Unlike the red light districts in other cities, Boston's combat zone was a peculiar hybrid of the puritanical and the permissive. It began as an accident of urban renewal, but it was later cultivated as an economic engine and destination for tourists. The zone was also a magnet for criminal activity and quality of life problems, especially for Chinatown. You can read the story in the newest book by a veteran Boston journalist. We'd like to welcome the author of Inside the Combat Zone.
Stephanie Shero. Thank you very much for being with us, Stephanie. Thank you for having me.
Appreciate it. People who know, let's say, New York in the 60s and 70s and Times Square, they may say, what's the big deal? What makes this district so special?
Well, it was peculiar in Boston, I think you pointed out in the introduction, because, first of all, it was very small. It was a very small area. And it has a kind of a rich history. While you have that, obviously, in Times Square, Boston had its peculiar mark on that. For example, it was...
It was all things X-rated at the time. There were movie theaters showing Deep Throat and The Devil and Miss Jones. There were shows, often very elaborate shows, with strippers and performers.
And for a while, some of those clubs had comics, and Jay Leno got his start in some of the Combat Zone clubs. And then you also had the dirty bookstores, and that was a part of the whole thing. I don't think we realized what a phenomenon that was, but to have these stores where you could buy all this material. that you couldn't get anywhere else. It was all concentrated on these few blocks in the Washington Street area.
And it was also, like I said, up against Chinatown, so that was a real lifestyle issue for the people who lived there. But you have to remember that at one point, this area was designated as an official adult education, adult entertainment district. Sorry, it might have been educational, but it was entertainment district.
But the idea was that if... Boston could concentrate all the smut into one spot. It wouldn't go elsewhere. So it was a peculiar nod to zoning and to neighborhoods.
And Boston's been a city of neighborhoods. And that's kind of why it was set up that way. And, of course, ironically, this came into place because there was an earlier attempt to clean up Scully Square, which wasn't so bad. Yes.
In retrospect, again, it's like anything else. You look back and say, oh, well, that wasn't so bad. But at the time, it seemed...
There were a lot of editorializing and a lot of hemming and hawing and gnashing of teeth about Scully Square. So it was taken down for the government center. And what happened is that the demand and the business moved to the comment zone.
Now, I have to be very careful about that. It wasn't the specific businesses that moved over there. It was basically you cut off the supply, but you could not cut the demand. So the people used to go to Scully Square. simply moved over to the Washington Street area and started going to the clubs there, and the clubs and the bars and the other things started to cater to that crowd.
So there were only one or two actual businesses that picked up and moved over there, but it really was like the sister, the descendant, if you would, son of Scully Square was the combat zone. What's also interesting here is that for many people who've been there and even recall it fondly, it was a drive-by experience, but what about the people who worked there, especially the performers? Yeah, it was a world unto itself. I talked to a number of people who lived and, well, who worked there, and it was almost as if they formed their own little world.
Many of the dancers, for example, made a boatload of money. They made a lot of money. And they were very friendly with each other and friendly with the musicians who played for them, and they sort of relished the idea that they're living on the edge.
Like, I talked to a number of strippers who were... punk rockers that were kind of rock and rollers and who did stripping as a way of making money and a way of kind of living outside the law. One thing that I found was Universal Hub, which is a very, which is a well-known-Adam Gaffin's website.
Yeah, he's a great guy. He set up a website about, or a section for the comment zone, and all these people started commenting on it. And it was just this amazing look at community, like all these people. Bringing up their memories. So while the outside world looked at it askance, a lot of people had good memories of working in the zone, working in the clubs.
Or if not having good memories, have very mixed memories. They loved the people. They loved what was going on.
Maybe they had some doubts and qualms about what they were doing. But, you know, I talked to bartenders and someone who worked at a dirty bookstore and a pizza owner. There was a king of pizza.
was operated right in the heart of the combat zone. And the owner of that loved his business, just loved his business, served anybody, you know, the prostitutes, the cops. The derelicts coming by, you'd give them free pizza.
And then when he was kicked out in the name of kind of urban renewal, his heart was broken. And I had a long conversation with his son about what having that store right in the heart of the combat zone meant to him. If you look at the narrative here, you see a lot of agonizing over the zone in the 1960s.
And then when Mayor White takes office, people start looking at, wait a minute, the tourists. They come here for something like this, and if only we find it a little bit. That's, yeah, and that's a dirty little secret that no one really liked to admit, but that the combat zone was a draw for conventioneers.
As one, a BRA person told me, he says, well, when they come to the convention, their wives go shopping, and they, after the convention, go to the combat zone. So it was something that actually had a lot of economic impact on the city, and for better, for worse. That was something that they didn't like to broadcast, but it was part of the whole experience of the combat zone. And of course, you had this sort of guerrilla effort by a city official on facade improvement.
Yes, our friend John Sloan. John Sloan was an architect. You know, he was kind of called an urban guerrilla pioneer.
And he was redesigning the look of the zone because the idea was that when they created the adult entertainment district, the idea was, well, OK, we're just not going to just. put up a zoning and let them just do what they want, we're going to work with them. The city is going to help these people look more respectful, make it a prettier place to be, a more safe place to be.
