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chapter 6  Lodgings In his warnings, Robert Love created a prose map that plotted the many kinds of lodgings found by newcomers. Rebecca Anderson and her two children were living in a chamber of John Bartlett’s; Thomas Frasier’s shop was hired as living quarters by a shoemaker and his wife, fresh from London ; Anthony St. John was working for and living with the baker John Lucas. Bartlett, Frasier, and Lucas were among many hundreds of Boston residents identified by Love as landlords who took in ‘‘strangers.’’ The roster of their names and locations exposes not only the town’s social hierarchy but also the seaport’s streets, alleys, and structures. Much remains in the shadows. The indefatigable warner reported where strangers could be found on the urban grid but not if they lived upstairs or down, in a handsome house or a backyard hovel, in one room or more, with decent furnishings or almost none. Love’s goal, after all, was to enable the selectmen to find the sojourning stranger, if they chose to do so, or to reprimand a landlord who had failed to give notification.1 Lining Boston’s streets were roughly two thousand buildings of irregular shape and size. A late eighteenth-century account observed that ‘‘two contiguous Houses are seldom found of the same height.’’ Most blocks sported a jumble of structures, with large and small residences found next to the town’s seventeen churches and innumerable shops and taverns. Despite ordinances requiring new construction be of brick, the majority of dwellings were wooden, two-story affairs. William Price’s astonishingly detailed 1769 map (produced on the endsheets of this book) reveals that on the west side of Marlborough Street in the two blocks between West Street and Rawson’s Lane, for example, the buildings ranged between one and three stories and were nearly continuous, with few yards or passageways 96 Chapter 6 between them. Throughout the town, gambrel roofs were a common architectural feature, found on both modest houses and the grandest residences. The latter could contain as many as twenty-six rooms and were often set back from the street and surrounded by handsome gardens.2 Love’s testimony that two-thirds of warned newcomers secured lodgings is powerful evidence that the great majority of people listed on Boston ’s warning rolls were not abjectly poor. In all, Love named nine hundred town residents who accommodated 1,482 warned parties. Some newcomers were prosperous enough to rent spacious quarters for their families. Many more arrived without much visible capital, but at least they carried with them sufficient coins, paper money, social credit, kin connections, charm, or potential as an employee to convince a Bostonian to house them.3 Love’s phrasing sorts the living arrangements of strangers into four types. The majority ‘‘kept with’’ a landlord, meaning they lodged inside his or her dwelling and probably lived as part of the household. For this group, the warner used a range of verbs: ‘‘lives with,’’ ‘‘lodges at,’’ ‘‘lives and works for.’’ A second type consisted of boarders, some of whom rented a chamber from a Bostonian. Third were new arrivals without long-term living arrangements, staying temporarily at an inn. A fourth group could afford to ‘‘hire’’ houses. This profited the rentiers of Boston, particularly merchants who had invested in multiple properties. John Hancock, for example , whose elegant residence was at the base of Beacon Hill, owned a rental house a few blocks eastward.4 For those ‘‘living in’’ others’ households, Love’s notes rarely indicate whether the newcomer was paying rent, exchanging services for room and board, or staying with kin or friends on a nonpaying basis. The proportion staying with kin appears to have been quite small: 5 percent of the warned parties with landlords shared their landlord’s surname or told Love that they were lodging with relatives. These arrangements—living in, boarding, renting—could overlap, of course. Early modern cities were full of subtenants , and the warner’s information allows us to see the layering of living arrangements. It was not unusual for him to explain, for example, that Ruth Scott ‘‘keeps now with the widow Dorothy Turner’’ who ‘‘lives in a house of Mr. Josiah Quincy.’’5 Love’s landlords remind us of the many ways in which urban dwellers earned livelihoods—by speculating in real estate, managing wharves, or operating disorderly houses. Their biographical sketches not only evoke the vast assortment of Bostonians...

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