I’m sure (or at least I hope) we’ve all had a chance to titter at the twin stripclubs located one block down from the Little Building: the Glass Slipper and, for the high rollers in our midst, Centerfolds. Which you prefer is as much a matter of personal taste as it is of personal finance, but they are born of the same curious history.

Emerson sits on the border of what was once called Boston’s Combat Zone, our very own red-light district. What did the Zone look like in its heyday, circa 1975? Imagine that every parking lot, every dormant construction site, and every Dunkin’ Donuts was a shrieking, winking strip club, peep show, or topless bar - the Two o’ Clock Lounge, Good Time Charlie’s, the Naked i. Nothing was sacred! Even the Majestic regularly screened triple-X fare, adding a suggestive dimension to its nickname “the Maj.”

The knot of alleys at Washington and Lagrange was a dark and seedy hub for pimps, streetwalkers, and their targeted demographic, suburban johns. As one writer put it: “LaGrange Street is a trollop-pocked fistula…A voyager down LaGrange discovers that impudent fingers are fluting his privates, while subtler fingers peculate his wallet.”

So, the following is a selection of Combat Zone facts for you to impart should you have occasion to host out-of-towners.

In 1974, Boston’s shadowy city planning agency, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) – which, since its formation, seems to have no overseers or regulatory bodies to answer to – zoned the Combat Zone for “special adult entertainment purposes.” (The fact that the BRA officially sanctioned topless bars is drenched in its own “special” irony.) In an effort to curb the spread of naughtiness to incipient hotbeds of ill repute – namely the affluent and vigilant communities in the Back Bay and the Fens – the city of Boston opted for an approach of contained tolerance. In their ordinance, the BRA simply allowed for flashing neon lights, which were otherwise forbidden throughout the city. City planners take note: the difference between god-fearing morality and frantic fellatio on LaGrange is neon.

It should be noted briefly that Massachusetts’ own Congressman Barney Frank, while he was serving as a State Representative, submitted his own legislation to legalize Boston’s red-light district (as well as the prostitutes who worked there) – however, Congressman Frank proposed to move the Combat Zone closer to its primary customers, right next to the Financial District.

During its years of civic tolerance, the Combat Zone saw routine police and municipal neglect. The Vice Squad was slow to take emergency calls in the Zone and their selective enforcement of prostitution laws was highly correlated with media attention; street cleaners never came, streetlights were never repaired (and why should they, really, with all those flashing signs.)

When, in 1976, Mayor White denied Police Commissioner DiGrazia the promotion he had been expecting, DiGrazia exited office, leaving behind a surprise for the incoming commissioner: he leaked a Special Investigations Unit report to the press, documenting the police and municipal neglect of the Zone, the police brutality, and scores of other deplorable findings the SIU had documented over the course of their three-year investigation.

Two weeks after the SIU report exploded on the pages of the Globe and the Herald, a first-string cornerback for the Harvard Crimson and Jamaica Plain native, Andrew Puopolo, was fatally stabbed in the Combat Zone after a wholesome night out with his boys at the Two O’ Clock. The incoming Commissioner Jordan, a weathered veteran of the Boston Vice Squad, assumed office with an imperative to quash the municipally-sanctioned Combat Zone.

Despite frequent police raids and drawn-out battles to revoke area liquor licenses, the Combat Zone proved stubbornly entrenched in its tiny corner of the city. By the 1980s, the BRA developed a different clean-up strategy. They engineered prohibitively expensive property values in one of the scummiest parts of town - enter the private institutions of higher education!

It’s difficult to imagine that the parents of Emerson’s undergrad smartphone-toting set - who could buy and sell my student debt a bajillion times over - would allow such a demographic quirk, with dorm rooms a thong’s throw away from the Combat Zone. But it was precisely this real estate strategy that delivered Emerson from its lush property in Back Bay to the wheezy, pock-marked corner of the Theater District. (In fact, for our Ploughsharers in the audience, some of DeWitt Henry’s choicest anecdotes are set in Crossroads, the Irish pub at the corner of Beacon and Mass Ave., due to its stumbling distance to Emerson’s then-campus.) Coverage of the controversial move can be found in the Berkeley Beacon archives.

Be sure to ask your friendly barkeep at The Tam for more Combat Zone trivia!

Tags:   Anne Gray Fischer · Combat Zone · Emerson College WLP Department · Emerson history1 Comment