Boston—Oct.3, 2023 THANK YOU MAYOR WU, and profound thanks from our North End community to the Landmarks Commission, to state Sen. Lydia Edwards who was with us from the beginning, and especially to state Rep. Aaron Michlewitz who has found $5 million in state funding to repair this building as it anticipates a vibrant future with new uses.
We stand here with so many others who have worked for five years to make this possible. From that first moment in the pouring rain on election day in 2018, when Marie Simboli, Kirsten Hoffman and I started our first petition here on the Nazzaro steps–to this signing today–we can say this is a case study of how democracy can work. In 2019 we presented approximately 1,500 signatures on two petitions to the Landmarks Commission, who said there were too many signatures to process!
So what is so special about this building? As Boston prepares to celebrate its 400th anniversary, the city’s oldest neighborhood, the North End, is of course famous for its Colonial and Revolutionary War structures such as the Old North Church and Paul Revere House. We respect that history, which includes indigenous people whose lands were taken for this new nation, and those who came here involutarily as enslaved people.
This Nazzaro landmark represents another American story that we wish to recognize: the influx of European immigrants into the United States at the dawn of the 20 th century. The Nazzaro building is one of the last remaining well preserved Boston monuments to that earlier immigrant era—as the original North Bennet Street Bath House and Gymnasium. It was designed after the Villa Medici in Rome, by prominent Boston architects. It was commissioned by John F. Kennedy’s father, Boston Mayor Honey “Fitz” Fizgerald, as a bathhouse for his Irish constituents in the North End. But by the time it opened in 1910 the neighborhood was not only Irish, and populated with European Jewish refugees, but increasingly Italian. Instead of building a wall back then to keep out these immigrants seeking a better life, these Democrats and Republicans in the Progressive Era worked together to try to help them, by relieving some of their unhealthy tenement conditions.
The Bath Reform Movement aimed to prevent cholera and typhoid epidemics, and to bridge the gap between the rich and poor classes. By 1916, Boston had 15 year-round public baths, including the North End Bath House, most of them with gymnasiums attached. Even as late as 1940, about 90% of North End homes were without private baths and about 50% lacked private toilets so the Bath House was crucial.
World welterweight champion Tony DeMarco started his boxing career here. The building fell on hard times after the bath house closed in 1976, but Mayor Menino revived it in 1985 as the Nazzaro Community Center, populated by city programs run by the BCYF.
This Nazzaro building in the heart of the neighborhood, where we vote, meet in community groups, hold senior programs, exercise in the gym and educate our after-school children, bears the name of Michael Nazzaro Sr. It was actually a project of his son Michael Nazzaro Jr. who helped to save this neighborhood in the 1960s from being torn down and rebuilt by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
So here we are again—protecting the heritage of our ancestors, hoping to learn from their struggles, their mistakes, and their successes. And now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Nazzaro building could be featured on a new Immigrant Trail in Boston, criss-crossing the Freedom Trail here in the North End? Some of us dream that in addition to having continued programs for seniors, commuity meetings and other purposes in the Nazzaro building going forward, we might also have an Immigrant Museum, or at least a lobby display, with Boston school children adding new stories of their own families to inform the visitors who come through our North End neighborhood.
Thank you Mayor Wu, Rep. Michlewitz, Sen. Edwards, the Landmarks Commission, and all who made this possible today.
–Ellen Hume
Co-founder Save the Nazzaro Coalition
www.savethenazzaro.org
savethenazzaro@gmail.com
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