Seeing Red in Boston

Better Know A Precinct #1. Ward 6, Precinct 9

Looking up Broadway in South Boston

As anyone who has eaten a lobster knows, a cooked lobster turns red. The reason for this remarkable color change has to do with the unraveling, or denaturation, at high temperature of a protein called crustacyanin, which results in the release from its molecular grasp of a type of carotenoid  (an organic pigment; the name is derived from the Latin word for carrot (carota), which are full of these molecules, hence their bright color) called astaxanthin. In an uncoupled state, the astaxanthins in the carapace of a lobster appear red (this molecule is also responsible for the color of salmon, shrimp, and flamingos), but when they interact with crustacyanin the combination produces a blue color (I will skip the complicated details which cause this bathochromic (or color) shift). A  genetic mutation is thought to result in overproduction of crustacyanin which reels in all the available astaxanthin molecules. Such lobsters appear to be electric blue as a result, which likely places them at an evolutionary disadvantage as they are pretty easy to spot. This hypothesis leads to the prediction that an electric blue lobster will turn red upon being boiled. This is in fact the case, although blue and other rare unusually colored lobsters usually end up in aquariums. Besides, you would have to be an insensitive jerk to cook a blue lobster!

I ponder this thought as I sit at an outdoor table on a (rare) warm November afternoon at Sullivan’s in South Boston, eating a lobster (just kidding, fried clams).  Sullivan’s, which sits in the shadow of Fort Independence, is a decades old institution serving typical New England fried seafood as well as hot dogs and hamburgers. You have likely flown directly over Sullivan’s if you have ever taken off or landed at Logan Airport from the south. Open from the end of February through Thanksgiving, Sullivan’s annual opening is a harbinger of spring and a summer fixture. As the website says, they close when there are more seagulls than cars in the parking lot. To be honest, there are a large number of seagulls in the parking lot, so I doubt that would be good for business.

Sullivan’s is located in Ward 6, Precinct 9, a precinct that, although not quite as rare as a blue lobster, is a unique exception among the 255 precincts of Boston: it is a red precinct in a sea of blue. In the 2012 Presidential election it was the only precinct to cast a majority of its votes for the Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

Ward 6 Precinct 9 , South Boston, highlighted on a map of the Wards and Precincts of Boston

“Damn the windsurfers! Full speed ahead!” Admiral Farragut looms over the neighborhood

Architecture of the precinct.

Yikes.

Ward 6, Precinct 9 in South Boston

Below I have generated a chart which ranks the results of the top twenty precincts of the 2012 Presidential election according to the percentage of the vote that the Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney received in each precinct. Ward 6, Precinct 9 tops the list at a little more than 51%. Close behind is the precinct immediately to the south of 6-9, Ward 7, Precinct 1 at 49.33% Mitt Romney actually won this precinct as well, by exactly one vote: 480 to 479! Overall, seven of the top eight Romney precincts are found in the eastern half of South Boston.

Lest one think that perhaps there was some special relationship between Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, and the voters of Southie that explains their relative affinity for the candidate I have included the results of the 2008 Presidential election as well as the results of the most recent non-municipal election, the Gubernatorial race of 2014, which was won by the Republican Charlie Baker. As the data clearly illustrate, if anything Romney fared worse than other recent Republican candidates. McCain received 52.47% of the vote in 6-9, while Baker received an astounding 60.73% of the votes of the residents of the precinct.

The results of all three elections were the same in one respect: Ward 6, Precinct 9 was the top Republican precinct in the city in all three of the elections shown.  The fact that the precinct is one of the most white precincts in Boston is not insignificant. Seventeen precincts gave Romney at least 40% of their vote; of these ten are among the thirteen most white precincts in the city. Similarly, John McCain received more than 40% of the vote in nineteen precincts, and of these were eleven of the twenty three precincts where more than 90% of the residents are white. Similarly Charlie Baker, who actually won a majority in 28 precincts in 2014, including twenty two of the 30 most white precincts in the city.

Race clearly plays a role, but the data does not suggest that all white people in Boston are racists or Republican, or even that these are the primary characteristics of the voters of South Boston. I offer two pieces of evidence to support the opposite conclusion. First, President Barack Obama actually won all but two precincts, the aforementioned 7-1 and 6-9. In the first precinct he lost by one vote and in the second one he received a respectable 47.84% of the votes cast, losing by 37 votes out of more than one thousand votes cast. So, it is clear that there is strong support in every precinct in South Boston for Barack Obama, far more than in most states of the union.

