The Combat Zone Of Old

[Gansett]

This thread brought back some good memories and few chuckles. My dad had glaucoma and was involved in some medical trials in the early 80's, I think it was thru Tufts. I'd drive him up every month for his checkup and no trip was complete without a trip thru the zone. The stuff he got away. He'd tell the girls he "could see with his fingers" and he'd have his hands all over them with no objections. Dad was pretty cool.
He had a reaction to meds one time and they put him in the hospital overnight for observation. My plan when I left the hospital was to get a few drinks, go back and sleep in the car. Went to the bar we always went too, wish I could remember the name but when they heard he was hospitalized one dancer took pity on me. Ended up with her taking me back to her place for the night.
While the girls back then, like now were in it for the $$$ it seemed they cared a bit more.

[Easy Going]

One evening, around 1986, I drove towards the Zone from a bar in Southie. I drank very, very heavily in those days. I was blind. I came out of a blackout, driving in the Zone. A couple of hours had passed, but I have no idea what transpired. There was a piece of cardboard passing around the car with coke on it. It turns out I had two lesbian hookers in the back seat. How they got there, I'll never know.

I vaguely remember them getting out of the car when the lines were gone. I went into some strip bar in the Zone. I spent the rest of the night there, drinking more. One dancer was lactating and she constantly sprayed her milk all over me (and others) as she was dancing. I mean, she was shooting streams and gobs of breast milk all over the freaking place. For some drunken reason, I was loving it. At that time, for me, I lived for the kink.

In the midst of this drunken haze, I somehow managed to pick up another dancer. She must have been way messed up to deal with me. I vaguely remember driving back to Somerville, Davis Square, to my apartment. Which I shared with my fiancee, who was out of town for a couple of days. I somehow banged this dancer (no fee), came to in the morning, and just left and went to work.

Yup, I left a passed out dancer in my bed, my fiancee's bed too. Just took off.

I came home from work that night and she obviously had taken a shower, but amazingly nothing looked out of place. Oh, I freaked out and searched the apartment over and over for anything that was missing; or anything that did not belong. But it was clean!

I wonder what she remembers ...

[Phat Bastard]

...back when it was just beginning to take hold, in the early sixties. Back then there was still a major military presence in Boston, at the Charlestown Navy Yard and the Boston Army base. Every night there were loads of servicemen in town, and three or four Shore Patrol or MP paddy wagons. It was during this period that it won the name "Combat Zone" as servicemen experienced brawls in various establishments. Your greatest risk was to get caught up in a big beef. Other than that, MM is correct. The zone was always actually the safest place in the city.

The first joint I ever walked into in the zone was a place called, if my memory serves, "The Palace Bar." Located on the corner of Beach and Washington, before Charlie S's Pussycat Lounge occupied that spot, it was known far and wide as a real bucket of blood type place. I was only 19, but looked older...but the bartender who came up to me as I bellied up to his bar looked me up and down and said "You ain't 21. Lemme see some ID." As I groped for my fake ID, he said, "Aw, fuck it. If you've got the balls to come in here, you've got enough balls to get a beer. What'll you have?"

Viejo, I'm jealous man, you remember The Zone in it's real heyday.

How's this for coincidence, The Pussycat Lounge is the first place I saw a stripper and got served....though it took two tries.
I went in there one hot summer night with a bunch of friends when I was in my mid-teens and the drinking age had gone down from 21 to 18 before going up to 20 then 21 again. The door at the corner was propped open and we just strolled in and stood along the wall near the bar ogling the dancer with our jaws hanging open. The bartender came over, asked us what we were having and like the kids who had never ordered a drink that we were, said "beer please" and he looked at us like the idiots we were and said "what flavor?"

[Phat Bastard]

Despite all the stuff we read and hear - during it's heyday, the Combat Zone was no more dangerous than it is now. When it really became dangerous is in the late 80s when the city pushed the busineeses out. Then the city was left with blocks of boarded up desolated blocks of nothing. This is when the crackheads and prositiutes became a major problem. The city could have done a lot more to patrol it and clean it up, but they didn't.

The people that worked in and owned the strip joints, bars, book stores, and other places were mostly old guys and girls just living day to day

This puritanical backwards city of Boston will always be a minor league city. No adult entertainment, no convention business, no nothing! This is why so many are moving out from Boston. But I digress....Still looking for some vintage pictures of the Zone

Meatman, you're so right.

I've had a lot more problems mongering Brockton than I've had in The Zone.

