CultureNOW - North Bennet Street School: Peter Vanderwarker

North Bennet Street School
Historic Buildings: Educational

Dates

1885

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Description

ABOUT THE HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS
No two pictures could better dramatize the change in Boston in the last 100 years than these. In both, we're looking at the same room in the North Bennet Street School, at 39 North Bennet Street in the city's North End. And in both pictures, it's a woodworking shop.

Things look pretty scary in the old photo. The boys -- they're all boys, that's one difference -- are working with dangerous lathes, drills, and table saws. The air is filled with so many pulleys and belts that the room looks like a scene from a rain forest. The fast-moving belts dropped down from the ceiling to drive the machinery. They would have been powered by a DC electric motor somewhere in the same room.

In those days, the building was called the North Bennet Street Industrial School. Its main purpose was to teach employable skills to children from the city's neighborhoods. The North End was the first stop for immigrants, most of them either Italians or Jews from Eastern Europe. About 20,000 people were crowded into its tenements by 1920.

The school was a charity for children, begun by wealthy Boston families in 1885. Mostly, the motive was compassion for the youngsters. But partly, says a history of the school, "prominent citizens spread the gospel of hygiene and hard work" out of concern that crime, disease, or political unrest might spread to other parts of the city. The school did everything, not only teaching trades but also running kindergartens, reading groups, caddie camps, and a credit union.

Fast-forward to 2004. No pulleys, no belts. When the North End stopped being a poor neighborhood, the school had to reinvent itself. It's still a school of manual arts. But it's kicked the word "industrial" from its name. Today, it's a school of fine crafts. Students learn bookbinding, cabinetmaking, locksmithing, and preservation carpentry. They make and repair jewelry and violins, and they tune, fix, and restore pianos. They average 33 years of age, many are college graduates, and they come from all over the country. And they pay tuition.

North Bennet has found a way to survive in the Boston culture of today and tomorrow. It's done so with New England frugality, too. The work tables at right in the old photo are still in use. The students in the foreground of the new photo are Maggie O'Brien and Oliver Bejarano. She's working on a drawer bottom, while he's carving a tilt-top pie-crust table.

"I graduated from Colby as an English major," says O'Brien, who's 26. "But after two years in an office job, I realized I wanted something more artsy."

-Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, "CITYSCAPES - Art History", Boston Globe, 2 May 2004

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Location

39 North Bennet Street
Boston, MA 02113
United States

Nearby Items

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