Second, if race were the only factor, then every precinct with a very high white population should have been in, let’s say, the top 100 precincts for Romney. To take one counter example, Ward 19, Precinct 8 in Jamaica Plain has the 33rd whitest (86.4%) electorate of the 255¹ precincts in Boston. In this precinct Romney received 10.50% of the vote (#161/255), while President Obama received over 87% of the vote. Even in Ward 6 itself, the area comprising the ‘South Boston Waterfront’, precinct 1 which is 70.9% white, gave over 70% of the vote to the Democratic candidate and only 27% to the Republican in the 2012 election. It is this precinct, at the opposite end of the Ward from the precinct I am writing about, which to me is an indicator of the direction of the neighborhood.

As I walk around O and P streets I notice that a great many people in the neighborhood are elderly. I speak to one man who is sitting on his porch wearing a Celtics cap with his dog in his lap (and artificial turf for a front lawn). He is a long-retired city worker, he has an Irish flag hanging alongside an American flag on his house, he lives alone, his children live in the suburbs, and he has lived there for most of his life. Next door to his modest single family house, a large Victorian mansion is being renovated. Down the street a completely new large residential condo building is being built. On Broadway, around the corner, no less than three large mansions are being gutted and rehabilitated. Who will buy these units? Certainly not people like the gentleman with his dog. It is unrealistic to believe that he will even be there in a few years time.

South Boston World War II Memorial

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Perhaps the direction of the neighborhood can be divined from the three restaurants, by my count, located in the precinct. First there is Sullivan’s, on this day packed with a predominantly white-haired crowd. Then there is the Galley Diner on P Street between First and Second, which on this day is filled with locals, many of whom bear a strong resemblance to the crowd at Sullivan’s. However, I am reliably informed by Yelp (oxymoron?) that this place is a big brunch hotspot for the ‘Apple-tini’ crowd. And then there is the slick restaurant on the corner of P and 6th Street called Local 149. Formerly the site of an Irish pub called the Farragut House, this new (2011) “neighborhood joint” (it says so on the menu, according to Devra First in her Boston Globe review) offers, according to its website “an incredible selection of craft beers and creative cocktails.” it also charges $8 for a chili dog. Sullivan’s charges $2.95 for a chili dog. Local 149 also serves brunch until 3pm on the weekends.

It is not for me to say whether Local 149 is good or bad (especially since I have not eaten there. It might be good!). I am merely using the arrival of the type of restaurant I expect to see in Ward 6, Precinct 1 as a harbinger of the future of the area. Sullivan’s and the Galley will no doubt be around for a while but the clientele will change and the menu might get a little slicker.  More establishments like Local 149 will arrive and surely a Whole Foods cannot be too far behind. I would be shocked to see the gentleman with the Celtics cap sitting at the bar of Local 149 only a few steps away from his house. This restaurant is for a new crowd, younger with money, probably earned at places like Vertex in the ‘Seaport District’, the trendier name that is often applied to the area listed as the ‘South Boston Waterfront’ on the Boston neighborhood map.³ Some residents of Southie were furious that the city wanted to take the area ‘out’ of South Boston and the ensuing fracas resulted in the appellation ‘South Boston Waterfront‘. However, hardly a person refers to it as such and the Seaport District is taking over in more ways than one. Perhaps even Southie will acquire a new name, ‘Farragutville’ or ‘SOS’ (South of Seaport) or ‘Lower Waterfront’.

South Boston is changing. It will still be predominantly white as it changes, as most of the fashionable areas in Boston are predominantly white. However the racial data from the Census tells us little about this transformation. Local 149 speaks volumes, as do the election results. As the clientele at Sullivan’s changes, the percentage of voters selecting the Republican candidate in the outer precincts of Southie, such as Ward 6, Precinct 9 will decrease. I say this because if you examine the results of the 2012 election in each precinct from west (the Seaport District, 6-1)  to east (6-9, the subject of this entry), you will see a progressive increase in the Republican vote, or a corresponding decrease in the Democratic vote as you travel from west to east through the precincts (see chart below). The newcomers are increasing in number every year, and they are slowly pushing east.

The demographic shift resulting from the rapid growth of Boston as a high tech hub and as a beneficiary of the renewed interest in ‘city-living’ and the resulting developmental pressure is likely to swamp South Boston in the same sea of blue that covers the rest of Boston. Unlike the blue lobster, we will have to wait a few years to see whether South Boston actually turns from red to blue which is certainly preferable to boiling.

¹There are now 255 precincts but in the 2010 census Precinct 5-2 is counted as one; subsequently it was split into 5-2 and 5-2A. In my data these two are merged into one precinct so that the math will work. Technically my charts show only 254 precincts.

²”We are the Knights who say…NI!”

³An interesting article about what defines a neighborhood, in this case the ‘Seaport District’