Slow Train Comin'... Irish Riviera Gentrification: Duxbury Beach

Is Gentrification changing the character of the Irish Riviera? Duxbury Beach, the very tiny slice of Irish Riviera that the gods allotted Duxbury, will be today's case study. 

Duxbury Beach is the smallest Irish Riviera neighborhood outside of Gurnet/Saquish, and is thusly easier to scout for this phenomena than somewhere which jams people thickly along the coastline like Scituate or Hull does. About half of Marshfield's population is within a mile of the ocean. The DBC is about 2% of Duxbury's population. Changes here are instantly noticeable. 

Size doesn't matter, as I tell my girlfriends. Gentrification of beach neighborhoods is inevitable. You just see it easier in a small village.

Gentrification is an influx of wealthier residents into a formerly working class neighborhood which gradually changes the character of the neighborhood. 

The causes are legion, but they almost all tie to money eventually. Someone is giving up a house for monetary reasons, and someone is buying it off them for monetary reasons.

It is generally thought of as an urban thing, but- as we'll see today- it can happen anywhere. You'd think that toney Duxbury would be difficult to gentrify, but remember that Duxbury was a farmer-ish backwater for most of her history. It just got ahead of the curve in the last few decades, really not a lot of time at all in the great scheme of things.

Might I add that, in the very background of that picture above, live 15,000 Duxbury residents who essentially view this Gurnet Road neighborhood as Lower Green Harbor. They aren't 100% wrong, at least in an Irish Riviera sort of way. That distinction blurs a little more each day, however.

Slow train comin'

It happens everywhere in the world, and it is timeless. I can imagine some caveman was most likely encroached upon and eventually displaced by people from more affluent caves.

Gentrification is a funny thing. It is what the neighborhood might desire if it were sentient. "Older houses are torn down and replaced with newer ones. Property values increase across the board." 

"Better, stronger, faster," like the TV show said. Just with houses, it's "Bigger, taller, costlier."

However, a sentient neighborhood may also hold nostalgia for how things used to be, and it may even be capable of making subtle distinctions between who used to be there and who is there now.

(Editor: The cottage above has been demo'd and rebuilt- bigger- since we took these pics) 

That is a story for another day. It is also fantasy. The reality is that someone bought a small cottage and built it up into a big house. Or someone kept their house as it was, and it is now towered over by the upgraded "cottages."

It isn't for me to say whether this is a good thing or even a natural progression. I suppose it depends on who you ask. A yuppie might think it's a great thing. It may not be viewed as great by a person who remembers a little cottage neighborhood in 1972, a person who now has houses towering over him on either side to the extent that his neighbors could shoot basketballs at his chimney from their upstairs bedrooms.

Gentrification usually wins, via the Big Bank Takes Little Bank rules of commerce. Very few wealthy neighborhoods are taken over by poor people, other than that Low Income Housing Infestation nightmare being pitched in the Presidential campaigns. Poor people, especially the ones who own a cottage on a beach, are in turn very amenable to large cash offers being made on their property.

Duxbury Beach is the photo part of this essay. Duxbury, as well as her Duxbury Beach neighborhood, is no stranger to gentrification. Duxbury was founded by a guy (Myles Standish) for whom 1637 Plymouth had gotten a little too crowded. 

Plymouth herself had undergone gentrification of a different sort, when more affluent settlers took over an abandoned Wampanoag settlement. Everyone in Patuxet, which is what Plymouth used to be called, was dead from disease caught from European fishermen. The Pilgrims had immunity to smallpox (or hepatitis, meningitis, typhus, chickenpox, leptospirosis, opinions vary), and that was the only affluence that mattered once someone started coughing Plague around.

Duxbury became a farming community, and with the exception of a brief wooden shipbuilding period which essentially ended when the CSS Virginia sank the USS Cumberland, it was always a backwater. Duxbury actually went about 100 years without equaling her 1850s population total.

In the 1950s, the advent of Route 3 opened up Duxbury to people from Boston, either workers or retirees. Duxbury, reborn as a resort/retirement community also fit for commuters, was revitalized. People fleeing urban strife in the 1970s also favored very rural Duxbury.

Foster Cass, the great Duxbury soccer coach AND English teacher, once asked a class I was in to raise their hands if they moved to Duxbury from Dorchester, Roxbury, Southie, Roslindale, JP, Charlestown or Hyde Park. Just about every hand in the class went up.

They had 1500 people in 1920, they have 15,000 today. Many of the 15,000 bought an old farmer house and upgraded it. Many others just bulldozed the old house and put up what we now call McMansions. There are plenty of Captain's houses (built to house workers, but disregard that) to keep the Old School look alive. Before long, Duxbury had become "Deluxebury."

Duxbury Beach was uninhabited for much of history. Cable Hill used to be called Rouse's Hummock, because he was the only one who lived there. Rouse's Hummock is what Hummock Lane is named for.

George and Georgina White tried to build almost 300 cottages further south of this neighborhood at the end of the 19th Century. It's what the Powder Point Bridge was built to accommodate. The Portland Gale of 1898 scared away investors, and the idea- as well as the beachfront property- was abandoned. 

The land was sold to a citizen group, then to a non-profit, the Duxbury Beach Reservation. The Reservation runs everything south of the gates, either as an enviro-friendly nature reserve or a jam-10,000-people-in beach parking lot.

Many attempts were made by the Commonwealth to purchase the beach, which probably would have ended up with it being very similar to what is now Horseneck Beach State Reservation in Westport. This is not at all unlike how the DBR runs their chunk of the beach. 

