Pete Stidman
acj.org

After four years of putting out their newspaper on pure volunteer power, the Fenway News board of directors has hired writer Stephen Brophy as editor.

“We still have to hold their feet to the fire,” said Brophy, speaking about real estate developers during his acceptance speech at the Fenway News annual meeting on June 14. “There are ways to be involved, and the newspaper is an essential part of that: a way for people to know what's going on and affect what's going on.”

On changes at the paper, Brophy is conservative yet ambitious. He is interested in bringing in new advertisers to support more pages, publishing a website and adding content that bridges the divide between long-term Fenway residents and the student population.

“We need music reviews for god's sake,” Brophy said. “We've got three great music schools here.”

Brophy first came to the Fenway in 1971 and was drawn into local politics by parents he met at Mothers Rest in the Back Bay Fens. They traded child-rearing and neighborhood development stories while he watched his son Benjamin frolic at the playground.

In 1974, a group of college students Brophy knew founded the Fenway News. Many of them lived in what Brophy termed a “commune.” They were hippies. Brophy admits this, but makes a clarification.

“In the West, [hippies] had a social focus. Here, they had more of a political focus,” Brophy said. “We were trying to build an ideal world in the Fenway that wouldn't be just for hippies.”

Brophy wrote a number of articles for the paper in 1975, including coverage of Northeastern University's development plans.

“It was class consciousness, race consciousness, to identify with the oppressed,” Brophy said. “In the south it was sheriffs and dogs. But you look at who was the oppressor up in this part of the world, and it was the developer.”

Many residents in the Fenway began focusing on development during the early 70s in reaction to the Boston Redevelopment Authority's (BRA) 1965 Fenway Urban Renewal Plan (FURP) and the planned I-695 inner beltway, the latter canceled in the face of citywide protests. Over 300 housing units were razed to create room for the Christian Science Center on Massachusetts Avenue as part of the FURP and I-695 would have required further use of eminent domain and the wrecking ball in the Fenway.

Today, Brophy works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a teaching assistant in the Media Studies department. His stories have appeared in the Cambridge Chronicle, Bay Windows and Cinéaction, a Canadian film criticism magazine.

Over the past two years, he has slowly worked his way back into the mix at the Fenway News. Things have changed in the old neighborhood, he reports.

“The first thing I did when I came back was to write about the Berklee [College of Music] Task Force and their plan to expand campus housing. The BRA chairs the task force, which is unfortunate, but from the beginning, they knew they had to have community involvement, instead of the resistance to it they gave in the old days. I like that.”

This article originally ran in The Boston Courant on June 30, 2007.