Sunday night, November 7, 1982. Herman Greenfield, long-time proprietor of Gary Drug, remembers it well. Police climbed onto ladders, changing signs on Charles Street. When dawn broke the next morning, drivers were surprised. The traffic rolled south, not north. The cacophony of impatient drivers leaning on their horns was gone. The pollution from their tailpipes was nowhere to be smelled.

In one night, Mayor Kevin White had transformed his neighborhood. He didn’t ask anyone if it was okay. There was no “public process.” He just did it.

As is typical of legends, this event has taken on a life of its own. Some people remember it as happening on the last night before White left office. But he didn’t leave office until 1984. Some remember it as a whim that went against the grain of Charles Street merchants. But most merchants and most residents had implored the city for years to get rid of that traffic.

No matter. Everyone who lived here at the time considers the event a watershed. It was one of the first “traffic calming” and pedestrian-promoting actions taken by a city official.

Before the change of direction, Charles Street was a thoroughfare for suburbanites rushing home for dinner. Afterward, it was ours again.

Before, businesses were thwarted because commuters had no place to stop to run in for a bottle of aspirin at Gary Drug, though they surely needed that aspirin, trapped as they were in the traffic. Neighbors avoided the street too during rush hour. No way would I subject my little girls to the danger and the dirt.

Afterward, we could patronize our shops at any time of day, and the pedestrians outnumbered the cars.

The Boston Globe’s report on November 8 called the change of direction an “experiment.” We knew it wasn’t. Later, neighborhood leaders, afraid some later mayor would reverse Mayor White’s reversal, got the city to install a hefty island in the intersection of Beacon and Charles streets so cars couldn’t get to the Beacon Hill section of Charles Street.

There were repercussions. Some Beacon Hill residents worried how they would get home. Back Bay residents complained at the increased traffic on Berkeley Street. A few local merchants who still believed in the salvation of cars fumed that their business would dry up.

Those problems mostly got solved. Robert Beal of Brimmer Street, realizing he’d have to find a different route home if he were in his car, considered the illegal U-turn everyone made at the Storrow Drive exit at Beacon Street, and persuaded officials to make it legal. Berkeley Street traffic is still heavier than it was before Charles Street’s transformation, but Charles Street’s reduced traffic load turned out to be good for business.

This event will be the one Beacon Hill residents most remember about our late mayor. But there are other neighborhood memories too.

When White was first elected he vowed to give every neighborhood something it wanted. Beacon Hill got more bricks and gas lamps, completing a streetscape that now defines the neighborhood and its boundaries. Because cities were at their nadir, and Kevin White loved this city, he gave us fun, tapping an old friend and fellow Beacon Hill resident, Katherine Kane, to rev up the play index in the city, starting with Summerthing and culminating with a Boston 200 celebration and First Night in 1976.

Colin Diver, a then-young lawyer who was an aide in White’s first administration, remembers meetings at the mayor’s house on Mount Vernon Street. “Kevin would invite us over, and he would pop corn,” Diver said. “We’d begin talking about infill housing, but soon we’d be talking about Bobby Crane or Volpe or just politics.”

During the time White was in office and afterward, neighbors remember him for walking around. He’d walk with his dog. He patronized the local shops. Greenfield remembers him as a bright guy, politically savvy, and personable. “He was always friendly and outgoing and he lived up to his reputation as a person of action,” said Greenfield. “A little girl got hit by a bike at our intersection, and he was the first on the scene.”

Everyone pointed out how much Kevin White loved the Paramount Restaurant, and the Paramount celebrates that devotion with a picture of him on its wall.

Jack Gurnon of Charles Street Supply remembers the mayor walking with his kids. “He was a great neighborhood guy. He loved being out in public,” said Gurnon, who was walking up to the Parkman House for the wake when I interviewed him. “When he came into the store everything stopped. It was like a rock star had come by.”

White called the 15-year-old Gurnon “kid.” “Hey kid, smile. Life’s great,” he would say. But after Gurnon grew up, White still called him “kid.”

“ ‘Hey, kid, I’ve got a problem with my sink,’ ” Gurnon reported White announcing in the store. So Gurnon would go over and help him with projects from time to time. “He was like everybody else,” said Gurnon. “Irish Catholic who moved into a house that was too expensive for him, and not wanting to pay anyone to do something he could figure out himself.”

Gurnon pointed out extra benefits to Beacon Hill by having a mayor as a neighbor. “There was less trash, and the lights were always fixed,” Gurnon remembers. “A police cruiser was in front of the house 24/7.  If anything happened you could run to the corner, and the guy was there.”

The city has its own legends about Mayor White, but our legend is local. We are the ones who knew him not only as mayor, but as our neighbor. May he walk the streets of heaven as he walked ours.