Leonard Nimoy Remembers Boston's West End Neighborhood

It was really interesting and I looked for a very healthy way to grow. We lived in a

neighborhood

called West End in the early 1900s. It had been a black

neighborhood

and then it became more immigrant and finally when we arrived. When he arrived, it was about 60% Italian, about 30, 25, 30 percent of Jewish years spoke Jewish, but there was a street called Spring Street, which was where most of the Jewish shops were and all the merchants spoke Yiddish, so my grandmother, if she wanted. to shop they never had to speak English they never had to worry about the language she could go and do all her business in Yiddish it was really a village life before a refrigerator we had a refrigerator, which meant it was a box with two compartments an The The upper compartment was where they put the ice, a block of ice.

The bomb compartment with all the food. We had a good man who put a block of ice on his shoulder and went up two or three stories. He was an Italian who spoke Yiddish and learned. speak Yiddish because I had a lot of Yiddish clients oh it was that kind of cross relationship the Italians spoke Yiddish the Jews spoke Italian some did and my friends were all a mix of Jews and Italians we lived the second floor was Italian the third floor was Jewish and you could knowing who the occupants were by the smell of the food, above all I learned.

I learned to accommodate the needs of others because there were six of us living in small spaces and we had to worry about what others needed there. There was only one bathroom, so there was a lot of sharing, it couldn't be monopolized, since my father and my grandfather worked like we did, like they did. I think we learned a great respect for responsibility. Those guys were very responsible people. They worked six days a week, seven days a week, and we lived quite comfortably because there were two incomes. I entered the apartment. My dad. My grandfather. My grandfather went out in the dark every morning and returned home at dusk every night.

And he worked in a leather factory cutting patterns. for leather luggage in those years in the 30s and 40s, leather was what luggage was made of and he made good leather suitcases, they allowed him to take the remains, the leftover unusable pieces to take home, where he made key cases and wallets always smelled like leather in his apartment and he would make things like this, simple, very crude but efficient, he would zip it up and put together a dozen of these and take it to stores in downtown Boston, jewelry stores or whatever and he sold them for a dollar each and brought home an extra ten to twelve dollars from his homework, so I still have this.

I remember how I got this part of his work from the Treasury when I returned home to visit him, sitting next to him, the first thing he did. I bent down and examined my shoes, the leather of my shoes somehow got the feeling that it was trying to determine how well or how badly I was doing depending on the condition of my shoes charger, so I was in good shape. state. It was fine, it was great, the land value was very small, very little tax revenue coming from this low rent neighborhood and some very financially smart people did what they had to do, they tore it all down, they put up something very expensive and high.

Buildings are going up in a very desirable area where people have been paying $30 a month in rent, that is, three or four hundred dollars a month, ten times more than what they had been paying. The theory was that these people could move again. but they couldn't afford it, so everyone was spread out socially. It was a tragedy because a wonderful, close-knit community was destroyed to this day. There are hard feelings about it in Boston and there is a museum in the West End that I visited not long ago. to keep alive the memory of what was because it was a very powerful influence on many people's lives, many people still consider themselves West Enders and a kind of proud heritage.

I have a house in Lake Tahoe that we call West and I have a boat up there this name West End said a battle over the West End I saw pictures of the destroyed buildings these giant wrecking balls crashing into these buildings and the buildings collapsing when I grew up in that neighborhood it was a horse of carts and there was a guy who passed with carts down the street yelling at the vibe of the observers lisbeth biblical vibration of wood calling the wives you know we have thread and we have needles and we have fabric that tape and we have what do you need, everything is here in the cart and there was a guy who came selling crabs how many Carboni how many Gavin some people went out to buy a crab in the building where I lived at 87 Chambers Street, the ground floor was a store that Once It had been a credit union and they had closed, but the sign in the letters in the window still said that Harry Rubin Credit Union was no longer there and that space was now rented by a man who sold linoleum from a cart, so it was stayed with him. linoleum in the front and he lived with his wife in the back that was the kind of life it was I would like a little shtetl life Oh God Oh God the only thing that was still interesting and ironically was the Catholic Church which was right in the middle of the neighborhood that was left intact st.

Joseph's Catholic Church remained intact in Kildare to this day. Everything else around him changed all the streets. The configurations totally changed the buildings. Oh God.