Landmark Housing: A Personal Tale

by Lauraine Alberetti Lombara

My father and mother emigrated from Parma, Italy in 1923 and 1929. Their first home was a third-floor, cold-water flat with a shared bathroom in a cold hallway on Stillman Street in the North End. Looking at photos taken on the roof, I see lovely al fresco dining and socializing spot with a great view (despite the hanging laundry) of Boston and the surrounding rooftops. Clearly the market value of a rehabbed penthouse condo in the North End is sky-high and the cost, exorbitant!

Due to my older brothers’ continuing respiratory and ear infections, the family doctor advised my parents to move. In 1938, they left friends who were like family - many from the same province in Italy –and moved to the newly built Old Harbor Village project in South Boston. My parents were doubly fortunate: first to be accepted into this landmark housing development, and second, to score a single-family row house, complete with the three floors, four rooms, a bathroom, a basement, a small garden in front with many trees, a quick walk to Columbia Park and –joy of joys—Carson Beach. As I was the youngest child, this was my first home. We children grew up surrounded by good neighbors of all nationalities, sharing old-world cultures and values, and forming new, lifelong friendships.

Summers meant days at the Carson and L Street Beaches. My mother trekked across Columbia Park to bring us lunch in her wooden picnic basket, filled with freshly steamed hot dogs in warm rolls, ice-cold drinks and yummy treats baked that morning. Papa ate only day-old, crusty Italian bread with coppa or salami- no “uncooked white bread” of frankfurters for him.

Winter brought ice skating on the frozen, flooded park, sledding on any available hill – too often a street—and listening to records on the Victrola in our toasty basement. Spring and fall were outdoor play times: we dabble in hopscotch, tag, double-dutch jump rope, releevio, hide and seek, especially at the statues in Sterling Square, and all types of ball games.

Living in South Boston made it possible for my father to walk to Andrew Square and travel by the Massachusetts Transit Authority to work. Papa was a salad chef at Warmuth’s Restaurant, known for its Boston scrod, B-Deck salad bowl, and scrumptious prune muffins. My parents never owned nor learned to drive a car. This necessitated living close to public transportation, so when we moved next, it was to another South Boston location close to St. Augustine Church. My parents purchased the former home of family friends who had “moved up”—and out—to Arlington, Massachusetts. Now my parents became homeowners of a rambling, old, three-decker row house, larger by far than our previous home, and with a bigger backyard that we shared with close family friends to whom our house and lives were attached.

Our lives were changing: my older brothers finished high school and went on to apprenticeships and college. I continued to commute to Girls’ Latin School in the Fenway, then to Codman Square in Dorchester for seventh through twelfth grade, and then to Boston College School of Nursing at Newbury Street and in Chestnut Hill.

Surely, this last home commands another sky-high price in today’s gentrified South Boston. However, by young adulthood, we have moved on, leaving behind three family dwellings, all with unique histories, and bringing with us many sweet and priceless memories.

                                                                       

Landmark Housing: A Personal Tale was first published on The Raconteuse Expose on August 2, 2013.