And so he worked very much in designing facades and even something called the Dirty Bookstore. He had this great design for that. And he got very upset with the House of Pizza, which is different from the King of Pizza.
The House of Pizza had a huge sound. An offensive pizza sign. He was like, it was right next to the two o'clock. two o'clock lounge, we'd have pictures of naked women and other things.
And he didn't worry about that. He worried about this huge sign for House of Pizza. And so he decided to have it taken down in the middle of the night. And the owner of the pizza shop was not too happy about it. And it's just one of the many kind of crazy stories that came out of the zone.
There were a lot of others, things like the Wilbur Mills incident, which is interesting to look at now in light of what is going on in the national. Yeah, I mean, compared with the things we've built up a tolerance to in recent decades, you go back to this, and it almost looks innocent, but it was intensely embarrassing for this member of Congress. Well, to be taking up with a stripper and hanging out, and he had this incident in Washington, D.C., in which his car was stopped.
He was drunk. Someone was drunk who was driving. Fannie Fox, the Argentine. firecracker, jumped out of the car into the title basin, had to be fished out, and that made the papers. And Wilbur Mills could have survived that.
I mean, here he was just hanging out with the stripper. But he ended up appearing one night at the Pilgrim Theater. While she was doing her act, he was hanging out backstage. And at one point, he comes out on stage and shakes her hands, and everyone's applauding, and people snap pictures of it.
And that was kind of the end of his career. Today we elect him president, but that was the end for him. This has been the news.
We were talking with Stephanie Shuro, the author of Inside the Combat Zone. Stephanie, of course, the other element of the zone, and one which even attracted some of the business, was the sense of danger. Of course, there was this turning point in 1976 when this was fatal.
Talk about the Andrew Poplow story. Yeah, the Andrew Poplow. It's interesting because A couple things about that case. One is that it is perceived as the end of the zone, when actually the zone went on for at least another decade afterwards. But sort of psychologically, it was the end of the experiment, of this idea that you could have a play zone for adult entertainment.
But what happened was Andrew Popolo was a Harvard football player, but he was also from the North End. I mean, he was a local boy as well as a Harvard player. People tend to forget that, but he, so he grew up in the Scrappy in the North End, and he was with a group of football players who were celebrating at the end of the season with the trip to the Naked Eye, to the strip club, and it was very typical of guys in that period.
That was really nothing very different, but coming out of the club, they were accosted by a couple of women who apparently picked the pocket of one of the men, and the... The man tried to get it back, and there was a fight between the Harvard football players and men of the neighborhood who came out and who, according to what they said, were defending these two women who were being attacked by these football players. It was a...
It was a horrible melee and Andrew Popolo, who really was just trying to save his friend, he was not the instigator of it, he was not even part of the first part of the fight, but he jumped in when he saw one of his friends being beaten up and he got stabbed by someone in the neighborhood and died later. He actually died like a month or so later because he was in a coma for a long time. But it was just heartbreaking for this young man who was just out for a night. night in the town. And of course, the way this played in Boston, you had the subtext here, you had all these football players, practically all of them white, and the other people involved were black or Hispanic.
Yeah. So it became a big, it became a racial issue, the subtext. And so what happened in the first trial that all three men were convicted of first degree murder, which seems extreme when you look at the circumstances, that it was kind of a fight that got out of hand.
One of the guys never even laid a hand on Popolo. But But they were able to get a conviction. And then a few years later, on appeal, and after a lot of legal machinations, two of the men were found innocent, and then one of the men was convicted of manslaughter.
And so he served his time. So it was kind of a, you know, neither verdict was all that fair, but it swang one way to the other. And I think it added to the era, sort of the aura of... danger in the zone and the idea that this just isn't working, this is just not working. You pointed out that some of the establishments in the zone were pretty well regulated, at least managed, but on the other hand, you had this ripple effect, part of which was involved in the Popolo case, is that there are all these other people coming around the zone, stealing wallets and things like that.
Right. Well, the prostitution, that was an interesting thing because the... I've been told by many people that the bars and the clubs really didn't want to have prostitutes working out of them, particularly the big ones like the Naked Eye. They didn't want prostitutes because they knew they could get busted, they knew they could get put out of business. So they tended to discourage prostitution.
However, some of the bars didn't, and there were some bars that were known as prostitution hangouts on LaGrange Street. That was the area where you really went when you wanted a date, as they used to call it. And... But aside from the prostitutes, there were also pickpockets.
So there were girls who would pick the pockets of inebriated men, or just men, and really were not necessarily prostitutes, or they might pull a trick or two, but their goal was to pick the pockets of the men. So you had several layers of different people in the zone. And then there were the dancers, the women who dance, and they were kind of at the top of the hierarchy. So even within this small framework, there were different hierarchies and different things that went on among these different people. Like there was a woman who was the spokesperson for the combat for a while.
She actually was hired by them to be their PR person. She did a very good job on it. She even brought a junior club to a show at the Naked Eye just to show them what it was like. So because she was trying to show that it was adult entertainment was pretty mild. But even she came out and said, The cops aren't doing enough to crack down on the prostitution because they're not helping the respectable clubs with the dancers.
