Contrarian Boston/Dec. 15, 2021
In today’s edition: Worker bonus showdown on Beacon Hill |Lincoln assassin’s Boston obsession | Ready for the next Somerville? | Edwards wins big | Rash secession talk | About Contrarian Boston | Seeking writers/contributors
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Quincy the new Somerville?
Ok, that’s still a bit of a stretch. But the South Shore city has joined a growing number of working-class enclaves going uptown fast.
Rents in Quincy now top $2,000 a month - the fifth highest among the cities and towns surrounding Boston, the Patriot-Ledger reports in this excellent piece on the changes transforming the city.
Developers have built thousands of new apartments in Quincy over the last few years, with the overwhelming majority luxury units. With a statewide housing shortage and other communities on the South Shore resistant to new housing, you can guess the result.
We’ll add here that home prices are going through the roof as well in Quincy, with the median sale price passing the $600,000 mark in 2021, having jumped more than 11 percent, The Warren Group reports.
Gentrification isn’t limited to city neighborhoods. Needham, Natick and Watertown are among other cities and towns that were all, like Quincy at one time, bastions of working and middle class affordability, but are no more.
Showdown looms over frontline worker bonuses
It’s not clear what combination of brilliant minds at the State House dreamed up plans for a 28-member panel to review bonuses for cashiers, nursing home aides and others on the pandemic frontlines.
But the good news is the panel, which included everyone and his brother, just got the axe by Gov. Baker when he signed legislation appropriating $4 billion in federal relief money.
Workers who labored in grocery stores and nursing homes during the pandemic shouldn’t have their $500 bonuses held up by a committee made up of environmental activists, regional planning associations and community groups, among others, with political reform group Common Cause of Massachusetts thrown in for good measure.
With no designated chair, it is a recipe for irrelevant long-winded discussions and gridlock.
Here’s wondering whether the Legislature will put up a fight to keep this ridiculously convoluted bureaucratic process.
Another big night for progressives
Lydia Edwards won big Tuesday night, with the Boston city councilor picking up 60 percent of the vote and winning a seat in the state Senate.
Edwards, who supports rent control and eliminating qualified immunity for police officers, beat out Anthony D’Ambrosio, a 25-year-old Revere school committee member with strong ties to that city’s political establishment.
D’Ambrosio, who pitched himself as a moderate alternative, won Revere without a sweat.
But he was crushed in Cambridge, where Edwards “captured an astounding 95 percent of the vote,” notes CommonWealth Magazine, which has some of the best coverage of the big race.
Enough already with the secession talk
The Brookings Institution probably meant well with this piece on the apparently growing support for the idea of secession on part of voters in various states.
It’s not just Trumpsters in the South who think breaking up the country is a good idea – a significant percentage of Blue State residents are now fantasizing about ditching their Red State brethren, according to a University of Virginia poll.
But the highly respected liberal think tank also inadvertently gives credence to what should be shunned as a fringe idea.
The inviolability of the Union was one of the key issues our nation fought over and resolved in the Civil War, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
It’s not up for debate.
Don’t take my word for it - here’s Lincoln in his first inaugural address:
I hold that, in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the union of these States is perpetual....It follows....that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence, within any State or States, against the authority of the United States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances. I, therefore, consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken.
Policy wonks, stop playing with fire. Find something else to chew over.
THE MASSACHUSETTS CONNECTION
Paul L. DeBole is an assistant professor of political science at Lasell University and the author of “Conspiracy 101: An Authoritative Examination of the Greatest Conspiracies in American Politics.” The Massachusetts Connection is the first in a regular series on major historical figures with ties to the Bay State. Today Professor DeBole looks at John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln assassin and diehard Confederate’s strange obsession with Boston.
Mention the name John Wilkes Booth, and you immediately think Ford’s Theater.
On the evening of April 14, 1865, the Shakespearean actor leveled a pistol at the back of President Lincoln’s head in the darkened, Washington, D.C. theater, and with a single shot tragically altered the course of history.
Ground zero for the abolition movement, Massachusetts and Boston in particular, would hardly seem to be the kind of place that would draw someone with Booth’s beliefs and hatreds.
Yet Booth’s fascination with Boston spanned course of the Civil War, all at a time when giants of the anti-slavery movement like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe trod the city’s streets.
Booth lobbied hard for and landed stage roles in the city’s theaters, engaged in some Back Bay real estate speculation, and likely met up with Confederate agents at one of the city’s most revered restaurants in the run-up to Lincoln’s assassination.
Sifting the evidence
We know a bit about John Wilkes Booth, the world’s most famous assassin, from his writings; and, for a private citizen, a surprising number of them have survived.
Many of his letters are in the hands of private collectors or in museums. But those writings, as well as a book written by his sister, Asia Booth Clark, give some fascinating insights into Booth’s persona.
One thing that is clear from Booth is his strong connection to Joseph H. Simonds, the Cashier at Boston’s Mercantile Bank, who would effectively become the well-known and prosperous actor’s investment manager and one of his closest friends.
By 1864, Booth had come to rely on his financial advice so much that Simonds left his position at the Mercantile Bank to work for him full time, eventually relocating to Pennsylvania to assist in the management of an oil company, in which Booth was a major investor.
In his correspondence with Simonds, Booth also relays his constant and initially unsuccessful pursuit of roles in Boston theaters from the fall of 1861 through the spring of 1862, when he finally lands something.
Booth really, really wants to be here.
Adding to the mystery, Booth complained about the low pay he was being offered by theater managers, only to redouble his wheedling of theater managers.
We do know that Booth did appear on stage in Boston beginning on May 12, 1862, but clearly wants to spend more time in here. The $100,000 question is why?
It may not be the smoking gun, but Booth drops one clue in a letter to Simonds, his Boston banker friend, April of 1863.
The filling of the Back Bay, one of the biggest engineering projects in Boston history, had begun in 1857, and was proceeding apace.
And Booth’s eye had fallen on a potential real estate opportunity – a plot of land at 115 Commonwealth Ave.
Booth pulls the trigger on the purchase in October, 1864, with Union and Confederate troops locked in a grim stalemate in the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, and as Sherman closed in on Atlanta.
We see a deed recorded October 17, 1864 in the Suffolk County Registry of Deeds [in Book 849, Page 272], with the purchase price at the princely sum $8,192.20.
Yet on further inspection, the mystery deepens, for the deal is not quite as it seems.
Next up: Booth’s romantic, family ties to Boston