Continue walking around the Pond. The path splits - take the right option(straight ahead and go up the hill) until you are across from the Curley House.
Across the street, this lovely Georgian Revival mansion with its iconic shutters with the shamrocks cut into them was the home of the infamous Mayor James Michael Curley. 350 Jamaicaway was constructed in 1915 and the architect was Joseph McGinnis. Now the house is owned by the City. In early 2020, the Emerald Necklace Conservancy moved into offices here.
James Michael Curley (1874-1958) was born near the mud flats of lower Roxbury (where Boston Medical Center is today). His father died when he was young and his mother was forced to work hard in her profession as a charwoman to support her children. Jim Curley worked his way up through ward politics, as a natural leader and great orator. When he first became mayor of Boston, he made sure the cleaning women at City Hall got long-handled mops – to save them from having to scrub the floors on their knees as his mother had done. Curley served four terms as Mayor (1914-18, 1930-34, 1922-26, 1947-50), one term as Governor of the Commonwealth (1935-7) as well as serving in the United States Congress as a Representative for Massachusetts (1913-14). He was known as a “man of the people” and he did serve the population who got him elected, the immigrants who had become a majority of the population in the early part of the twentieth century, extremely well. Curley was constantly at odds with the old Protestant Yankees (the Republicans) who had long held the reins of the City. He delighted in antagonizing the Boston Brahmins as much as he delighted in helping the working classes of Boston. While he earned the title of “the Mayor of the Poor” he also was an instrument of a political machine whose modus operandi was mired in corruption. Curley served two terms in jail – one in the Charles Street jail (now the Liberty Hotel) for taking a civil service exam for a friend and the other for mail fraud in the federal prison in Danbury, CT. He remains the only Boston Mayor to be in office while in a prison cell. It’s well-known the standard cut for a City contract under Curley was 10% - which would put his “take” at several million a year.
The mansion across the street is a testament to the wealth that Curley collected (always in cash, mind you). It was said to cost twice his annual salary to build. And where better than on the shores of the Jamaica Pond to stick it to the Brahmins that a poor Irish kid from Roxbury had made it to the top? The house was sumptuously decorated, it even had a chandelier purchased from the Austro-Hungarian Embassy in Washington DC. In 1956, Mayor Curley moved from this house to another Jamaica Plain residence on Moss Hill (9 Pond Circle). But his legacy is strong here in JP: a middle school named for his first wife (Mary), an elementary school named for “Himself”, Our Lady of Lourdes, his parish, which the church construction financed largely by Curley, the Connelly branch library (which dates to Curley’s expansion of the library throughout the neighborhoods). When he died in November of 1958, his funeral was the largest ever seen in Massachusetts. Curley remains a fascinating figure even half a century later.
At the beginning of the tour we talked about how the Pond is a kettle hole, created when the glaciers retreated. These hollows we are about to walk through are another glacial landscape feature. This area is known as the “Sugar Bowl” and it’s a favorite place for sledding during the winter. This type of landscape was an Olmstedian dream. We’ll walk across this open countryside so you can get a feel for the land.