Jimmy's town

The city-council president sticks up for his old-school vision of South Boston. But what happens when no one stands up to him?

by Ben Geman

It's a portrait of Southie power -- literally. The photograph hanging in Boston City Council president Jimmy Kelly's office shows Kelly, along with South Boston state legislators Stephen Lynch and Jack Hart, standing with Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) head Tom O'Brien.

The four are all smiles. The photo was shot in March 1998, just after they cut a deal ensuring that at least half the affordable-housing "linkage" payments generated by new waterfront development would be funneled to South Boston.

Jump ahead a year, and the smiles are gone. At a recent hearing on the city's plan for the Seaport District, which includes less commercial development (and thus less linkage money) than Kelly would like, Kelly told O'Brien: "So help me God, I'm going to get you."

That explosion was only the latest in a slew of Kelly controversies. Last year, after promising to lead a citywide discussion on race, Kelly, an affirmative-action foe, held a divisive and pointless hearing on affirmative action in the city's police and fire departments. He's been castigated as an anti-yuppie reactionary, too, for his push to limit roof decks and accordion-style restaurant doors in Southie. "Kelly is trying to force his old, tired way of thinking onto a new Boston and new century," scolded the Boston Globe's Joan Vennochi last month.

CITY HALL

Alive and, well . . .

But if all the heat has damaged Kelly politically, it doesn't show. If anything, he's as powerful today as he ever was. He helped keep the New England Patriots out of South Boston in 1997, helped swing Southie's sweet linkage deal in 1998, and was easily elected council president in January for a sixth term. Most significant, after the blow-up at O'Brien, Mayor Tom Menino barely slapped Kelly's wrist. "You have to act in a professional manner at all times," the mayor told the Phoenix in regard to the incident -- hardly a stinging rebuke.

Kelly is at the peak of his power at a critical time. As the city wrestles with development questions and with racial trouble in its police department, housing authority, and elsewhere, Kelly's intransigence on housing and affirmative action has real consequences. As Boston changes around him, why does this guy stay so powerful?

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Twenty-five years ago, few would have predicted that Kelly would be where he is today. Jailed briefly in the 1960s for possession of a firearm, Kelly is still remembered by many as a tough, unpolished Southie activist bitterly opposed to school busing.

The quiet man Joe Moakley gets what he wants In newspaper headlines and city-council meetings, Jim Kelly may be the loud and inflammatory voice of South Boston. But the neighborhood's true protector is a man who speaks more softly and carries a much bigger stick: Congressman Joe Moakley. Now in his 13th term, the 72-year-old Moakley may not have the clout he had when the Democrats ran Congress and he won millions of federal dollars for such local projects as the Big Dig and a grand new federal courthouse. But even if he's been marginalized in a Sunbelt Republican Congress -- and even if he spends most of his time several hundred miles away -- Moakley remains a titanic force in city politics. "Joe may be viewed as someone who doesn't get involved in local disputes," says former city councilor Michael McCormack, "but he's always there. He's always a presence." Two recent interventions in city politics have reaffirmed the power of this courtly pol with the Santa Claus physique. One is his declaration last month that he would "resort to anything" to block a proposed new runway for Logan Airport, including a federal funding cutoff that could kill the project. Moakley also persuaded the city to scale back its plans for new housing on the South Boston waterfront. In both cases, Moakley has arguably favored a narrow interest over a greater good. Massport says Boston's economy needs an expanded airport -- but Southie residents are wary of increased noise and air pollution. The Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) insists that waterfront development requires enough housing to create a residential community, and that new units will help lower soaring South Boston rents -- yet Southie is wary of gentrification and the outsiders it brings. Moakley's gentle touch and lofty congressional stature, however, usually mean that he gets what he wants. Thus, when Mayor Tom Menino and BRA director Tom O'Brien were in a bitter standoff with Kelly over the number of new housing units to be built in South Boston, the hand of Moakley quickly settled the crucial issue. When he told O'Brien and Menino that he supported the construction of only 4000 new units in the next 10 years -- as opposed to the city's plan for up to 8000 units -- the city scaled back its ambitions. Which makes one wonder whether Moakley's periodic muscle-flexes irk Menino, who doesn't like being overshadowed on his own turf. A Menino adviser says the two have a "positive, very respectful" relationship. Moakley puts it this way: "We're not in bed together. We've had a decent relationship." Not hostile, perhaps, but that doesn't quite sound like deep kinship. Yet Moakley maintains that he tries to avoid city-level politics. "I don't try to micromanage anything," he says. And if South Boston's advocates seem overly passionate at times, he says, they are simply "trying to preserve this little area that's suffered so many slings and arrows over the last 30 or 40 years and make sure it comes out okay from this progress." That's his only agenda within the city of Boston, he says. "Most of the other things in the city, I let them do whatever they want -- if it doesn't adversely affect my constituents." But given how many of Boston's biggest projects -- from waterfront development to a new convention center to the proposed Logan runway -- do affect the strong-willed folk of South Boston, that seemingly conciliatory statement might be little more than Moakley's way of saying he's not done yet. -- Michael Crowley

