Once upon a time, there was a slice of Boston called the Combat Zone, and in that zone was a long block named LaGrange Street. LaGrange was the core of the Zone. What it was was a rodeo.
On any given night from the ’60s into the ’80s, you’d find scores of prostitutes on parade on LaGrange. They leaned into open car windows, teetering on elevator platforms, talking to men inside while trying to steal their wallets. They worked the sidewalks like they owned them, which they did.
“Scores of them? Try 60 some nights,’’ recalls Bill Dwyer, a 32-year veteran Boston detective, now retired, who worked the Zone in various capacities from 1971 to 1984. “LaGrange was insane. It was the O.K. Corral. Wall to wall traffic. People would be coming down from Maine and New Hampshire to see the sights. It was like a circle, the cars would drive through and then come around again.’’
But then the whole Combat Zone was a rodeo. It ran roughly from Tremont to Washington and from Boylston down to Kneeland, extending west onto Stuart Street. The area was infamous for its strip clubs, peep shows, dirty bookstores, booze, drugs, and violence.
The ladies were, in the street parlance of the time, “on the stroll.’’ They would swarm like silverfish near Good Time Charlie’s, a bar on the block that poured men into the night. The women would be there in daylight too, their ranks thinned, working hard for the money.
You had men trolling, undergraduates ogling. You had small seedy men leaning on parking meters, eyeing and smoking, and people punching each other’s lights out. It was a gamy playground for anyone interested in adventure of a certain kind. The Zone was nothing but sleaze.
“It had something there for everyone,’’ recalls John Goodman, a photographer who took some of the photographs mounted on the Howard Yezerski Gallery’s walls in “Boston Combat Zone: 1969-1978.’’
Goodman all but lived in the Zone during the ’70s. He and five other photographers shared studio space in a huge deserted kitchen atop the old Bradford Hotel, which had once offered rooftop dinner dancing. “Some of the girls lived below me. We were on the elevator together all the time.
“One girl was with me one day,’’ he adds, “and I asked if I could shoot some pictures of her,’’ he says. “One second later, she was totally naked in the elevator.’’
The names are gone but not forgotten - places like the Naked i, the Two O’Clock Club, the Pilgrim Theatre, the Intermission Lounge, and the Pussycat Lounge. Strip clubs festooned their front windows with 8-by-10 pictures of their performers, their breasts barely covered by pasties.