We were thrilled to get two important new endorsements for our Save the Nazzaro campaign this week. The first came from the North End Waterfront Residents Association (NEWRA), in a letter to the mayor:
Secondly, David Foxe, President of the New England chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, wrote a letter on Jan. 22 to the Boston Globe that was published as follows:
“Re “In a lather over former bathhouse” (Page A1, Jan. 14): The magnificent Italian Renaissance Nazzaro Center (the former North Bennett Street bathhouse) was designed by the extraordinarily talented and prolific Charles D. MaGinnis, who specialized in Catholic churches and institutions and had apprenticed under Boston’s last official city architect, Edmund March Wheelwright. The effort to designate it a Boston landmark is fully justified.
The North End’s dense urbanity and tight irregular street pattern, worthy of a European village and long so closely identified with its Italian population of the past century, is almost unique in the United States. The Nazzaro, one of the North End’s few symbolically Italian buildings, stands at its very heart, facing a small piazza-like playground.
When built, the Nazzaro proclaimed the North End’s recent rapid transformation into a vibrant Italian community. The Nazzaro is also a rare survival of those monumental urban bathhouses that, along with the settlement houses of the era, were important instruments for welcoming new immigrants into America’s melting pot. It deserves to be preserved.”
Now you can write your own letter, as we are hoping any day to hear from the Landmarks Commission that they will accept our petition. When they do, a hearing will be scheduled at Boston City Hall–and we will need every one of you to show up!
Write letters please, and stay tuned for more actions to take ahead! Please have all your friends sign our change.org petition, which will bolster our case with the Mayor.
Thank you from all of us at the Save the Nazzaro Coalition!
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