Further north of that, after a hurricane changed the course of the Green Harbor River (both old and new river mouths can be seen on the Fish Map of Duxbury), northern Duxbury Beach became somewhat more suited for development. An 1872 dyke and 1898 jetty construction softened the blow from storm waves somewhat while concurrently altering the immediate shoreline sandflow current. Mosquito control efforts (and the river change/dyke) drained the marshes, and the area became inhabitable. 

Green Harbor was the site of a small fishing/farming settlement since 1627. Saquish was inhabited early enough to have fired at the British. South of Green Harbor was full marsh with a thin strip of beach until the 1804 Snow Hurricane. 

An 1833 map shows no development at all in the DBC area. Same with both 1857 and 1879 maps. A 1923 map might show structures in place, might not. Pictures of the trans-Atlantic cable coming ashore in 1869 show the area being empty, even on the Cable Hill high ground.

Cottages began to bleed down from neighboring Marshfield, and I bet Mr. Rouse's ghost was pissed.

Postwar prosperity, desire for oceanfront recreation, white flight, highway construction and cheap open land led to the construction of more and more cottages, right up to the DBR land. Before you could say "Jackie Robinson," Duxbury Beach became a textbook Irish Riviera resort community.

The neighborhood had gained a certain look that it held from the 1950s through the 1990s. Major ocean storms in 1978 and 1991 led to both the destruction of many cottages and an influx of insurance money. Many people built up considerably higher than they used to be before the storms. 

Most of the July 3rd bonfires between WWII and Tom Brady quarterbacking the Patriots were built from some sort of storm debris or rebuild project. This rebuilding saw the neighborhood getting a bit more valuable each year. 

Insurance money wasn't the only money to come into the neighborhood. 

Oceanfront property in a wealthy town with an Ivy league factory high school is going to draw people in, and the people with the High Card in the bidding weren't the Irish and Italian families of blue collar Summer People who made up most of the DBC demographic for 50 years.

Matt Taibbi, speaking about Goldman-Sachs, described them as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." If you think of rich people thusly, you know it was only a matter of time before the DBC looked like a prime investment opportunity.

Buy a cottage for X, spend Y restoring it, sell it for Z, with Z > X+Y. Simple gentrification algebra. Goldman-Sachs would recognize it in a nanosecond.

Gentrification isn't a sprint, it's a crawl. It is far more tortoise than hare. You see it happen more over time, although you can see much of the story simply by walking around a small neighborhood. My criteria when shooting at houses here was "looks about the same as it did when I was a child." I think the Cristafulli/Leone house above may have been red when I was a kid, but you know what I mean.

My memories on the neighborhood's character start in the early 1970s. Older folks than me might remember when some of these houses pictured in this article were the largest houses in the area. 

I have no idea which house in the neighborhood was the first, or which has been up the longest, or who was the first year round person. I'd love to hear guesses in the comments, and don't be afraid to bother grandpa to find out for me. 

Walter Read would have known, and Mister Carroll (Editor: when referencing the parent of someone you went to high school with, they are always a Mister or a Miss, even if you are 53 years old. I do so with Chrissy Carroll's dad, I do so with Mrs. Forfia, who isn't even a Forfia anymore, and I did so with Mrs. Reed, Mrs. Kerrigan, Mrs. Fisher, etc... there is a ten year window on this, and I refer to Colleen Krugger's parents as Rick and Sally because Colleen was a generation behind mine) might know. Mister Carroll can reference back to when the seawall was a bunch of telephone poles, in case you doubt my sources.

Many properties, while going from cottage to house, also went from summer to year-round. The town's excellent schools drew in families. Like the rest of Duxbury, there are also a lot of well-off retirees. Not everyone buying these houses flipped them.

Sometimes these year-rounders were culled from the Summer flock, sometimes they weren't. 

All neighborhoods, everywhere, operate along a certain manner. The summer people who become year-rounders instinctively, for lack of a better term, Get It. Many cottage sales were made to branches of families who owned nearby cottages. These transitions were usually seamless.

The newcomers, on the other hand, sometimes were slow to understand the ways of the neighborhood. 

Some form of the Karen phenomena begins to involve itself. 

A bonfire that was a neighborhood tradition for 60 years might now be seen as the mischief of hooligans, something to be complained about. Right of ways that were formerly open now get fenced off, left for the courts to decide. Police get called on kids building a sandcastle.

Even without that Karen action, a new group of citizens is bound to change the character of the area. 

The locals laugh it off, but there are less and less old school locals each year. Karen, on the other hand, grows exponentially.

I work for a publication that spams a whole lot of Massachusetts town Facebook groups, and I get the feeds from all of them. Similar friction happened as the Pine Hills went up in what was previously the most hillbilly part of Plymouth. It happens in every town on Cape Cod.

The trend looks to continue. A new seawall provides additional security to the properties in the neighborhood. Investing in a coastal property is now less risk-aversive. Property values will rise, drawing in a wealthier sort of purchaser.

Each new generation will be further and further removed from the blue collar roots of the neighborhood. 

I don't live there, and I haven't lived there for over 20 years. I moved to the lakes region of Plymouth County, and then to a Cape Cod beach neighborhood. Both are slowly undergoing a similar transition.

The yuppie/blue collar tension in this article is not referencing anything or anyone in particular, even indirectly, from this Duxbury Beach neighborhood. I'm 20 years removed from the local gossip of the neighborhood. 

I love every cottage pictured in this article, even that spooky one below with the bent tree. I'm just speaking in generalized terms about the natural way of things in Irish Riviera resort communities, a subject in which I have widespread experience.