Before they started closing the businesses (pre-crack and pre-AIDS) the place was wild but it was a good wild. After they started driving out the bars, strip clubs and peep-shows the place went downhill even though streetwalking was still going strong.

And backwards is right.
What kind of an asshole mayor builds an $800 million dollar convention center in a city virtually without adult entertainment?

Good job Mumbles.


Convention center article:
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/...s/01228210.htm

[Viejo]

Despite all the stuff we read and hear - during it's heyday, the Combat Zone was no more dangerous than it is now.

...back when it was just beginning to take hold, in the early sixties. Back then there was still a major military presence in Boston, at the Charlestown Navy Yard and the Boston Army base. Every night there were loads of servicemen in town, and three or four Shore Patrol or MP paddy wagons. It was during this period that it won the name "Combat Zone" as servicemen experienced brawls in various establishments. Your greatest risk was to get caught up in a big beef. Other than that, MM is correct. The zone was always actually the safest place in the city.

The first joint I ever walked into in the zone was a place called, if my memory serves, "The Palace Bar." Located on the corner of Beach and Washington, before Charlie S's Pussycat Lounge occupied that spot, it was known far and wide as a real bucket of blood type place. I was only 19, but looked older...but the bartender who came up to me as I bellied up to his bar looked me up and down and said "You ain't 21. Lemme see some ID." As I groped for my fake ID, he said, "Aw, fuck it. If you've got the balls to come in here, you've got enough balls to get a beer. What'll you have?"

My next stop was Izzy Ort's Golden Nugget - now that was quite the place - a combination hooker bar and soul music joint. I happened to walk in on a night that had a performance by a guy who perfectly mimicked James Brown...can't remember his name - it was "Little Somethingorother" - great performance, and he had a sax player working with him who was incredible. It was here that I made my first connection with a lady of the night.

By the way, in an earlier post, which for some reason the edit option is no longer available, I refferred to Johnny M's bar as the 666 - that was a typographical error...it was the 663 Lounge. I spent many joyous hours there, until Johnny got set up by a vice cop who lied his ass off to give him a violation that eventually cost him the license...but that's another story.

[Double Nickle]

The second major incident was the murder of Robin Benedict. She was a dancer/provider who worked in the zone, mostly at Good Time Charlie's. She hooked a professor from Tufts who became obsessed to the extent that he put her on his payroll, giving her tens of thousands of dollars of his grant money. It was a rocky relationship and he got caught embezzelling. When he finally realized that he'd been taken all along and he snapped, killing her in his home. He got rid of her corpse and did so well enough that it was never found...but there was sufficient physical evidence to convict him and put him away. He's out of the slammer now, as is the pimp who did Andy Puopolo.

I read the book about this case (and others) long ago. Below is an excerpt from the NEW YORK TIMES review:

June 1, 1986
WHEN THE MIDDLE CLASS SNAPS
By JONATHAN COLEMAN; JONATHAN COLEMAN, THE AUTHOR OF ''AT MOTHER'S REQUEST: A TRUE STORY OF MONEY, MURDER AND BETRAYAL,'' WILL BE TEACHING NONFICTION WRITING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA THIS FALL.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE PROSTITUTE And Other True Tales of Murder and Madness. By Linda Wolfe. Illustrated. 228 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $16.95. IN a rather curious, autobiographical introduction to the nine true stories in ''The Professor and the Prostitute,'' Linda Wolfe informs the reader that she is a ''psychological'' writer whose interest is in ''people who inhabit the middle class . . . people I, and many others like me, might know, entertain, work beside.'' She had hoped to become a novelist, but, concluding that her imagination was ''impoverished,'' decided to ''try using fictional techniques to fuel nonfiction'' -as she seems to see it, to go slumming with style.

In the title story, Miss Wolfe's reminder that such writers as Heinrich Mann, Dostoyevsky, Somerset Maugham and Zola all demonstrated an interest in ''the love of reputable males for reprobate females'' is unnecessary. The story of how and why William Henry James Douglas, a professor of anatomy and cellular biology at Tufts University's School of Medicine in Boston, became obsessed with, and later murdered, a comely prostitute named Robin Benedict in 1983 is fascinating on its own terms.

It is the longest and the best story in the book, and apparently the author agrees. In her introduction, she asserts that ''it comes closest to what I had in mind when I first dreamed about making real events read like invented tales.'' She portrays the two major characters well, but one of the main problems with this story - and several others - is Miss Wolfe's technique. She often switches to the first person, and this detracts from the effect of her narratives. One example: ''Douglas, I felt certain, . . . had been in love just that one time.''

