Off the Bricks

Pack 06

A Banned in Boston Walking Tour: Censors, Burlesque and the Combat Zone

For about a hundred years, Boston was where books, plays and films came to be banned. The Watch and Ward Society told booksellers what not to sell, mayors revoked theatre licenses, the vice squad brought a camera to the burlesque, and the state took books to court by name. The phrase 'banned in Boston' became a selling point everywhere else.

Banned in Boston is a self-guided walk through that history and the places people went anyway. It starts on the Common, where a public speech once needed the mayor's permit, and runs past the corner where a famous editor got himself arrested on purpose, through the site of Scollay Square's most famous burlesque house, down Washington Street into what was the Combat Zone, and on to the Theater District stages that fought the censors. It ends in Bay Village.

It's twelve stops plus a bonus, about two and a half hours and three kilometers, flat and step-free on the main route. Each stop is a riddle that walks you to the next spot, and the answer is something you can only get by looking: a word on a marker, a year, a misspelling on the city's own marker. Then you get the story, with its sources.

The sources are the point. Court opinions, the Watch and Ward Society's own annual reports and pamphlets, the Landmarks Commission's survey of a Combat Zone building, a 1970 TV news film, the Harvard Crimson's 1929 interview with Groucho Marx. Where the sources disagree, we say so. Where a famous story is shaky, we tell it, then tell you what the record says.

Nothing explicit, 12 and up. In a hurry? The short cut does the Combat Zone and the theatres in about an hour.

Off the Bricks: Boston Hunts. Any two stops free. Start at Park Street.

Play any two stops free.

Route

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Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

  • The whole walk

    145 MIN · 3 KM · 12 STOPS

  • The short cut: the Zone and the stage

    65 MIN · 2 KM · 7 STOPS

    An hour from Mencken's arrest to the Combat Zone to Hair at the Wilbur, ending at the door where Boston's first Pride march started.

Stop 01 · Boston Common

In the 1890s a public speech on the Common needed the mayor's permit, and Oliver Wendell Holmes said that was fine.

In the 1890s you needed the mayor's permit to make a speech here. The city's ordinances said no person shall 'make any public address' on the public grounds 'except in accordance with a permit from the mayor.' A man named Davis spoke on the Common without one. His lawyer told the U.S. Supreme Court that preaching the gospel on the Common went back to 'time immemorial.' He was convicted. In 1895 the state's highest court upheld it in an opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote that a legislature forbidding speeches in a park was no more an infringement than it is 'for the owner of a private house to forbid it in his house.' In 1897 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. So the Common was the mayor's living room. It took until 1939, in Hague v. CIO, for Justice Owen Roberts to write that streets and parks 'have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public,' and that the Boston case didn't settle the question. The fountain is from 1868, the Common's first public art. Four figures, none with a permit.

Look now

Look down the paths. In 1897, anyone giving a speech on them needed the mayor's signature first.

Read more
Davis v. Massachusetts, 167 U.S. 43 (1897) - Cornell Legal Information Institute

Stop 02 · Boston Common / Downtown

H.L. Mencken came to this corner in 1926 to sell one magazine to the one man in Boston who wanted to arrest him.

On April 5, 1926, H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, stood here holding copies of his April issue. The offense was 'Hatrack,' a story by Herbert Asbury about a prostitute in his Missouri hometown. The Watch and Ward Society had called it obscene, and under an informal arrangement the Society told booksellers what not to sell and the police arrested anyone who sold it anyway. Mencken came to be arrested on purpose. A crowd Mencken remembered as mostly Harvard undergraduates watched the Society's secretary, J. Frank Chase, pay a silver half dollar for a copy. Mencken bit the coin, the story goes, and Chase had him arrested. The next day Judge James P. Parmenter acquitted him, and Mencken printed the judge's opinion himself. Now the name. Brimstone Corner sounds like hellfire sermons, and that's the story most people tell. The church says otherwise: during the War of 1812 its crypt stored brimstone, a gunpowder ingredient. The sermons were extra. The Society held its annual meetings in this church, too.

Look now

Look at the sidewalk between the church and the Park Street stairs - that's the whole stage Mencken needed.

Read more
H.L. Mencken Arrested in Boston - Mass Moments

Pit stops

  • Warm up inside · NEAR STOP 07
    Boston Public Library, Chinatown Branch (2 Boylston Street)
    Public library on the Liberty Tree corner. Weekdays only, closed Saturday and Sunday; check posted hours.
    Boston Public Library
  • Warm up inside · NEAR STOP 12
    Boston Public Library, Central Library (Copley Square)
    About 15 minutes' walk west of the last stop. Open daily, shorter hours on weekends; cafés inside. Check posted hours.
    Boston Public Library

74 sources