Press: Old Boston Tours in the news
By food and by megabyte, Nichols explores
North End Bulletin, Septemeber 28, 2006
By Joseph Mont
Bulletin Staff
Guild Nichols is hoping to bring a high tech twist to the North End's Old World Charm.
Nichols is the creator and web master of the site www.northendboston.com, an online portal of all things North End related. In the coming weeks, a new feature will be added to the site that will allow visitors to view mini-documentaries of some of the neighborhood's best-known residents. One of the first features will be a local cook whose meatballs were featured on television with celebrity chef Emeril Legasse.
Increasingly, the site is also a gateway to a North End tour he has run for the past few years, Boston's North End Secret Tours.
The tour, long advertised as a "coming soon" venture of the site was kicked into reality when a group of 40 Jamaican residents contacted Nichols to book the guided walk. The interest from that first group led Nicols to finally formalize and develop the offering.
A 20-year resident of the North End, he draws upon the small neighborhood's broad history. Among the highlights of the tour, offered on Friday and Saturday nights, are: exploring the North End's hidden courtyards and passageways and the oldest public square in America; the narrowest residential house in Boston (9-1/2 feet wide); the city's oldest sign dating from 1694; where the wake for Sacco and Vanzetti was held; a look at how the infamous Ponzi scheme was first hatched in the neighborhood; a visit to the cemetery where 1,000 free slaves lay buried; discussion of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 and a viewing the birthplace of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Nichols sees the neighborhood's past-and future-as very unique,
"The North End has been cut off from the rest of the city of Boston for 250 years," he explained. "When it was a mariners' neighborhood, police wouldn't even come to break up fights. It was too dangerous. Then it was the Irish slum and 'lrish need not apply' and no one is going to come to this slummy place.
Yes, they did come here when it was a Jewish neighborhood, because it was a place to go shopping and there weren't any supermarkets at that time. But then... it was the construction of the tunnels, the Callahan and Sumner and so forth. No sooner than that gets settled, within 15 years we have the Central Artery being built. Now we have it being taken down to go underground.
"So now, for the first time in almost a couple hundred of years the North End is being discovered and it is suddenly being reconnected to Boston. When those parks [from the Big Dig] are done in six months it will be very much reconnected."
As for the website that started it all, Nichols, back in 1999, bad the idea to register specific domain names for every city neighborhood.
"I bought a variety of neighborhood sites... with the intention of rolling them out," he said "The problem was paying $70 for each domain name a year. What I also discovered, as I started to build this North End site, is that you really had to live in a neighborhood to understand it. I wouldn't be capable of doing South Boston or a South End site or a Kenmore Square site. After paying these renewal fees for four years I said this is crazy and I dropped them."
"My original view was that this could be a communication link for the North End,"
Nichols said, admitting that his goal has not yet been completely fulfilled. Even now, compared to other neighborhoods, the number of computers in the neighborhood is relatively low per capita.
That statistic is changing, though, and as he adds more features - like the video profiles he has planned for the coming days, ongoing historical essays and an interactive forum - he is hopeful the site will become the neighborbood resource he envisioned.
For all his efforts, however, Nichols is well-aware that many visitors to the site will always come for two very specific purposes
"We get 1.8 million hits per month... that translates to 67,000 actual visitors ol which 37,000 are unique visitors. What do most people look for in the site? Where to eat and where to park."
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