Such questions and answers as ''What kind of man falls in love with a prostitute today, when sexual companionship is relatively easy to come by? The answer is, of course, a repressed man, a lonely, insecure man'' seem both flip and condescendingly simplistic. Cliches - ''feeling that life had passed him by,'' ''being in love is never a simple matter'' - and awkward language -''he would seek sexual surcease'' - are too frequent. By contrast, such lines as ''Douglas had killed, not someone he loved, but someone he had loved having invented'' infuse the story with a poignancy that eventually makes it succeed.

[MeatMan]

Despite all the stuff we read and hear - during it's heyday, the Combat Zone was no more dangerous than it is now. When it really became dangerous is in the late 80s when the city pushed the busineeses out. Then the city was left with blocks of boarded up desolated blocks of nothing. This is when the crackheads and prositiutes became a major problem. The city could have done a lot more to patrol it and clean it up, but they didn't.

The people that worked in and owned the strip joints, bars, book stores, and other places were mostly old guys and girls just living day to day

This puritanical backwards city of Boston will always be a minor league city. No adult entertainment, no convention business, no nothing! This is why so many are moving out from Boston. But I digress....Still looking for some vintage pictures of the Zone

[PsyberZombie]

The second major incident was the murder of Robin Benedict. She was a dancer/provider who worked in the zone, mostly at Good Time Charlie's. She hooked a professor from Tufts who became obsessed to the extent that he put her on his payroll, giving her tens of thousands of dollars of his grant money. It was a rocky relationship and he got caught embezzelling. When he finally realized that he'd been taken all along and he snapped, killing her in his home. He got rid of her corpse and did so well enough that it was never found...but there was sufficient physical evidence to convict him and put him away. He's out of the slammer now, as is the pimp who did Andy Puopolo.

Ever hear the old Joke about Robin Benedict ?? ==>

http://www.usasexguide.info/forum/sh...&postcount=112


The Link there no longer works ; it was to a lengthy article on the case

[Viejo]

in the old zone was a murder...this is from a post I made a while ago:

"The beginning of the end came when the Harvard football player, Andy Puopolo, was killed in a scuffle with a pimp. The pimp's hooker had relieved Puopolo of his wallet with the old 70's trick of putting one hand in a guy's crotch and the other in his pocket. At the end of his chase to retrieve the wallet, the pimp used a knife to end the scuffle - Puopolo was killed, and a friend wounded.

Kevin White, then the mayor of Boston, had declared the zone an adult entertainment area, and instructed his police commissioner, DeGrazia, to take a laissez-faire stance on the area. As a result the place was full of roving, young hookers who doubled as pickpockets. The real streetwalkers and bar-girls who worked Good Time Charlie's and The 663 hated the hordes of street thieves...club owners talked about banding together to do something about the problem, but could not agree on just what they could do.

Shortly after the Puopolo incident, DeGrazia left Boston and a new commissioner was installed, with instructions to clean things up. It didn't take long for the streets to get pretty barren. That lasted for a while, until the early 80's, when things began to get somewhat back to the original state - but never back to the craziness that marked the early and mid-seventies."

The second major incident was the murder of Robin Benedict. She was a dancer/provider who worked in the zone, mostly at Good Time Charlie's. She hooked a professor from Tufts who became obsessed to the extent that he put her on his payroll, giving her tens of thousands of dollars of his grant money. It was a rocky relationship and he got caught embezzelling. When he finally realized that he'd been taken all along and he snapped, killing her in his home. He got rid of her corpse and did so well enough that it was never found...but there was sufficient physical evidence to convict him and put him away. He's out of the slammer now, as is the pimp who did Andy Puopolo.

[MeatMan]

PB

Cool Pic of the Naked I, if you guys have some classic clips of the ol Zone, share em!. I'm gonna get started right now!

[Luke 777]

Great idea MeatMan

Let me start the ball rolling with a picture, one that will bring back a lot of memories, most of them blurred with intoxication.

Featuring the Pussy Galore Stag Bar.

What ever happened to Princess Cheyenne? I know she was in hot water for practicing pyschology without a license -- did she beat that rap?

[Phat Bastard]

Great idea MeatMan

Let me start the ball rolling with a picture, one that will bring back a lot of memories, most of them blurred with intoxication.

And what's my favorite memory of that very spot?

