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.