Gangs of Melrose

In 2021, teenage gang activity is not a concern in Melrose. Things were different in 1954.

As the weather had warmed that spring, tensions had grown between adults and teens, as youth would loiter on Main Street in the evening, acting boisterously and annoying adult passersby. A group of teenage boys with access to cars, whom the Free Press dubbed “hotrodders,” had made a reputation for themselves on Main Street from Wakefield to Malden.

On June 1st they gathered at Brigham’s ice cream parlor (now Bruegger’s). The fed-up waitstaff called the police. Patrolmen Patrick Walsh and Melvin Crosby responded, and asked the gang to disperse. They refused. As the Boston papers would report, many of the boys were from well-connected Melrose families. A police spokesman later said, “They, they’ll tell you, [that] they know their constitutional rights. Their fathers pay taxes. They have a right to stand on a street corner if they want to. That sort of stuff.”

Facing an impasse, the officers elected to arrest a boy they identified as the ringleader. As they passed down Main Street towards the police station, the gang surrounded them, and pushed the two officers through the plate glass windows of the Melrose Army-Navy Store (now Lilah-Rose). A long sliver of glass punctured Walsh’s lungs; Crosby suffered broken ribs.

Melrose was aghast. The members of the gang were rounded up, a volunteer police force of 50 was brought in to patrol Main Street at night, and the Aldermen passed a tough-on-crime anti-loitering ordinance empowering the police to arrest anyone obstructing a public way without a warrant.

One anonymous teenage letter-writer to the Free Press mounted a defense of his cohort, writing that “I, like the rest of my friends, have been subjected to lectures, pointed remarks, and repudiations of all kinds,” but that the problem for youth in Melrose was that, aside from Main Street, there simply wasn’t anyplace in town for teenagers to gather. Adults, he alleged, had created this problem.

True to their privileged backgrounds, none of the boys charged with crimes seem to have been prosecuted. Sixty-seven years later, the anti-loitering ordinance is still on the books.

Ell Pond drownings

Content Warning: this post may prove disturbing for those with aquaphobia.

In our last post we remembered how Ell Pond was once a popular water recreation spot. Yet there was a dark side to that story. Between 1867 and 1950, at least 27 people drowned in Ell Pond.

Four of these drownings were suicides. The rest were accidents, and the vast majority took place during the summer months. Every accidental drowning was a boy or young man between the ages of 3 and 25. This fact speaks both to the male dominance of swimming during the first part of the twentieth century, and also to a masculine ideal that called for reckless, daring behavior. Girls and young women do feature in Ell Pond rescue stories, but they all managed to survive.

Sometimes the victim died alone, the body only later discovered by a passerby or swimmer. Such was the case in 1917, when Harry Brock “stumbled over” the body of 11-year-old Roy Hamilton as he waded into the water.

More frequently, friends and family were left with the visceral horror of watching their loved ones sink beneath the surface, as when in 1928 Joseph Crane watched his 19-year-old son and namesake drown just thirty feet offshore, owing to the sudden onset of a heart attack.

Drownings most frequently occurred on account of boats, either because their occupants got out to swim and then found themselves unable to get back in, or from capsizing, as for example when 22-year-old Fred Sackett’s canoe overturned in 1904, and he could not stave off the onset of cramps.

For every drowning, there were many more heroic stories of rescues. In 1907, 9-year-old Gertrude Leisk went fishing at the corner of the pond where the gazebo now stands. She fell in and bumped her head on the bottom, but Rose Levine, also age 9, heard her muffled screams and pulled her to shore. In 1949, a man vaulted a fence, swam out, dove to the bottom of the pond, and rescued James Daley, age 23, from almost certain death—and he left before anyone could get his name.

The pollution that now chokes Ell Pond has been an environmental disaster. But with the pond in such an unappealing state, at least the drownings have come to an end.

Swimming at Ell Pond

In 1927, a reporter for the Boston Herald wrote “A prettier spot for swimming and diving than Ell Pond would be hard to find.” He was in town to witness the New England Association of the Amateur Athletic Union’s annual swimming championship, which was being held at Ell Pond for the third year in a row. The city had just laid out a considerable sum to build a modern bathhouse, with lockers, changing rooms, and toilets. Ell Pond had taken its place as one of Greater Boston’s finest swimming holes. But it was not to last.

