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The National Guard had closed off the city to vehicular and
pedestrian traffic. We left our car by the Meridian Street Bridge on
the East Boston side and watched in awe at the spectacle of leaping
flames and billowing smoke as Ward Two vanished into the air.
We made our way through throngs of curious onlookers and reached
Bellingham Square, which was awash in a sea of hoses and fire
apparatus. Embers were flying over our heads and the smoke grew thick
and heavy.
It became harder for us to breath as we moved down Fifth Street to
the corner of Chestnut where hectic activity was taking place to save
the Williams School.
Every building in sight around the Williams School was ablaze and a
mass of fire equipment and men tried to cut the onslaught of fire
that was threatening to take the school, after which it would have
been all over for the city.
So at the corner of Fifth and Chestnut the tragic 1973 Chelsea Fire
was stopped, and many people around this city who stood on that
corner on that early fall evening will remember how close the city
came to being destroyed.
Water pressure was low, so low that many hoses were fed no water. The
people on that corner knew that and today many of them will agree,
things might have ended up a lot worse.
I returned to that corner the next morning. The people were gone, but
the firemen were still there. Police and National Guardsmen patrolled
the streets as I walked about taking pictures.
The destruction had been wholesale. An entire city ward had been
destroyed and only the empty shells of houses and buildings remained.
Piles of rubble taller than a man, cars on their sides burned to a
crisp and trees that looked like petrified wood created a landscape
so barren and hostile that it resembeled a war zone.
Live electric wires lay sprawled on the streets like deadly snakes
and rows of chimneys stood as silent sentinels. It was as if death
had stalked this place.
I walked around the entire area, an area I had known well. A sense of
helplessness overtook me as I looked north and south, east and west.
Little of Ward Two remained, pitifully little could be salvaged.
Chelsea burned last night the Boston papers wrote. But what did they
know? Who but the people of this proud city could comprehend the
magnitude of this incredible loss?
Who but the proud people of this city could weigh and measure that
thankless task that lay ahead if the city was to recover and go forward?
Who but the people of this city would care that Ward Two had
disappeared in a funnel of smoke and burning embers up into the sky? |