Dante Ramos’s otherwise fine piece on the 1976 murder of Andrew Puopolo in Boston’s Combat Zone repeats an often-cited but incorrect notion that the Combat Zone was made up of businesses that had moved from Scollay Square (“Murder in the Combat Zone,’’ Ideas, Aug. 28). In fact, the area that would later be designated as the Combat Zone was already populated with bars and clubs that had thrived as early as the late 1940s.

Scollay Square was no Disneyland. By the beginning of the 1960s, it was a rundown collection of seedy bars and taverns (but no peep shows, as Ramos suggests), which made the area ripe for redevelopment into Government Center. But the Combat Zone was not a replacement for Scollay Square; it was a completely different entity and existed for different purposes.

David Kruh

Reading

The writer is the author of “Always Something Doing,’’ a history of Scollay Square.