Washington Elms

A dozen blocks east of Harvard is Washington Elms, one of the pioneer Federal housing projects. Today this orderly pattern of three-story buildings is the focus of a community that might have been the model for Emile Durkheim's frightening concept of anomie.

There is no social structure in Washington Elms; in the fifteen years since it was built, social workers have found no centers of life, no bars where men congregate, not even a corrupt political machine to command loyalty. Abandonment here means that a majority of children say their father does not live at home. And abandonment is the insularity of inferior government services, of political impotence, of being a football in organized charity's fights with the city of Cambridge, of living in The Elms, roughest, poorest, dirtiest most hopeless blocks in the city.

The Elms stands where a slum was razed to make way for a new attack on poverty, disease, and delinquency. But health has not improved. In moving the residents away and back again something was lost, and when the project was opened the delinquency rate soared above the heights of slum days. At last, by creating clubs to replace the fighting gangs that once roamed the streets, the local settlement house is trying to reintroduce some kind of organization.

While physically not a slum, the Elms is a squalid place to live. During the day a child can be seen, crying but unnoticed, on the step of an entryway. And as evening comes, a teenager can chase a screaming seven-year-old across the project without interference. A mother's plaint is accurate: "The project is no place to bring up a child."

The people understand their neighborhood all too well. One boy said, "Look around you. Don't you know where you are? This is the project. This is where the bums live." But the parents, who often say they would like to move, are bound by a community of isolation from the world, and they do not leave. The transience rate is still high, but there are many who stay on--the average time of residence is three years, but more than half of the occupants have been around for a decade. Families lack the strength, the impetus, the unity to break away.

Nobody knows what portion of parents are illiterate, for even the settlement house has difficulty reaching this group. The best many of the adults can do is pay lip service to middle class values, tell children not to grow up like their parents, and continue to live the roles of failed men.

To succeed in the youth culture is to fall into an orbit where clipping is a diversion and vandalism a style of self-assertion. To enter the school is to face up to middle class values, and the barrier is virtually impenetrable. Youth returning from school take off their school clothes as if removing prison uniforms. More than half quit school as soon as the law allows. Little wonder that parents turn to the settlement house and ask, "Why don't you make the kids behave?"

A recent report, which the city suppressed, documented the adolescent's answer to a situation in which no positive solution seems open. Neighboring Central Square has the highest delinquency rate in the nation. One bitter youth said, "We broke the law when we were born."