Boston in the 50s, Italian neighborhood/s

"East Boston ("East-a-Bost" as the old timers called it) had supplanted the North End as the center of Italian family life"

East Boston was not called "East-a-Bost" by the Italian-American inhabitants themselves (or at least not intentionally), but was a derisive term used by others outside the community to negatively describe the Italian-American inhabitants therein.

East Boston was a primarily Italian-American neighborhood, and well known as such, from at least the 1920s straight through to the 80s when there was a sudden and swift shift of demographic to the Latino community it is known as today.

In the late 19th Century a character named Loomis Griswold (and his brother?) would run real estate scams on North Enders. They owned large swaths of swampish land in Revere and drew up plans with hundreds of tiny lots. They went into the Boston neighborhoods and hustled people fresh of the boat telling them to buy now before the roads were built: It will get more expensive and you don't have the money to move for a few years anyway. So they sold the lots to Italian immigrants, but never put any roads or utilities in. Others copied this winning formula. Decades later the streets would be built and it remained an Italian enclave through the 20th century. Today the area is known as West Revere which the residents always try to get snobby about, if only to explain they don't live near Shirley Ave.

I was going to add Brighton Center. Both Bug City and down by Fenuel st.

I know a number of my current neighbors moved from San Donanto (which is where many of the people form the lake came from as well) to the streets around me in the mid 60s.

And you might want to consider having the character pontificate on what constitutes good garlic and how to correctly use it, but when asked the secrets of growing good garlic, they say 'you just put it in the ground!'.

I’m not sure or aware of Italian POWs in any of the harbor islands, but there were POW camps on East First Street in Southie and Columbia Ponit in Dorchester.
They were treated so well by Italian Americans, who brought them food and cigarettes, many stayed after the war.

There were plenty of non-prisoners who camped on Peddocks Island. One part of the island was an old US Army facility - it was called Fort Something but it didn't really resemble a fortification - and that's where prisoners of war would have been held. But another part of the island was open to the public. People camped there and many families even built cottages which they would use every summer. Ownership of the land, and the cottages, was disputed between the families and the state. I went on a walking tour of the island in the early 1980s and many of the cottages were still there. State officials were talking at the time about kicking the families out and tearing down the cottages. I'm not sure what the final result was. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the cottage owners were Italian, but the people leading the tour made no reference to their ethnicity.

I wrote a dissertation on the Italian POWs (actually a subset called Italian Service Units, or ISUs) housed in Boston during WWII and their relationship to the local community. In my interviews with local Italian Americans who grew up in the small Italian-American enclave in Southie, they noted that the enclave around Emmet Street existed before WWII (they thought the small ethnic community was drawn to the area by an Italian Franciscan priest who once led the local Gate of Heaven Catholic Church, though it's likely at least some of the Italian community was there prior to the priest). As for POWs staying around in the area post-war, all were required to go home to Italy due to the Geneva Conventions, but some definitely came back post-war and married local women they had met in wartime Boston (the POWs got to go visit with local Italian Americans as a reward for good work and behavior during the war). Also, re: prior mentions of the POWs in these comments, the POWs were housed first at Camp McKay on Columbia Point just south of Carson Beach. Due to rioting in reaction to their interactions with locals in the summer of 1944, the POWs were moved to Fort Andrews on Peddocks Island in the harbor, where they remained until the fall of 1945, taking daily boats to work at Castle Island Terminal, the Boston Army Base, and various shorter term assignments (gardening in Franklin Park, rehabbing hotels in Kenmore, hurricane clean up, etc). Another large Italian POW group was based at Camp Myles Standish in Taunton south of the city (where there's now talk of a casino) - they too traveled to nearby Italian-American enclaves (near Boston and Providence) to visit during their free time. While small groups of Italian POWs may have been temporarily housed elsewhere for short labor assignments (and other POWs may have been temporarily housed near the port if they disembarked in Boston and were being shipped inland), McKay, Andrews and Myles Standish were the only permanent Italian POW locales in Eastern Mass during the war. A few Italians were mixed in with the Germans at a POW camp west of Boston at Fort Devens, but only if they had been captured while fighting under the Nazi flag.

Southie, predominately Irish, never had an Irish or Hibernian club. Southie had a German, Polish, Lithuanian, Italian and Dante clubs but no Irish club.

You can still find the occasional fig tree wrapped up for the winter in South Medford.

For Italian-American families, moving from East Boston to Revere was almost a lateral move and did not really signify "a step up". A large number of the East Boston Italian-American families who moved in the 70s due to "white flight" went to Saugus, Peabody and Lynnfield on the North Shore. Those areas are basically "East Boston North" to this day. Today you will find more of the stereotypical "Boston accent" in those regions than in Boston itself.

Because when things are shiny it shows you have class,

Naah. We had the madonnas in bathtubs in the more Italian parts of the (mostly Irish, some Germans, Lithuanians to the west) neighborhood I grew up in on the South Side of Chicago in the 50s and 60s.

--gpm