaper advertisements, and grocery lists.

Bibliography[link]

• The Criminal Life of Effie O. (2005)
• Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife (2006)
• The Cry of the Sloth: The Mostly Tragic Story of Andrew Whittaker, Being his Collected, Final, and Absolutely Complete Works (2009)

Acclaim[link]

Sam Savage was finalist for 2007 Awards for books published in 2006 from the Society of Midland Authors,^[3] a 2006 Litblog Co-op Read This choice^[4] as well as a Barnes & Noble Great New Writers pick.^[5]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Coffee House press website
• Seix Barral website