Press: Old Boston Tours in the news
By Hanover Street, peeling back the years: A 17-year resident takes it way back
Boston Globe, December 14, 2003
By Tara Murphy
BOSTON GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
Guild Nichols says good morning to at least eight people he knows, in just the time it takes him to stroll the few blocks to his favorite café on Hanover Street.
Once settled in over a cappucclno, he estimates that conversations with old friends and new acquaintances can carry him through an entire morning. And, in fact, it is the North End's unparalleled ability to satisfy Nichols's self-described "taste for talking to people" that has kept him living there for the past 17 years.
It is also the inspiration behind the "North End Secret Tour," a walking tour highlighting the neighborhood's immigrant history, which he launched two years ago.
"I created the tour to talk about what happened to the North End after 1800," explained Nichols, a Winchester native, who said be only discovered just how much of his adopted neighborhoods history remained "hidden" when he sat down to build its first-ever website.
What happened was the successive waves of European immigrants - first Irish, then Jewish, and finally Italian - who came ashore in the years between 1840 and 1920 and made the North End their home. The traditions these newcomers carried with them and the businesses, churches, and four-story apartment buildings they left in their wake still very much define the neighborhood today.
Nonetheless, said Nichols, residents and visitors alike usually came to his website hoping to learn just one of three things: Where to eat? What's going on? And, of course: how to learn more about the sites on the North End's other better-known pedestrian expedition, the Freedom Trail.
Much to Nichols's disappointment, it seemed that stories about the immigrants whose struggles link the North End's Revolutionary War-era past with the tourists and restaurant-goers of today had been left virtually untold.
That is, until Nichols decided to tell them himself.
Caption: Guild Nichols shows students from Sparhawk School in Amesbury a map of the North End. He offers tours, he says, "to talk about what happened to the North End after 1800."
"My tour addresses the issues they all dealt with," he said. "Issues like being poor and being an immigrant and being ostracized ... and what it was like to live here before there was refrigeration and when no bank would invest in the North End."
"Those things are almost lost, and I think it's important to bring them up," he added.
Nichols said he stumbles upon the North End's "almost lost" history everywhere - in cafes, while getting his hair trimmed by the local barber, and sometimes just by squinting up at the time-beatn facades of the neighborhoods brick buildings, where he has even discovered a fading Star of David left over from the days when the North End, one of the city's most Catholic neighborhoods, was predominately Jewish.
"There's nothing rational about this at all," he shrugged. "It's really just talking to people and hearing something new and then following that thread."
Four books about the city's immigrant history unearthed at the Boston Public library have been invaluable to Nichols's attempt to document the tales he tells tourgoers.
And Nichols also makes sure to pepper his stories about the immigrants of times past with anectdotes about the North Ender's of today - like the "itsy-bitsy little old lady" who resides in the "only cast-iron facade building north of New York City" and who decided to become an airplane pilot at age 50.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the North End Secret Tour, which lasts approximately two hours, tends to attract visitors who, like Nichols himself, prefer their history up close and in person, rather than buried between the pages of a book.
"I like the visual," said Joyce Dendy of Watertown, who surprised her boyfriend, Rod Rodrigues, with a Nichols-led tour on his birthday a few Saturdays ago.
Her feet planted on cobblestones trod by young professionals and impoverished immigrants alike, Dendy gazed at a onetime chapel turned bed-and-breakfast on North Street and added: "I can't actually go back in time, so this is the next best thing,"
Many tour-goers, like Dendy and the honeymooning couple from Hamilton who joined her and Rodrigues on their excursion, are native New Englanders looking to learn more about the history that is "right in their own backyard. But Nichols has also hosted groups from the National Italian American Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a class of schoolchildren studying Italian immigrant history.
As for understanding the North End of today, the key is still "cafe life" - at least as far as Nichols is concerned. "You come to the cafe to meet with people, to talk with people ... to learn all about them," said Nichols, who says be sought out an apartment in what he calls New England's only "European neighborhood" for just that reason after living in France for more than a decade.
He said he still manages to make it to the cafes of Europe once or twice a year. But, Nichols admits, he often goes for weeks at a time without leaving his own tiny neighborhood once he's back in the North End.
"You walk a couple of blocks, and it's like you're in another village," he said.
Nichols said he only recently began learning more about the "fascinating history" of the neighborhood's waterfront and piers.
"And" he added, "there are. so many more stories to be explored."
Caption: Nichols points out a site to the Sparhawk students. Many tour-goers, he says, are history-minded New Englanders.
Media Inquiries
For information about tours for media members and promotional groups, please contact our press department with any requests. Media "ride alongs" are encouraged as sharing our stories is important to our educational mission
