The Combat Zone Was Boston’s Red-Light District on Washington Street
How lower Washington Street became the country’s first official adult entertainment zone in 1974, and what replaced it.
For a few decades, the blocks of Washington Street between Boylston and Kneeland Streets had a nickname everyone in Boston knew: the Combat Zone.
How it started
In the early 1960s, the city tore down Scollay Square, Boston’s old red-light district, to build Government Center. The bars, burlesque houses and strip clubs that were displaced moved to lower Washington Street, where rents were cheap.
The name came from newspaper exposés by reporter Jean Cole in the 1960s, a nod to the fights and crime on the strip and to the sailors from the Charlestown Navy Yard who crowded its clubs.
An official adult zone
In 1974 the Boston Redevelopment Authority made it official, zoning the area as an adult entertainment district. Boston was the first U.S. city to try that. The Zone peaked from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, with places like the Naked i Cabaret, the Two O’Clock Club and the Pilgrim Theatre, where a sitting congressman, Wilbur Mills, famously turned up on stage in December 1974.
Crime there drew more and more attention, especially after the 1976 killing of Harvard football player Andrew Puopolo in the Zone.
What happened to it
It faded through the 1980s and 1990s: property values rose, the Navy Yard closed, the AIDS epidemic hit, and home video and then the internet took away much of the business. Redevelopment did the rest. Emerson College and Suffolk University moved in, and a Ritz-Carlton, apartment towers and the restored Hayden Building replaced much of the old strip.
Walk those blocks today and you’re at the edge of the Theater District and Chinatown, a few minutes from the Wang and The Wilbur.
Sources: Wikipedia: Combat Zone, Boston.
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