From land takings to gentrification, East Boston has seen generations of ‘lost futures’
By hola | Published | No Comments
During his time as a postdoctoral research fellow, social worker Josh Lown found he didn’t have to look beyond his own East Boston neighborhood when doing research for a paper on “hauntology.” The term, coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, describes the emotional toll of unforeseen changes on a community.
Lown wrote about hauntology in the context of neighborhood change due to rising rental prices. He’s interested in what he calls the “more than material impacts of gentrification.” Hauntology speaks to the gut-wrenching feeling that one’s community no longer has a future — the feeling of being haunted by the “lost future” that might have been before things changed.
Lown’s paper explores how his Eastie neighbors are often “haunted by the sense of individual and communal loss of their community’s future place in the neighbourhood. These ‘lost futures’ are often represented by the material changes, such as new buildings, and demographic changes, witnessed through the displacement of their neighbours, occurring in their neighbourhood.”
In many ways, East Boston’s story is one of repeated displacement and even land theft. Indigenous people once hunted, fished and foraged on the islands and marshes where the East Boston neighborhood now stands until the arrival of the Puritans and the eviction of Indigenous tribes in the 1620s and 1630s. Working-class families were displaced by airport expansion decades ago and, in more recent years, by the cost of living that has increased with the wave of luxury condos built on climate-proof foundations. The pattern remains disturbingly consistent.
Yassir Blanco, a 16-year-old lifelong resident of East Boston, said he always felt at home in the neighborhood until recently.
“Growing up here,” he said, “at first I felt like there were a lot of people like me around, like people with the same backgrounds and all that. But as the years go by,” he added, “I’m starting to feel a little bit of a disconnect with myself, as well as the other people around me.”
“I don’t see the same faces as I did a couple of years ago,” Blanco said. “I don’t have the same type of connection I did with my neighbors. They’re coming and going. I feel like something is changing, and I don’t think it’s for the best.”
Blanco expressed a commonly voiced sentiment amongst longtime East Boston residents as gentrification changes both the people who live there and the look of the neighborhood. “This sense of grief at the loss of community hovers over every aspect of conversations surrounding residents’ relationships to gentrification,” Lown wrote in his paper.
When the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts in 1620, East Boston was a collection of five harbor islands. The Indigenous tribes of Massachusetts used the area for its tidal flats, marshes and access to the ocean, which provided them with the resources to survive and thrive until the Puritans evicted them.
It was not until 1833 that East Boston began taking shape (PDF) as the neighborhood it is today. That year, the East Boston Company purchased Noddle’s Island — the largest of the five islands — and began landfilling the harbor, and the islands became a neighborhood.
The next major change after the neighborhood’s establishment was the expansion of Logan International Airport. What started a century ago as a sleepy military air strip on less than 200 acres of land is now a bustling international airport with an average of a thousand flights coming and going every single day.
Francesca “Fran” Riley, another lifelong East Boston resident, witnessed the airport expansion that eventually led to the demolition of the home she grew up in.
“To this very day, I am still angry about eminent domain,” Riley said. She was in high school when she was displaced by the construction of a tunnel in 1960. “At 17, you’re a senior, you’re gonna go to your prom and all that. Well, I had to go to a different house, and it was devastating,” she said. Riley was one of many residents who lost their homes in the wake of Logan’s growth.
Lown, who has also studied the neighborhood’s history of displacement, said the Massachusetts Port Authority’s taking of Wood Island Park was a “trauma point” for Eastie residents who lived through it.
He elaborated while taking Hola Cultura on a walking tour of East Boston. “If you ask anyone who’s been around for a while, Massport and their expansion over time has really affected how people see the neighborhood, how they feel they can relate to the neighborhood, how they feel they relate to the city at large, and their separation from it.”
Growing up in East Boston, Fran spent a lot of time in Wood Island Park, which — like her childhood home — no longer exists. Wood Island Park was a public space built by Frederick Law Olmsted, the legendary landscape architect who created spaces such as the Emerald Necklace in Boston and Central Park in New York City. Wood Island Park was taken by eminent domain and bulldozed to expand the airport in 1967.
“We’d go fishing, we would dive down and catch lobsters and these crabs and things like that. You know, we played and played games and stuff. There were butterflies. It was great,” Riley said. “If I took you there, that’s Logan Airport right now.” But her own children and grandchildren never got to see Wood Island Park. That quality of life growing up as a kid is gone, that innocent, beautiful time.”
Wood Island Park today- Wood Island Park in 1925
East Boston today looks different from the way it did in the past. According to the City of Boston’s Home Sale Trends, from 2009 to 2018 alone, the value of residential real estate increased 161%, and this steep rise trickled down to rent. According to a report by the Boston Planning and Development Agency (PDF), the average cost of rent in East Boston increased 7.3% between 2022 and 2023, forcing many longtime residents to leave the neighborhood or move in with friends and family.
Saul Perlera, an East Boston resident and owner of Perlera Realty on Meridian Street, has observed the rise of East Boston’s real estate prices firsthand since moving to the neighborhood about four decades ago. When he first started renting apartments, most property owners were Italian Americans and Italian immigrants. He said his big struggle was convincing them to rent to Latines, because they were afraid immigrants from Latin America wouldn’t be good tenants.
By the time Perlera received his real estate license and began selling houses in the neighborhood in the 1990s, however, more and more Latine residents were moving in. Many purchased their homes and have benefited from the neighborhood’s rising home values, while renters have faced a harsher reality.
“Either they can’t afford the rent or they can’t afford to buy here, so they end up in Revere, Lynn, Chelsea, and even those places have become very expensive. So I don’t know where they’re going to go next,” he said. “But I know that there was one point when people could live comfortably, paying their own rents. And now you see more people in the same household because the rents are expensive.”
Whether you look at the changes underway in East Boston as a good or a bad thing, Perlera said, “the only constant is that it’s changing.”
– Story by Diego Aguilera-Steinert
– Copy edited by Kami Waller
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