Columbia Point and PBH: Big Brother Is Gone

Since the mid-sixties Phillips Brooks House had sponsored a Big Brother program at Columbia Point, a Boston housing project nine stops down the Red Line from Harvard Square. During each school year, about 50 big brothers--and, during the seventies, big sisters--worked with youngsters from the Point; in the summers the project continued with about a dozen volunteers serving as counselors for a Point based day camp.

But last summer there were no big brothers at the Point, and today the sole remnant of the program is a handful of big brothers and sisters who still travel to the Point to see "their" kids.

PBH's decision to terminate the program was based largely on a report written by Steven Pitts '74, its most recent--and apparently final--chairman. Pitts cited a lack of both money and experienced staff, and what he called "specific conditions at Columbia Point both in terms of the program and the housing project," as reasons for ending the volunteer work.

But the reasons go farther. They include the politics of Harvard's black radicals and white liberals, the rise and fall of the Great Society, and the social vacuum of Richard Nixon's new federalism.

The setting is New England's largest housing project--some 1500 units in 37 buildings, tall brown-orange buildings visible from Boston's Southeast Expressway and isolated from Boston by that route on one side and Dorchester Bay on the other three.

Today the Point is mostly black and Spanish-speaking; of the 5000 residents, fewer than 25 per cent are white, and about 150 of these are senior citizens. Over half of the families are headed by women.

The $20 million, Federally funded Columbia Point project had its glamorous side when it opened in 1954. The structure was new, buildings were equipped with elevators, residents had a scenic view of the nighttime Boston skyline, and the project had its own beach. Its population, at that time, was mostly white.

Beneath the impressive exterior, however, was shoddiness. A 1957 investigation revealed a number of building violations by contractors attempting to cut corners; residents were constantly plagued by rats and cockroaches. As the years passed, the Point decayed from lack of maintenance. Crime rose disproportionately to the city.

Enter the Great Society and a slew of new programs for the Point. Family services, youth programs, tutoring, manpower training and senior citizen services appeared. Perhaps the most heralded change, in 1966, was a neighborhood health clinic, one of two in the nation, providing free health care to the residents.

Construction of the Bayside Mall, which gave the Point its own shopping center, and the founding of a Columbia Point Credit Union gave other signs that new life was being breathed into the project.

During these years PBH began its Big Brother program.

At the time, the big brothers were mostly white. Their goals were humanist and liberal, as outlined in a position paper for the 1968 program: "to make kids happy and feel good about themselves. If a person is happy and feels good about himself he can handle any problem, whether it's physical or mental."

But it was the summer program, says Bert Rosenthal '72, who worked with the project in 1970, that brought community orientation and interaction. "At the end of the 1970 summer we put on a show for the whole community, and there was a feeling of cohesiveness and belonging," he said. And then things began to change.

The next summer, for the first time, the majority of the counselors were black or Puerto Rican. The emphasis began to change--the aim was no longer to get the kids out of the Point.

"The old philosophy was to keep things cool, to show kids a good time," says Pitts, who was a summer counselor in 1971 and led the program thereafter. Before that, he said, the Big Brother Program was part of a pacification effort--an attempt to keep the ghetto from erupting in violence, to keep the black man in his place. As director, Pitts wanted a more political program.

The new political philosophy turned into action in 1971, as the big brothers led a boycott against the shopping mall, charging that merchants were making an adequate financial contribution to neither the Big Brother Program nor the community as a whole.

"We wanted to get the kids involved in the political process by working to boycott the stores that were fucking us over," Pitts said. But the third effort at boycott was not as successful as the first two, and the tactic was stopped.

Come spring 1972, the time usually devoted to fundraising for the summer program, the Big Brother Program's chief fundraiser and half the counselors were involved in the takeover of Mass Hall and the protest against Harvard's investment in Gulf, and Gulf's involvement in Angola.

There were other problems as well. "The word got out that we were political, which cooled off the fund money," says Pitts, "and there was a general cutback in funds to poverty programs by Nixon at the time."

"As a leader I didn't put all my time into working on the program," says Pitts candidly. "I was doing more political things. But I don't think the money was out there to be got. I committed myself to the program, but I didn't go through with it.

"Our radicalism was a vulgar radicalism," he continues. "We might have done better if we had played some of the bureaucratic games. It's a question of style as well as politics."

Aid from the Area Planning Action Council (APAC), a government-funded program, was spurned, and a mutual dislike grew. APAC felt the big brothers were too radical; the big brothers felt APAC was another white pacification program.

The 1972 summer program left the big brothers deeply in debt, and the program as a whole declined rapidly. Admissions to the program were frozen, and in April 1973 Pitts recommended it be terminated, writing in his report that "it is doubtful Columbia Point is the correct battleground to fight capitalism."

At the project, the credit union folded in 1969 as too few members repaid loans, and the Bayside Mall closed last year, claiming too little business volume. APAC cut its staff of part-time help and beginning in December will be funded on a month-to-month emergency basis. The clinic, which seems to be set for the moment, must under new guidelines become self-sufficient by 1975.

The Harvard radicals can find new battlefields, the Harvard liberals can find new causes, the college-educated social workers can find new jobs in the system. But the Columbia Point residents have no place to go.