I was leaving there one night before joining the merry-go-round of hookers and mongers circling around the block and I stepped through the doors, stopped for a second to get my bearings, look left, then right and a quick double-take back to the left and there's a Zulu warrior wearing a loin cloth, hide buckler shield and a fucking spear coming right at me up the sidewalk.

I stood there for a second wondering if I'd seen Zulu too many times for my own good and then remebered it was right around Halloween.

I said something like "great fucking costume" and he smiled and said something I can't remember and just trotted on by.

http://*******.com/yz799c

[Tomkat4848]

Meatman that was a great post on the old "Zone" which was pretty good when Kevin White was mayor and also during the tenure of Ray Flynn. There was the Hotel Touraine bar on the corner of Tremont and Boylston where you could hustle some nice ass and take them up to one of the rooms, which were fairly cheap and pretty nice. There were also a couple of dumpy hotels on Boylston near Washington (think they were called the Pilgrim and Puritan) that burned down one Saturday night/Sunday morning where a few people were killed. I never felt comfortable in those joints because I knew they were firetraps. But in those days there were plenty of drunken/willing chicks and you would grab the nearest available room. Also, there was no LEO problem.

Actually, the Diplomat Hotel on Berkeley St. just down the street across from Boston PD HQ was a great cathouse where the rooms cost $8 for a session and noone wore rubbers. Maybe it was luck or good judgement but I never caught a STD.

[MeatMan]

From Wikipedia.org

The "Combat Zone," in Boston, Massachusetts, was the name given to the adult entertainment district in downtown centered on Washington Street between Boylston Street and Kneeland Street. It extended up Stuart Street to Park Square. The name "Combat Zone" came from a series of exposé articles on the area published in the 1960s in the Boston Record-American newspaper.

The Combat Zone began to form in the early-1960s, when city officials razed the West End and former red light district at Scollay Square, near Faneuil Hall, to build the Government Center urban renewal project.

Lower Washington Street was already part of Boston's entertainment district with a number of movie theaters, bars, delicatessens and restaurants that catered to night life. It was located between the classic, studio-built movie palaces such as the RKO-Keith and Paramount theaters and the stage theatres such as the Coloniale on Tremont Street.

With the closing of the burlesque theaters in Scollay Square many of the bars began to feature Go-Go dancers and later nude dancers. During the 1970s when laws against obscenity were relaxed many of the smaller movie theaters that ran second-run films became adult movie theaters.

During the Combat Zone's heyday, some of the larger strip clubs were the "Teddy Bare Lounge", the "Intermission Lounge", the "Two O'Clock Club", "Club 66" and the "Naked I" which featured local celebrity Princess Cheyenne. Besides the strip clubs and X-rated movies theaters, numerous peep shows and adult bookstores lined most of Washington Street between Boylston Street and Kneeland Street. LaGrange Street, which runs between Washington Street and Tremont Street, was the gathering place for street walker prostitutes. Most congregated in front of, or near "Good Time Charlie's" at 25 LaGrange Street. All of these establishments are now gone and the buildings are being demolished.

The Combat Zone's demise can be attributed to a number of factors. Among them are the rising property values that made the downtown locations more attractive to real estate developers. In 1974, the Boston Redevelopment Authority began a containment policy by designating the existing businesses to be part of the official adult entertainment district known as Liberty Tree Park. In the 1980s the former Playboy Club and the strip clubs in Park Square were replaced by the building of the Four Seasons Hotel and State Transportation Building. A new Emerson College dormitory (and eventual relocation of the entire campus), Suffolk University administrative offices, a relocated branch of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles, a new $300 million development which includes a Ritz-Carlton Hotel and a Loews cinema, and a renovated Boston Opera House all opened in the area in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A new luxury apartment tower is currently under construction at the corner of Washington and Beach streets.

The introduction of home video and the Internet made it possible to view adult movies and other erotica at home without going to a possibly dangerous red light district. Zoned out of the rest of Boston, the strip clubs have moved to the suburbs and become more up-scale.

Years of grassroots activism by neighboring Chinatown residents, aggressive police work and massive urban renewal projects instigated by the Boston Redevelopment Authority helped to stem crime and close most of the adult businesses.

All that remains of the former Combat Zone as of 2005 are two small strip clubs, Centerfolds and The Glass Slipper, along LaGrange Street and a few adult book and video stores on Washington and Kneeland streets. Prostitution and drug sales are still issues in nearby Chinatown, the Theatre District, Bay Village and Park Square.