came not from black people pressing into the neighborhood but from advocates of redevelopment, who dreamed of Boston as a model of the "information economy" destined to grow up on the ruins of heavy industry. With a sense of self-importance reminiscent of the city's seventeenth‐ century founders, but with little of their moral vision, promoters of redevelopment envisioned the "new Boston" as a city on a hill, a show‐ place of advanced technology, cosmopolitan sophistication, high finance, and architectural splendor. They had big ambitions for Charlestown, a run-down neighborhood long since forsaken by Protestants, more recently by the more prosperous members of its predominantly Irish population, and finally by the Charlestown navy yard, once the basis of the local economy. Planners saw renewal as a matter of "getting a better grade of person" to live in Charlestown. "Charlestown has a dream," exclaimed a columnist in the Boston Globe, "a developing dream—to be to Boston what carefully restored, stylish Georgetown has been to Washington." This was not Charlestown's own dream, of course, which was typically small-minded in the eyes of the outside world. "We wanted to help people rehabilitate their houses," said one resident. "We tried to show we could do without the federal government." For old inhabitants, renewal meant the restoration of the community as it had been in its better days, when "Townies" were self-supporting and respectable and the neighborhood known as one of the safest in the whole city, even after dark.

A tumultuous session of the Charlestown city council in 1965 approved a plan calling for demolition of 10 percent of private housing, replacement of the state prison with the Bunker Hill Community College, and other dubious improvements. Subsequent plans called for the construction of luxury housing on the site of the old navy yard, complete with swimming pool, tennis courts, and two marinas. "I am concerned with the destruction of families," said an opponent of gentrification. "We want people back, not a professional man, his secretary, and a dog." Professional planners, however, cared more about real estate values and a "better sort of person." The Charlestown Patriot accurately assessed the effect of their efforts when it warned that "Townies" would soon lose the "Charlestown they now know," if indeed they found themselves "able to live here at all," in the "backyard of all this luxury."

The same coalition that designed and built the "New Boston"—bank— ing and real estate interests, university presidents, foundation heads, and civic leaders, including representatives of the small black elite—wel—

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