Salvaged Buildings

Loss of the historic buildings appears to have been more newsworthy. But when Portsmouth historians protested the impending loss of important colonial architecture, a November 22, 1968 Portsmouth Herald photo showed a littered back street with tarpaper houses above the caption: School Street Houses are well worth preserving say the experts." In contrast, a front page headline on February 13, 1969 featured a gleaming modern artist's conception of a proposed $2 million complex proposed for the North End site. It included a 100-room motor hotel, swimming pool, underground parking, offices and a two-story shopping mall. The planned complex was never built. By this time 66 North End families had been relocated and demolition of the historic Farragut school and Eureka fire station was imminent.

By contrast, a large feature article in the September 14, 1969 Worcestor Telegram -- a distant Massachusetts publication -- depicted details of the North End's extraordinary architecture. One photo ran over a foot high with the headline: "Can Portsmouth, NH save these historic houses and reap a profit too?" Even the Manchester Union Leader presented a commentary in favor of the preservation plan.

By this time the battle was already lost for North End residents whose houses were being purchased based on a formula calculated by the PHA. The newly formed Portsmouth Preservation Inc. turned its attention to 64 houses identified as historically significant. With Strawbery Banke Museum recently created in the South End as a result of urban renewal there, preservationists did not believe another nonprofit museum was feasible. They attempted, instead, to attract investors to a for-profit company that would relocate key buildings to a new site along Deer Street nearby. This site was directly in the path of the modern complex imagined by the Portsmouth Housing Authority.

Not one to compromise, PHA Chief Executive Walter J. Murphy insisted that all houses in the identified region were "substandard" and that "a program of total renewal" was the only sensible avenue. Murphy's plan was the architectural equivalent of clear cutting a forest. Appeals to state authorities did not help preservationists and the Historic Preservation Act had not yet been made law in New Hampshire. The Portsmouth City Council, under Mayor Eileen Foley, whose father Charles Dondero was born on Russell Street,voted 7 to 1 to implement the urban renewal project, with the condition that historic preservation be considered where possible.

When the smoke cleared, 13 buildings were "saved" or settled on the area now known as The Hill which was turned over to a private management company. The large gleaming complex, which some promised would be a smaller version of Boston's Prudential Center, did not materialize. Hotel offers were made on the new site, but none accepted until the construction of the Portsmouth Sheraton hotel in the mid 1980s.

The Parade Mall (including an A&P supermarket that later closed) and parking lot now covers the site where Daniel Webster's first home and the Farragut School stood. A hotel complex will soon be in place there. Other modern buildings including a modern strip along historic Congress Street, the municipal parking garage with a brick motif, office buildings, high-rise residential housing, and the single-story Portsmouth Herald building occupy the North End. No one is likely to argue that the new buildings offer much in the way of architectural significance.

Thirty years later, the neighborhood that eventually included Italian, French, German, Polish, Russian and "Anglo" residents of Portsmouth's North End are widely dispersed. A document archived in the library ticks off the new location of each family and its ethnic status. For years a vacant lot, the former Russell Street neighborhood is today an adjunct parking lot for hotel patrons. A conference center is now planned.

When 100 former North End residents and their descendants gathered a few years ago to dedicate a simple granite bench to the lost Italian neighborhood, there was talk of another kind. They told stories of grandparents, old customs, great food, of weddings, childhood games, of homes lost and hearts broken.

Copyright © 2005 SeacoastNH.com. Originally published here in 1999. J. Dennis Robinson was the producer/ director of the video "Russell Street Reunion" in 1986. All photos courtesy of the Portsmouth Public Library.