The South End Is So Over

“I see women here putting on twin sets and pearls and three-carat diamond studs to walk their dogs,” says Karen Bommart, a financial services marketing executive who’s lived in the South End for 18 years. “I remember this local hair salon years ago that did a hilarious serialized diorama in its display window using edgily dressed Ken and Barbie dolls—that would never fly now.” Indeed, like their dining counterparts, the neighborhood’s new retail ventures are pandering to a more status-conscious clientele. Lekker, a purveyor of midrange to high-end furnishings, seemed lonely and daring when it opened at the corner of Washington and Waltham in 2003; the nearby blocks have since become a magnet for posh home goods and fashion boutiques. There’s Looc, an austere women’s clothing shop that debuted on Union Park in August; Diseño, which sells costly furniture and textiles imported from South America from its space on Harrison Avenue; and, a few doors down from Diseño, design man-about-town Dennis Duffy’s new retail outlet, set to open this month. Not far away, 22-year-old gallery owner Colin Rhys deals in installation pieces with prices in the tens of thousands. It is now possible, within a three-block radius, to spend $800 on an outfit for a night at the Beehive; $60 on an alpaca scarf you can say you brought back from Bolivia; $12,000 on a disassembled motorcycle; and 10 bucks on a dime bag in Peters Park.

As he walks his pretty, perpetually worried-looking vizsla, Sophie, near Harrison Avenue’s cluster of loft-style condos, Gibson Sotheby’s realtor Moshe Elmekias notes that despite a scary U.S. housing slump, South End real estate values have hardly sagged. Shoebox Waltham Street apartments that might have sold for $285,000 in 2003 now command $415,000. At the Gateway Terrace complex, just yards from the Pine Street Inn, two-bedroom condos are listed for as much as $805,000. “Buildings like these attract a new kind of buyer, people who prefer modern lofts to rehabbed brownstones,” he says. While acknowledging that many gay homeowners are moving out to the edgier environs of Dorchester and Fort Hill, he’s quick to present examples of enduring diversity: “We still have strong Latino, Asian, and African-American communities; we have luxury condos, halfway houses, and low-income projects all sitting side by side.” As if to underscore Elmekias’s point, a derelict with oversize dentures on a nearby bench cheerfully endures Sophie’s nosy attentions, gives us a wave, and burbles, “Party party party!” before rolling and lighting a joint.

While new mixed-use developments like ArtBlock and its 23 live/work studios still attract artists, rising real estate costs have made the South End far less welcoming to the creative types who first helped make the neighborhood vibrant. “My art collective [Project SF] can’t afford workspace in the South End anymore,” says Dana Woulfe, who paints street-scale installations when he’s not designing footwear for Converse. “We’re looking in Eastie now. These days, the South End is more about selling art than creating it.”

Other South End veterans see things more philosophically. “Without knocking my fellow artists, I must point out that they, too, displaced poorer neighbors, the crackheads and drag queens, just as they are being displaced now,” says Lydia Ruby, director of Rhys Gallery. “You don’t need a South End address to make art, but some of us have opted to pay the premium to live here anyway so we can support other artists and businesses. We’re working to preserve the old neighborhood’s personality.”

As he contemplates the prospect of leaving the South End behind, Woulfe isn’t sure there’s anything left to preserve. “It’s lost all the things that made it Boston’s coolest place to live,” he says. “Now it’s where rich people go to buy the experience of being hip, without actually being hip.”

On his blog, the anonymous author of The South End Is Over hurls barbs at certain odious behaviors he ascribes to the newcomers, including rudeness, contempt for less fortunate neighbors, and efforts to steamroll idiosyncrasy off the block by lobbying for pricey dog runs instead of social services for human beings (true story), and whining when a local school converts a vacant lot to a kids’ soccer field and thereby eliminates some free parking spaces (also true). “These people actually fought the opening of a 7-Eleven here, saying it would attract a ‘bad element,’ meaning people without nannies, I guess, or folks who buy lottery tickets,” the blogger told me.

My wife and I hold pedestrian day jobs, but our artistic avocations enabled us to flatter ourselves that we fit the South End’s bohemian profile when we bought our condo in 2002. We already had a large group of friends here: multiracial, gay and straight, well-off and not-so. Yet I imagine that some longtime residents might have sized us up with the kind of snarky appraisals lobbed on The South End Is Over. Certainly, the tensions the neighborhood is now experiencing have happened before, just as they’ve also happened in places like Fort Point Channel and Roslindale. What’s different about this new wave of gentrification is that it’s pushing out or marginalizing not just the people who made the South End a unique and attractive place to live, but also regular, straight white folks who are frankly more interesting—and interested in diversity—than the pumps-and-pearls set.