Recreational swimming, like most modern sports, was an invention of the Victorian era. The earliest attested recreational swimming in Ell Pond dates to the mid-1880s, but the pond at that time was encircled by private landowners and was primarily used by two ice harvesting operations on its southeast and southwest shores.

In 1897, the Melrose town meeting voted to purchase most of the north shore of the pond for parkland. This property had long been a swampy bottomland prone to flooding, and in many ways it still is. The area corresponding to what is today the Melrose dog park was soon adopted by locals as a public beach and boat launch.

In 1910 Melrose built its first bathhouse on the site, and hired a seasonal staff of attendants and lifeguards. In 1913 the city reported that 10,057 people used the bathhouse, with a gender breakdown of 8,823 males and 1,234 females. Within a couple of years, the number of female bathers had quadrupled, suggesting changing gender norms surrounding swimming.

By the close of the 1920s, when the NEAAAU held its competitions at Ell Pond, men and women were equally at home at Ell Pond. The beach drew upwards of 1,000 people on summer weekend days. This happy scene would prove short-lived. In the years that followed, the pond was becoming noticeably murkier, with fewer Melrosians willing to take the plunge.

In 1951, swimming was finally banned at Ell Pond. By then, the underground tributaries that supply Ell Pond’s waters had become hopelessly polluted by human waste and other contaminants. In 2021, it remains contaminated, and it is harder than ever to imagine the aquatic paradise that Ell Pond once was.

Melrose Public Library

We congratulate the Melrose Public Library on receiving an $8 million grant from the state to renovate and expand its historic building. It is a fitting gift for an institution that this year is celebrating 150 years of service to the people of Melrose.

The library was incorporated on March 27th, 1871 by a vote of the town meeting. It soon secured a permanent collection through the gifts and fundraising of Melrose’s people, a steady revenue stream through the institution of a Dog Tax, and a capable administrator in librarian Carrie L. Worthen, who would serve in that post for a half-century, retiring at age 78 in 1922.

What it lacked for the first thirty-odd years of its existence was a dedicated building. It was initially housed in the back of an office in the Waverly Building rented by one of the town selectmen. When the Town Hall was completed in 1874, the library moved into a room there. In 1895 the library moved again, to the new YMCA building, where it finally was granted enough space to have a reading room.

In 1901, Mayor John Larrabee wrote to Andrew Carnegie, imploring him to include Melrose in his public library construction program. Carnegie wrote back to offer $25,000 to build a new library, on the condition that Melrose budget at least $2,500 per annum for the library in perpetuity.

The city accepted the gift, and after much debate, settled on its present location. Lynn architect Penn Varney was selected to design the new library, largely on the strength of his design of the Schenectady, New York, public library, which you can see bears more than a passing resemblance to the building he would create for Melrose.

Ground was broken on April 20, 1903, and the building was dedicated on April 16th of the following year, with Mary Livermore serving as keynote speaker. The new library was not just a repository for books, but was also a place for quiet study, a meeting space, an art gallery, and a community center—uses which the library has included in its current renovation plans.

We wish the library and its staff all the best in this latest historic transition, and look forward to seeing what the next 150 years will bring.

Barbara Weeks

At age 17, Barbara Weeks had gone from Melrose High to the brink of becoming a major Hollywood star. But behind the glamorous photos lay a misery that led her to walk away from show business and never look back.

Weeks’ parents divorced shortly after her birth, and she was raised by her mother, Ida. Their circumstances were so straitened that it has proven impossible to identify her childhood home; they apparently moved quite a bit. Barbara attended the Roosevelt School, but from an early age, Ida made performance rather than academics the center of Barbara’s life, pinning the family’s hopes on a future acting career.

At age 13, Ida took Barbara to New York City to audition for Ziegfeld’s Follies. She scored a part. Barbara’s life for the next few years involved stints performing on Broadway with time off spent back in Melrose. In 1930, on Ziegfeld’s recommendation, she was cast in her first Hollywood film, and moved to Los Angeles.