He's lost many of his rough edges over the years, but not everything has changed. In 1996, he initially opposed a resolution by city councilor Gareth Saunders -- one of just two black councilors -- condemning the wave of burnings that had struck black churches in the South. And then there was his call for a review of hiring policies in the police and fire departments. That action wasn't popular among his fellow councilors.

Yet, says Allston-Brighton councilor Brian Honan, "he did not hold that against anybody." And Honan and most of his colleagues did not hold it against Kelly, electing him president again.

Part of the reason Kelly can maintain a good rapport with Menino and other city pols to his left is that he musters a defense intellectually respectable enough to ward off heavy artillery. The shelves of his City Hall office are lined with books, including the work of conservative writers such as Dinesh D'Souza, and Robert Zelnick's anti-affirmative-action book Backfire: A Reporter Looks at Affirmative Action.

"I've been identified as someone who is very narrow-minded, who has stepped over the threshold of being parochial," says Kelly. "I've been accused of a number of things, but the people who come in and out of my office are of all different persuasions and races. I work closely with all my constituents, whether they are from the [South End's] Cathedral housing project or [South Boston's] Old Colony project."

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Kelly may be a reactionary, but he's a reactionary who works. Even South End neighborhood activists -- who sit cultural miles from Southie and often don't share his politics -- admit that when they place a call, he returns it.

On a recent Saturday, in the South End's Peters Park, Kelly stands smiling in the late-morning sun. It's opening day for the South End Youth Baseball. "I have a ball here," he says, taking the mound, "and I bet I can get it in to one of the guys with the glove in three bounces!"

The kids here, mostly black and Latino, laugh at Kelly's self-deprecation as he tosses a pitch into the catcher's glove. It's a hard event not to enjoy. But even today, Kelly has Southie on his mind. Standing on Washington Street, he brings up the controversy over the name of the new waterfront. Kelly is adamant that it retain a reference to South Boston -- where it's technically located -- both in city planning documents and in the popular vernacular. For him, it's a referendum on the city's respect -- or lack thereof -- for Southie. "I asked O'Brien why he deleted South Boston [from the name] and he started talking about building heights," recalls Kelly of the April meeting where he exploded at O'Brien. "I asked him again and he started talking about linkage payments. I never got a straight answer.

"He looked at me," adds Kelly, "like I was the village idiot."

Village idiot he is not. Kelly offers a consistent and coherent vision of a neighborhood threatened by more than just housing prices. Seated in his fifth-floor office overlooking City Hall's red-brick plaza, Kelly describes the issue not in terms of Southie itself, but in terms of Mattapan -- specifically, the Mattapan described in Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon's Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions.

"It went from stability and strength and low crime, in a very short period, to high crime," says Kelly. "Mattapan right now, in many areas, shows tremendous stability, well-paved streets in good condition, kids playing in the yards, people mowing lawns. It's very nice, but there are many sections that are still in deplorable, run-down condition. And what I remember in the 1950s and '60s, growing up, was that with the exception of Beacon Hill, Mattapan was the most stable neighborhood in the city."