So it was kind of a mishmash of different things. But there's no question there was a lot of crime in that area, a lot of petty crime. And I have to add, it wasn't just against the people coming into the zone. There were a number of unsolved murders of prostitutes in the zone, of women who probably because of the tenor of the time.
It was never discovered who killed them, and so their murders have gone unsolved. So it's heartbreaking on both ends. For the zone to flourish as much as it did, it needed some pretty good legal work. And there's another uniquely Bostonian story about one of the sharpest lawyers working for the zone.
Talk about Regina Quinlan. Yes, Sister Regina. Yeah, Sister Regina started off as a nun.
She was a sister of St. Joseph. Since I teach at Regis College, which is founded by Sister St. Joseph, I know it's a very forward-thinking, very progressive order of nuns, and she was very much involved with that. But at some point she decided she wanted to leave religious life, and so she became a lawyer.
And she ended up getting a number of cases involving bookstores. She only concentrated in bookstores in the zone, but she became a fearsome defender of the First Amendment for these bookstores. She had no doubts, no illusions about what she was defending.
There are things that she would never look at. But she really, truly believed that people had the right to choose what they wanted. ...wanted to consume what they wanted to read and she felt, she felt, still feels very strongly about that. So she defended these people ably and then she became a judge and she eventually retired. But I think her story is is definitely one of the more unusual ones of the zone.
What was it like when you talked to some of the women who were performers? I mean for some of them this was a career move, it helped them. But there was a lot of abuse either in their past or while they were performing, too.
There was a lot of, yes, there was a lot of abuse. In fact, one of the dancers told me that she considered them sex workers, even though they never actually performed any kind of acts of sex. But because of the way that they presented themselves to men, that they can be considered sex workers. So she had one point of view.
But some of the other women talked with great relish about their time on the stage. costumes that they had, the money that they got, the kind of crazy fun it was. So there was a real, I think that was the hardest part for me.
I mean, I'm a feminist and I know qualms about that. And talk to these women trying to understand what, were they being abused? Were they taking control of their own sexuality?
It really raised a lot of questions. And then they had great stories about the things that they did. They, like Julie Jordan, one of the strippers there, performed.
She became Miss Bicentennial for the Bicentennial. So she was a patriotic stripper at the time. And so she had some really interesting stories. There is some truth to the idea that women use stripping to get through college. In fact, one of the people I spoke to used...
stripping to fund her graduate education and she later became, and she's open about this so I don't think I'm betraying any confidence, but she became a professor over at Suffolk University and then she became a dean of, sort of in the humanities area in Arkansas I believe it is, and so she and she wrote about her experiences and she was extremely eloquent. We had a great interview and she really... really zeroed in on the ambiguity about the role of women at this point in time. And then you had the woman known as Princess Cheyenne, who was on BCN letters. Yeah, Princess Cheyenne was like, I can't tell you how many men I would be interviewing, and I'd ask them about the comment zone, and they'd say, oh, and then there was Princess Cheyenne, and they'd sigh, and they just had this visceral memory of her.
And so she was quite the popular woman. And she was called the thinking man stripper. I mean, the ambiguity is great there. And she had a really kind of interesting career.
She stripped for a long time, or danced, as they call it. She was a dancer. Apparently she was quite a good dancer.
And she got out of it for a while, and she came back in. She wrote very eloquently about her experiences. She later became a photographer.
She got in trouble for practicing psychology without a license, but she... Apparently did quite well as a psychologist, but she had a very unusual career. So she was another example of these people who don't fit the stereotypes. And I think that there's a tendency to, when you look at either prostitutes or strippers, to kind of stereotype people.
And the people I met defied all the stereotypes. They don't fit neatly into any particular area. And that's what I liked about writing about the zone was to find this all these different aspects of this particular area, this small square patch that where anything went and where people, for example, the gay community, many gay men found community in places like the Pilgrim Theater. Now some of it was random sex with strangers, but for that time in that era, That was important to them and I read a number of accounts of people who were able to be themselves. The Zone provided a kind of a hybrid space where you could be yourself, whatever that was.
So that was another aspect to it. And it wasn't homogenized. Like, the women were more natural in the way they appeared on stage.
Now, If you go to a strip club, and there are two strip clubs left in the zone, by the way, Centerfolds and the Glass Slipper, which has been around forever. And it's kind of, especially the Centerfolds, it's a different feeling. It's almost, it's very cleaned up.
It's very homogenized. And I went there just to see what it was like. And I can assure you that even the sight of... Women writhing naked on a stage cannot keep men from checking their cell phones. So go figure.
We should mention if people want to check out the book and get some more details, what's the best way to do that? Yeah, the best way is we're just gearing up. It just is hot off the press, so to speak.
And it is available at your local bookstore. I encourage people to get it through their independent bookstore. It is available at Amazon.
Keep an eye out on my website, stephanieshoro.com, because I'll be having events. and other signings where I'll give talks about it. But really, the book is available.
Support your local bookstore. That's what I say. Thank you very much for being with us. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Stephanie Sherwood, and the book is Inside the Combat Zone. We'll have more news in just a moment.