One of the biggest crimes in Boston history occurred in quiet Jamaica Plain, with running gun battles and a dramatic shootout at bucolic Forest Hills Cemetery. The story includes foreign anarchists, less-than-astute police work, a mysterious woman, and more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel.
Read Morehe Jamaica Plain Cooperative Association, a real estate organization, composed of several of the leading business and professional men of that section of the city, has just approved the plans for a handsome, new, 80-apartment house, which is to be erected on Center St., opposite Seaverns Ave., Jamaica Plain.
Read MoreWell, not exactly like the other stations on the dial, but there was a broadcasting transmitter from my bedroom at 590 Centre Street in the late-1940’s that reached a small neighborhood audience, and far beyond as we shall see!
Read MoreThe streetcar tracks were still there, winding down from Dudley Station, following Roxbury Street to Columbus Avenue and under what we called “The Bridge,” the dividing line between Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. The railroad bridge carried the old coal-burning steam trains over Centre Street and along Lamartine Street out to New York or some faraway place that a pre-teen couldn’t comprehend.
Read MoreJamaica Plain really hadn’t changed much from the 1880s until after the Korean War in the 1950s. Times weren’t stable for those seventy-some-odd years.
Read MoreCurtis Hall was still there; we used to go swimming in the pool in the basement. We called it “the tank.” No bathing suit for the guys, but the girls wore city-issued one-piece suits.
Read MoreIn the section of Jamaica Plain on the Roxbury line bounded by the train tracks and Centre, Heath and Bickford Streets, lived some of my friends that had fathers and uncles that were a little left of center with the law.
Read MoreBack in the 1940s, the city and the schools kept us kids pretty occupied during school vacation. While the parents were planting Victory Gardens such as the big one on the Jamaicaway at Daisy Field, the city provided small plots for kids, and supplied the seeds, tools, and the teachers to show us how to grow vegetables. They had about an acre of land on Paul Gore Street for us to plant. Everything we grew we took home.
Read MoreAnyone remember before television existed? We had this thing called radio. It was kind of like TV. There was sound but you supplied your own pictures in your mind. After school I’d run home and turn on the big parlor Philco radio. At four o’clock the programs started.
Read MoreThe Ross ledgers run from 1926 to 1941. Thomas Ross took his son Wallace Ross with him on his jobs, and in March 1933 Wallace took over from his father. Happily the names of his father’s clients continue to appear on the accounts.
Read MoreJamaica Plain was visited by one of the most disastrous fires in its history early yesterday morning. It was in the extensive blower works of the R.F. Sturtevant Company, a three-story brick building covering a large area off Green St. and extending down nearly to the Jamaica Plain Station of the Providence Division of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad.
Read MoreMichael Guignard shares his story...At our first meeting after the revelation, I learned that my birth mother had spent five months in 1946 at a home for unwed mothers called Talitha Cumi (a phrase from the Bible meaning “Arise, young woman”) in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston.
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