From the Globe comes word of an odd development: South Boston residents are now feeling the need to lock their doors given the rise of burglaries. Odd if only because it hasn’t happened earlier, that the neighborhood was able to get through the 20th century with a tradition of keeping front doors unlocked. This is just another sign that of the neighborhood’s turning point away from Irish-American enclave to preferred home of younger professionals.
Part of the reason for the locked doors, certainly, comes from the dissolution of ethnic and class cohesion. The local pub or laundromat owner knew the neighborhood residents and could keep tabs on goings on on the street during the day. The proprietor of a sushi restaurant or boutique, through no fault of his or her own is much less likely to. (Jane Jacobs makes this argument as the value of mixed use neighborhoods, but doesn’t really consider the role of class and ethnicity in the success.) And with more working women represented demographically, there are simply fewer people around in the daytime.
But isn’t there another obvious reason doors weren’t locked in the first place? Organized crime not only provided an outlet for criminal impulses possibly directed against pettier targets, it also (sometimes explicitly) offered protection to local residents from petty crime as part of a quasi-legitimation effort. I may be overstating this, but then again, consider the explanation from the article:
‘’We always had our share of wise guys, but they would never think of breaking into your house or harming your family,” said Councilor James M. Kelly, whose district includes South Boston. ‘’That began to change with the rise of the drug epidemic.”
Now, drugs have been around for a while. People have been committing thefts for all sorts of reasons for a while. But previously drug addicts and other theives avoided easy prey of a neighborhood of unlocked doors for decades? No, instead, you had a contract that ensured that the “wise guys” would channel their energy to more organized criminal activity and that criminals from other neighborhood knew they could not target Southie.
Like city machine politics, organized crime was a functional arrangement and could be quite beneficent at times. But so, too, was its net effect detrimental. That’s why I don’t demoan the lost innocence of unlocked doors as much as Southie residents (understandably) do. It never was fully innocent.
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