Bring back and clean up the Combat Zone
Bring back the Combat Zone. That is what Boston Mayor Michelle Wu should do if she wants to revitalize nightlife in Boston.
To that end she has appointed Corean Reynolds to the new cabinetlevel position of director of nightlife economy.
Reynolds, like Wu, is from Chicago, so it stands to reason that she is qualified to reawaken night life in Boston.
And it is only a technicality that neither Wu. 39, or Reynolds, an El Mundo 2022 Latino 30 Under 30 recipient, were around during the heyday of the Zone.
Reynolds, the former director of “economic inclusion” at the Boston Foundation, said her goal was not only to impact nightlife in downtown but in the neighborhoods as well “to let folks to know what makes Boston so special.”
Well, one thing that made Boston special was the Combat Zone, which was known across the country and the world..
It was the free fire zone — or adult entertainment district — down on lower Washington Street between Boylston and Kneeland Streets. It consisted of grungy bars, strip clubs, porn shops, adult only bookstores, cafes, restaurants and X-rated movie theaters.
There were prostitutes and drug dealers and crime. But there was also great music in dives like Izzy Ort’s Bar & Grille, the Gilded Cage, the Teddy Bare Lounge and the Two O’Clock Club.
I used to walk through the Zone every day from the State House to the Boston Herald on Harrison Ave. Sometimes there were stopovers at Izzy Ort’s. Izzy even wrote a paid column called “I Wuz Thinkin” that ran in the Boston Record American.
The Combat Zone got its start in the early 1960s following the urban renewal destruction of famous Scollay Square at one end of Washington Street. When that happened all the action moved to the other end of Washington Street.
The demise of the Combat Zone began when property values skyrocketed, and developers moved in. Meantime, conditions in the area worsened due to purposeful neglect by the city. Crime flourished.
The end of the Zone seemed to come about in 1976 when Andrew Puopolo, a Harvard football player out on the town, was murdered.
This all comes to me in the wake of the new Hulu movie “Boston Strangler.”
The movie tells the dark story of the serial gruesome murder of 13 women in the 1960s and the effort by the press and the police to solve the case that gripped the city and the region.
Police authorities were so desperate that then Attorney General Edward W. Brooke hired a psychic to help in the investigation,
The movie centers on the late Boston reporters Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole, two pioneering Boston Record American women reporters working in an era when the press was practically an allmale profession.
They changed he nature of the investigation with a story they wrote in 1963 titled “Two Girl Reporters Analyze Strangler.” They wrote an in depth piece reporting that there was only one killer they dubbed “The Boston Strangler.”
They came to their conclusion with leg work. There were no cell phones, tape recorders, computers, or Zoom or Google to rely on. Reporters worked the streets. They carried roles of dimes to make phone booth calls to the City Desk. They also covered the Combat Zone.
I knew both women and can attest to their professionalism, determination and talent. They were as good or better than their male peers.
They had to be. While there were women working for newspapers at the time, they usually were assigned to the food and fashion sections of the paper.
Loretta and Jeanie were different. They were breakout reporters. They covered cops and crime. They smashed the so-called glass ceiling even before the phrase was coined.
They were not alone among Boston pioneering women reporters in the early Sixties. There was also Mary Tierney of the Boston Herald who new everything about everybody, and Gloria Negri of the Boston Globe who could cover everything else.
But Jeanie Cole holds a special place in my memory. She not only covered the Combat Zone, but she also gave it its name.
Clean it up and bring it back. It was special.