Something about the Christmas season makes people wax nostalgic.

The exam rooms where I see patients looks out over Howard Street and at the Shaw Street neighborhood. Many of my patients grew up there and will point out a house and tell a funny story.

I have a map of New London from 1911. The field outside my window between Shaw Street and Howard Street used to be a cove with boats in it. Somewhere along the line, it got filled in, and I’m told a barrel company, a gas station and an Italian baker used to sit on that land. There’s also an abandoned stone building in the north end of that field that housed a guy who was a “rags and bones man." A “rags and bones man” would drive around in horse and buggy or push a cart and collect rags, bones and other discarded stuff. Rags were sold to papermills. Bones were sold to knive makers for knife handles. Seems a lot more interesting that a recycling bin.

On the other side of my building and outside my office window is the where the Fort Neck or Fort Trumbull neighborhood used to be. It’s a wasteland now, but long before the Supreme Court decided it could be razed under eminent domain, it had been a vibrant working class neighborhood, just like the Shaw Street neighborhood.

In the early 1900s, however, the two neighborhoods were polar opposites politically. The Fort was made up of left-wing anarchists from Northern Italy, while Shaw Street was mainly Sicilian, tended to be more conservative, and housed, in the 1920s, a headquarters for the Fascist League of America.

About 10 years ago, I took care of a 90ish-year-old Italian woman who grew up in New London, and I asked her if she grew up in the Fort. “Oh, no,” she said. “My father wouldn’t let me go to the Fort.” Then she looked both ways as if to make sure no one was listening (we were all alone in the exam room) and whispered: “They were anarchists.”

About that same time, I saw another 90ish-year-old man, a self-proclaimed anarchista from the Fort who proudly told me that back in the day, his father “busted up heads” of some of the Shaw Street fascists. I wish that I had spent more time listening to them, writing down their stories. But alas, both are gone now, as are their memories.

During Prohibition, in the 1920s, Fort Neck was a center of bootlegging — a “New London Oasis,” as described in The Day back then. Fort Neck fisherman would sail out to international waters, where they would buy booze on “rum row.” Then they’d motor back, right under the nose of the Coast Guard stationed at Fort Trumbull. There were more distilleries, breweries, speakeasies and kitchen bars in the Fort and on Shaw Street than anywhere else in Connecticut, by some estimates. I am of the belief that the bootlegging income allowed these blue collar workers to survive during the Great Depression.

Recently, a number of patients in their 70s and 80s have looked out the exam room window at the field between Howard and Shaw Street. They told me about the friendly football games between the Shaw Street and Fort Trumbull gangs that used to happen at Thanksgiving each year when they were kids. That field is under construction now, and luxury apartments are going up over it, burying the field and a lot of memories.

On Christmas Eve this year, my family will gather at Auntie Sis’ house for the feast with seven fishes. We’ll tell nostalgic stories, and the little kids will probably not listen but will hear just enough so that someday, our silly stories will be things they talk about.