OODM: I’m going to take research time into account, adding time when necessary to make retries. I’ll assume Neal arrives at the permissions department just as they open at nine.
9-10 am-It takes Neal half an hour to fill out the paperwork and another half hour for the attendant to check his references at BU. Access in hand, he marches off to begin the search.
10-11 am-It takes him an hour to read up on Pickman. He learns some of the standard stuff that he probably already knew; Pickman’s family had a past history in the occult, with an ancestor hanged in Salem for witchcraft in 1692. The family apparently had an extensive library of occult texts written in Greek. He learns that Pickman’s painting, “Ghoul Feeding,” was sold at auction after his father passed away and made its way into the ownership of a local art collector named Brian O’Malley. No other paintings were ever recovered. The case of Pickman’s disappearance was never resolved.
11am -2 pm- It takes him a several hours to track down and skim through the book suggested by Renard. It is a general history of the North End with particular emphasis on the architectural trends and zoning layouts of the district. It discusses the history of some of the older structures, the types of houses built (some of which lasted for centuries), as well as detailing the gradual creation of monuments and tourist attractions around the North End. Of particular interest, the book discusses the role of the Italian mafia in the renovation of certain parts of the district. Filippo “Phil” Buccola, head of the mafia in the area following the demise of Gaspare Messina in 1924, ran bootlegging, racketeering, and loansharking operations in the area through the 1930’s. These were limited operations, due to the dominance of the Irish boss from South Boston, Frankie Wallace. With the successful murder of Wallace and the end of prohibition, Buccola scrambled to take the opportunity to invest in more legitimate fronts for his racketeering. These involved all sorts of things, but the book mainly details Buccola’s construction and property interests. Buccola became aware of precisely how much revenue could be gained (and laundered) in construction costs when he saw how long it took to construct the nearby Sumner tunnel. Beginning in 1934, the year Sumner Tunnel opened, Buccola bought much of the property in the area that Pickman’s place was supposed to be, usually badgering the current Italian-American landowners to bring the costs down, and tore down all of the older ramshackle structures, replacing them with sturdier brick apartments. Much of the construction expenditures used in the process were actually a means to launder illegitimate earnings and turn it into viable capital, with which Buccola then invested in legitimate interests all throughout Boston, while continuing with racketeering, numbers, and loan-sharking. The book, though written in the 1990’s, doesn’t get much past the 1950’s, presumably because there has been little change in North End construction since that time, save for the construction of the Callhan Tunnel, which opened to the public in 1961. By this time, Buccola had retired to Sicily, but his successor, Ray Patriarca, successfully acquired a share of the construction interests in building the second, sister tunnel to the Sumner.[Note that these are well traversed commuter tunnels, veering somewhat to the southeast of the North End and have nothing to do with the ancient tunnel systems Pickman described to Thurber].
2-4 pm- Neal spends a bit of time fruitlessly looking for items on the tremors, then finally comes across a journal article published in 1996 shortly after the last set of tremors. It doesn’t tell much more than they already heard on the radio, though it does show a map of Boston proper which details 13 unique epicenters scattered in or near downtown, from Beacon hill, to the commons, to the financial district, underneath the City hall, Haymarket, and up into the north end, with two epicenters in particular standing out; one just a little north of Copp’s Hill cemetery, and another just north and east of the alleyways where Pickman’s place was supposed to be located.
4-4:15- This part goes much more quickly; Neal just reads that the 10 year old was a student at the Eliot school in the North End, on the southeast corner of the intersection of Charter and Hanover streets. He never came home from school one day. He was known to visit the North End Playground, which is at the very northern tip of the North End overlooking the Harbor. The most direct path there would take him through the alleyway networks where Pickman’s place is supposed to be, and the path from the Playground back to his apartment where he lives with his mother on Lynn St would take him by the Copp’s Hill Cemetary. None of his friends knows where he went that day.
4:26-Neal calls to make an appointment with the City Archives, but learns it is too late to schedule one for today, as they are just about to close. They are able to schedule him in for the following morning at 10 am.
OODM:If Neal is an iron man researcher, he can do something else before the appointed meeting time, or he can assume he took a break for lunch somewhere in the above schedule and that the time for the meeting is drawing near.
Give apocalypstick a chance to chime in, then feel free to start the meeting. At this point in the evening, the Boston Public Library is probably the best bet for squeezing in any more research. It has the best historical selection of newspapers and journals on microfiche available, even surpassing Widener in this regard.
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