In 1931 she signed a major contract with Samuel Goldwyn and was cast opposite Eddie Cantor in “Palmy Days,” one of the biggest hits of that year. You can see her in the clip linked below. It is probably the first film with sound of a Melrose person.

Her publicist reported her dating Clark Gable and Gary Cooper and spending weekends at Hearst Castle. The truth was not so pleasant. She kept a brutal work schedule, making twelve movies a year.  When she refused Goldwyn’s sexual advances, he sold her contract to Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures, who likewise propositioned her. When she demurred, he punished her by giving her parts in low-profile Westerns.

In 1938, Weeks married and left show business, much to the fury of her mother. She later told an interviewer “I was tired of Hollywood. It was never my answer to a happy life.”

The happy life she chose was so quiet that “Variety” mistakenly published an obituary for her in 1954. Years later she was tracked down by fans, who found her living as a retired landlady in Las Vegas. “What’s all the fuss about?” she asked them, “I am no longer the siren you seek.”

Barbara Weeks died in 2003, a week shy of her 90th birthday.

The Malden Instructions

In Melrose, Malden, and Everett—what was once all Malden—Independence Day could well be celebrated on May 27th, for those communities declared their independence from Britain on that day, five weeks before the Continental Congress.

On April 19th, 1775, militiamen had gathered at what is today Gooch Park for the march to Concord. By the time they returned, their once idyllic neighborhood had become the edge of a war zone. Siege lines were drawn in the southern part of the town. The Provincial government gave heavy artillery to the Malden militia, who readied the cannons on the banks of the Mystic River, near what is today the Encore casino.

On June 17th, people here gathered atop Waitt’s Mount to watch the smoke rising from the Battle of Bunker Hill. The firing of the cannons could be heard across Melrose. After the battle, the front moved to the very border of Malden, with floating British batteries menacing the town from the Mystic.

People from South Malden moved in with people here in the North while their houses were taken over by the militia. All work in town was now geared towards supplying the soldiers, as well as providing relief for refugees who came streaming out of Boston.

On March 17th, 1776, after ten months of these conditions, the British army evacuated Boston. On May 27th, the Malden town meeting was asked to endorse instructions to their representative calling for independence, which read in part:

“The manner in which the war has been prosecuted hath confirmed us in these sentiments; piracy and murder, robbery and breach of faith…. defenseless towns have been attacked and destroyed; the ruins of Charlestown, which are daily in our view, daily reminds us of this; the cries of the widow and the orphan demand our attention; they demand that the hand of pity should wipe the tear from their eye, and that the sword of their country should avenge their wrongs.”

The vote was unanimous. The shared trauma of war had united the Malden town meeting to declare in words what they had already accomplished in action, a posture given visual form in the provincial seal adopted that year. The remaining homes of the Melrose voters are pictured here.

Melrose Spotlight: the McMansion

If there is an iconic housing style of the early 21st century, it is the contentious movement that architects call “contemporary,” but that detractors have dubbed the “McMansion.”

These houses from Regan’s Way and Patriot Way are examples of the type. Each one pays homage to local building traditions by incorporating Colonial Revival elements, such as the use of wood clapboarding, six-over-six pane windows, and gable-end roofs. Number six Patriot Way even has a Palladian window mounted above a door with sidelights and a transom window.

Based on that description, there is nothing offensive about these houses. Why then do they generate such a visceral negative response from some people? There seem to be three main objections: that they are mass-produced and homogenous, that they are environmentally irresponsible, and that they perpetuate racial exclusivity.

There has never been a housing style that was not homogenous. Architects have used pattern books since the Georgian era, and even First Period houses relied on standard proportions and stock elements. The very first suburban development in Melrose, the Greek Revival houses of Cottage Street, are more or less the same house over and over again, with slight variations—just like these houses.

Any house built in Melrose since 2011 has had to be a HERS-rated, environmentally friendly building. The four houses pictured here each have a HERS rating of about 50, making them about twice as energy efficient as an older house. While the houses are large, the lots they occupy are less than half an acre, and the destruction of vegetation required to build them released far fewer greenhouse gases than a knock down of an older building.

There has never been an architectural movement that did not have its detractors, and their objections were often based on class resentments and cultural prejudices. If you cannot see the beauty in McMansions, ask yourself why.