MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In 1956, the legendary four-time Boston mayor, James Michael Curley, left the “House with the Shamrock Shutters” for the last time. For over forty years, the neo-Georgian mansion located at 350 Jamaicaway had stood not only as a symbol of the populist mayor’s ascent from Irish immigrant poverty to Massachusetts governor but also as the “demonstration” house that signified his presumed graft. Even today, Curley remains a controversial figure: the “Mayor of the Poor” to some, the “Scandalous Mayor” to others. Nevertheless, Curley’s political activities left both literal and figurative marks on Boston’s urban culture. His career—and, by extension, his house—thus offers excellent insight regarding the complex social issues that shaped American urban life during the early twentieth century. Because of its iconic status, when the house came on the market in the 1980s, the City of Boston purchased it with the hope that it could be preserved for community use. To date, however, that hope has gone unfulfilled, and this prominently located house has—paradoxically—sat empty, despite being full of a city’s collective memories.

For the past year, the Curley House has been the focus of a new digital humanities course at Wentworth Institute of Technology. Since creating a physical museum is not currently feasible, student teams have engaged with a variety of faculty and external collaborators in order to curate a virtual museum devoted to the Curley legacy. This paper will discuss how our course challenges students to grapple with the urban past through a dynamic and interdisciplinary interplay of historical and digital methodologies that have led to meaningful, negotiated reinterpretations of Curley’s civic importance. In addition, we hope to highlight the diverse ways that a legendary urban figure can be (re)presented via public digital humanities and how such approaches can contribute to discourse on urban culture.