READ: Urban Renewal Takes Little Italy 

With the exception of The Plains, site of a colonial Indian raid, "The Hill" is the closest thing Portsmouth has to a battleground. No shots were fired and no one died in the taking of the North End in the early 1970s, but it was a battle all the same. An entire ethnic neighborhood was wiped off the map and 400 members of a tightly knit largely Italian community were scattered In all directions.

Thirty-five years later I bet a lot of Portsmouth residents have no clue why a dozen colorful wooden houses are squeezed up against the towering Marriot Garden Hotel. Another side of The Hill faces the butt-ugly Parade Mall, soon to be replaced by another high rise hotel. The grassy little campus of colonial homes is looking more and more like an oasis in a desert of dull architecture. Newcomers take note, that these restored old structures – most of which were moved from the great yawning parking lots all around -- are not just colonial buildings. They are a memorial, of sorts, to a little bit of ethnic housekeeping, courtesy of federal urban renewal.

The concept, popularized in the mid-twentieth century, was that dilapidated buildings bred dilapidated people. After World War II, Uncle Sam decided to demolish untold thousands of "blighted" urban areas across the nation. Most were replaced by high rise apartments. In Portsmouth we lost much of historic Vaughan Street, and got a mini-mall and a parking garage. In the South End, we lost the Puddle Dock neighborhood, and got a museum. And in the North End we lost hundreds of old buildings and hundreds of people – and got a parking lot and a mall.

We were supposed to get a shining new $2 million hotel complex, convention center and city offices. The Portsmouth Herald continually showed sketches of the modern new complex, while forgetting entirely, to write about the heartache of the disenfranchised Italian citizens. Not one feature article that I’ve seen told the human side of the story, although newspapers as far away as the Worcestor City Telegram did. In anticipation of the bustling commercial Mecca, the Herald purchased a key chunk of land for its own offices (now moved to Pease International Tradeport). But the commercial Mecca didn’t arrive, and the prime land has remained a weedy parking lot for decades. The Sheraton, that sits on a piece of the Old North End, didn’t appear until 10 years after the Portsmouth Housing Authority had flattened the "blighted" region, only to see it lie fallow.

All that will change soon with the arrival of more new hotels and conference centers. Pretty soon few will even remember how the city sacrificed its low rent neighborhood to the gods of Progress. The only reminder is The Hill -- sitting there quietly and curiously out of another place and time. Hard-working preservationists had hoped to save more than a hundred buildings back in the 1970s, but all they could salvage were 13 buildings dating before the 1830s. It was a small victory, but a victory all the same.

Think about what happened the next time you have dinner on The Hill, or do some business up there. Maybe you’ll even catch a whiff of Italian cooking, or hear kids playing stickball in the street. We didn’t save any of the people, but heck, we at least kept a few of the buildings to remind us where the battleground was.

Copyright © 2007 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.