Kurt Swanson presents a Tabblo of North End images.
“I live in the North End of Boston, so I volunteered to do my best to capture what life is like here, even though, like so many other places in the world, this is a neighborhood in transition. In the 1930’s there were over 45,000 people living here, 90% of Italian heritage; today, only 50% of the 15,000 residents are. Yet the traditions, and their way of life, are ever present. I hope you can get some sense of what the people and places are like here today (2009), and it is my hope, and the hope of the Boston Photography Center, that we can continually update the neighborhood projects to document the changes going forward. Thank you.”
Hi, Kurt, These are great photos, and wonderful to read how much you appreciate living in the North End with its real sense of community. As an editor/writer, I wondered about the spelling of "Tabblo" instead of "Tableau," but you probably have your reasons. By the way, my grandfather, Louis Goldstein, emigrated from Lithuania to Boston in the 1890s. Sometime in the early 1900s, he opened a shoe store at 213 Hanover Street, near Salem Street and next to a police station. My mother remembered that he sold "bulldog-toed policeman’s shoes" to the Irish cops, and that the neighborhood was mostly Italian. I’ve attempted to find some records of my grandfather’s shoe store, but I guess it’s ancient history now. LindaJay (P.S. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, but I worked on Beacon Hill at Little, Brown and Houghton Mifflin Publishers in the 1960s.)