Now he sees a similar threat to South Boston as housing costs soar. "I would hope that reasonable people can agree that South Boston residents, through no fault of their own, are being displaced," says Kelly. "Being driven from your home is a cruel thing." And the neighborhood's coherence, he says, is best maintained if the long-time residents are offered new housing built with Seaport subsidies.

The thing is, "long-time residents" of South Boston tend to be those who look a lot like Jimmy Kelly. "Jimmy has this vision of Boston, which is a vision of discrete and somewhat insular neighborhoods where everyone in the neighborhood knows everyone else and everyone looks like everyone else," says Back Bay city councilor Tom Keane, who's not among Kelly's supporters. "It's a very different vision from mine, but it is a vision, and what's happening in the Seaport and the way that this is playing out is the defense of that vision."

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After the mayor, Kelly is the most visible elected official in a city with a troubled racial history. "When people think of the Boston City Council," says Kay Gibbs, a long-time South End resident and activist, "I bet you everybody is able to identify Jimmy Kelly, whereas some of the more moderate influences are largely anonymous in the public mind. They think that he is Boston. I think that he is not."

More-moderate influences -- that is, most of the council -- tend to keep quiet and vote for Kelly when the presidency comes up. One of few councilors to have challenged Kelly for the post is Gareth Saunders. "The political power structure has not dealt decisively and forcibly with Kelly," he says. "They have not condemned statements that are a little out of left field -- or I guess I should say out of right field."

The clearest explanation for Kelly's clout is that it's really Southie's clout, which gets to the best prism through which to examine local politics: voting. "His opponents have nothing resembling the power base he has," acknowledges one critic. "In South Boston, people don't just talk about it, they vote."

They sure do, at least compared to much of the rest of the city. "The disproportionate input Southie has because of its large turnout makes it the literal linchpin in all of city decision-making," says Lou DiNatale, senior fellow at the McCormack Institute for Public Affairs at UMass Boston.

Kelly's labor record is another piece of the puzzle. A former sheet-metal worker, the council president has strong labor ties and really understands union issues, according to Greater Boston Labor Council executive secretary Tony Romano. "He is very passionate," says Romano, who credits Kelly for supporting the city's living-wage ordinance and union labor agreements for various construction projects. "He comes from a working-class neighborhood, and he hasn't forgotten that."

All that ground-level power is backed up by a bigger stick: powerhouse congressman Joe Moakley (see "The Quiet Man," above). No doubt his support of Southie pols who fought to keep a New England Patriots stadium out of the neighborhood in 1997 emboldened Kelly. Also, the mayor himself has plenty of reasons to stay in step with the council president. The two are buddies, for one thing. And Menino sees the future of the Seaport District as a part of his legacy. So it's to his advantage to keep Kelly happy as long as the councilor has the muscle to stall Menino's plans.

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Between Kelly's stance on Seaport housing and his recent attempt to restrict roof decks and accordion-style restaurant doors in South Boston, observers have begun speculating as to what his real motivations might be. Some charge that Kelly wants an anti-yuppie force field around Southie, limiting upscale housing and clamping down on amenities that might attract a new kind of resident to the neighborhood.

For his part, Kelly says his push on the accordion doors and roof decks has been misunderstood. The open doors put the public closer to boozing, he says, while roof decks are the stuff of constant disputes among neighbors.

Regardless, says UMass's DiNatale, the inevitable gentrification of Southie and the coming development of the waterfront means that for Kelly, Stephen Lynch, and other Southie pols, the writing is on the wall. Economic and social diversity may not come fast enough to change the political equation in Southie anytime soon, but it's coming.

"There's no question that the Seaport District is an absolutely fundamental political threat to the dominance that South Boston has had in Boston municipal politics," says DiNatale. "Kelly understands that clearly."

Ben Geman can be reached at bgeman[a]phx.com.