Street Hawkers Will No Longer Peddle the Phoenix

The Boston Phoenix will no longer be sold by street hawkers, beginning next week.

Howard W. Wolk, general manager of the Phoenix, said yesterday there are no longer enough hawkers to make such sales profitable. Wolk blamed the "declining street scene" for reducing the number of hawkers from about 100 in 1969 to "five regulars and five part-timers."

Wolk said hawkers sell only a "nominal" percentage of the Phoenix's 70,000 paid circulation.

Denying that the Phoenix is trying to change its image, Wolk said that it will probably still be considered the "paper of the street people."

David Stein, circulation director of The Real Paper, the Phoenix's main competitor, said yesterday The Real Paper will continue to use hawkers "as long as sales warrant."

Stein said that loss of revenue from Phoenix sales may oblige some hawkers to quit, thereby reducing the profitability of Real Paper street sales to the point where they will have to be discontinued.

Stein said the hawkers were successful when the Phoenix and The Real Paper were considered underground papers, but that increasing public acceptance of the papers, leading to greater newsstand sales, has hurt the hawkers.

The Phoenix, founded in 1969, was bought in 1972 by publisher Stephen M. Mindich, who merged it with the less politically-oriented Boston After Dark.

Staff members unhappy with the new management then formed The Real Paper, which was purchased three years later by David Rockefeller Jr. and two other partners. Both papers have since run ad campaigns disavowing their radical images.

Richard Eagles, who has been a hawker for six years, said yesterday that the hawkers had "made the Phoenix," and that the paper is "ripping them off" by stopping street sales. Eagles added that the Phoenix management "has always put on a liberal front," but has actually been anti-labor.