Jonas Prang

Less than careful commuter parking on Centre St

2012-02-10T05:00:00.016-05:00

Ticketed and hooked within fifteen minutes.

We've stumbled upon imminent disaster before and persuaded the BTD to hold off towing a neighbor's car until we've been able to bang on their door to alert them to the impending tow. Usually the tow operator has shown patience and been willing to wait a couple of minutes before hooking the vehicle.

Somehow we didn't feel quite the same compassion to the random commuter owner of this automobile, who wedged his full-sized vehicle into a half-sized spot.

We don't have strong opinions about how severely parking violations should be treated on Centre Street, but we were astounded at how little time elapsed between this car being spotted, being ticketed, and being towed. About a quarter of an hour from beginning to end.

The towing section of the BTD website tells this: "Vehicles towed for illegal parking are subject to a $90.00 tow fee. In addition, there is a storage fee of $3.00/hour up to $15.00/day. Payment may be made by cash, Master Card, VISA, ATM card, or debit card." That, plus the $100 for the ticket, sets the penalty at $193 minimum. Ouch. Tic-toc. The tow lot closes at 10:30 p.m.

The 47 bus out of Dudley is the closest bus. Not a pleasant walk.

John D. O'Briant gets a spanking new entrance

2012-02-07T05:00:00.003-05:00

After much digging and construction, the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science has gotten its new entrance.

Semper Fi! no more: Changes in Kittredge Square

2012-02-05T05:00:00.023-05:00

From Semper Fi! to more sedate

It's with mixed feeling that we see the work being done at the corner of Highland and Millmont streets adjacent to Alvah Kittredge Park. The scarlet and gold house always brought to mind the last lines of the last stanza of the Marine Hymn: If the Army and the Navy / Ever look on Heaven’s scenes / They will find the streets are guarded / By The United States Marines.

Google Street View still shows the house in its former Marine Corps-colors glory.

Meanwhile up the street, the park itself is still in a stage of upheaval. Check out Iseut's blog post to read about Chris McCarthy's work to gain funding for this restoration. She also has pre-construction pictures.

Alvah Kittredge Square's second rebuild in 30 years

The Powahouse foundation has been poured. Hopefully, there'll still be art for the Powahouse. The neighborhood listserve tells that thieves coveting construction materials at the site were scared away Sunday last by the developer. Yet again, Iseut's blog is always a good read: Here are two posts on the Powahouse, one from June 2011, with a graphic of the design and another one from the previous year.

Poured foundation for the development at Kittredge Square

And, the director of Historic Boston thanks watchful neighbors and the BPD for preventing dumping at the rear of Alvah's house. We are so happy that Historic Boston has taken responsibility for redeveloping the house after so many years of neglect.

The still derelict façade of the Kittredge House

In this post (with pics), Iseut writes about Historic Boston, Inc. turning the Kittredge House into condos. In an apparent dig at the Centre Street neighbors' implacable opposition to Darryl Settles's plan for a bar/restaurant (for example), Iseut writes that "Many of us still haven't given up on the restaurant idea". Having just now heard about the idea, we'll remain agnostic about it until we learn more.

No Saturday mail delivery? No Friday delivery, either

2012-02-02T05:00:00.001-05:00

The loading doc of the Stull & Lee Roxbury post office

For years mail delivery at our residence has been a lick and a promise on Friday—a single piece at best. Then Saturday would be the bonus day. Apparently the balance of Friday's mail and all of Saturday's mail would be delivered on Saturday.

We always attributed this to the Monday-to-Friday mail carrier wanting to work a easy, half day before lighting off for the weekend, sticking it to the Saturday carrier. This nuisance, stacked next to the plague of misdelivered mail (wrong number, wrong street name, sometime both) seemed small beer for life in Roxbury.

But then, the post office sorting got way better, so that it is rare for us to get mail that is not ours. However, now, the delivery on both Friday and Saturday is scant to non-existent. The bonus day is Monday. It seems this might be a staffing decision at a higher level, with money being saved by whacking delivery or sorting staff for these two days.

Again, this seems a small nuisance compared to the larger tribulations of urban living, but we can't help feeling that the USPS is sticking it to Roxbury. When the rest of the country goes to five day delivery, will Roxbury get only four days?

Clean streets IV

2012-01-31T05:00:00.002-05:00

About two years ago we whined about the disgusting mess on the odd-numbered side of Roxbury Street between Eliot Square and Gardner Street.

To be fair we ought to commend whomever has been keeping that stretch of commuter parking free of trash and litter. Walking by the other day, this is what we found.

No trash, no build up of leaves; but, rather a reasonably clean sidewalk and gutter. To whomever is tending to this part of Roxbury Street we say, Thank you!

Local business spills over onto local streets

2012-01-29T05:00:00.004-05:00

Phillips Auto Service from February 2010

A local Budget truck rental operation seasonally spills over its parking operation onto the already parked-up streets. The lot itself can accommodate about a half-dozen panel trucks.

But recently, we've noticed a more chronic appropriation of scarce on-street parking to support this small business. Frequently one or more Budget trucks are parked directly in front of the operation.

Sometimes a truck is parked on Centre Street between Cedar and New Heath Street, sometime on Marcella Street near the curve leading down to Centre Street. Perhaps this is on-street parking by renters, but we're thinking its unlikely for a renter to pay the rental fee while leaving the truck parked in the same location for several days.

A new blog about Fort Hill/Highland Park, Roxbury

2012-01-27T05:00:00.034-05:00

Please, please check out this relatively new blog—first posts appeared last September.

It is awesome.

But, don't flit over there like a hummingbird, expecting to slurp up a quick post or two. Make a cup of hot chocolate, burrow into your favorite warm chair, and expect to stay a while.

The range of topics and the detail of the writing is fascinating.

From redirects to beer and Mel Lyman and to recent census data to authored articles on the Athenaeum the blogger has command of a vast range of historical resources and the wit to write well about what he finds.

We've stashed a link on the left under Fort Hill Blogs so we see when there is a new post.

Arthur's house gets new siding

2012-01-25T15:23:00.001-05:00

After flapping in the breeze for the last year or two, the Tyvek home wrap on Arthur's house is getting some siding. Earlier this week the workers put up the decorative, external window frames, which gave us hope that this persistent Centre Street eyesore would finally start to look like housing, blending better into the neighborhood street-scape.

Evidently, the new owners of Arthur's house have been slowly investing in the community by rebuilding the house a little at a time, as they had the capital. We appreciate the investment, but it has been a long time in coming.

We are also liking the color.

Here is the unsided, northeast face of Arthur's house. You can see the EasyGuard brand home wrap on this face (Tyvek on the other side) and the new three-window dormer on the third floor. It's odd that all the old windows in the house were removed and replaced with much smaller windows and it's unfortunate that this side of the house lost most of its windows in the rebuild. We're sure the house will be much tighter, warmer, and cheaper-to-heat.

Why do we call it Arthur's House, even though it's also been Terry's house and Richard's house and some despicable and soul-less bank's house before these new owners took over?

Appallingly underfunded MBTA buses and trains

2012-01-11T16:51:00.001-05:00

It is no secret that the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority consistently has been deferring maintenance and capital investment. Any rider who walks from Fort Hill, down Gardner Street, to wait for a train at the Roxbury Crossing Orange Line stop can see this.

We will leave it to others to comment on the whys and wherefores of this neglect and disinvestment (Universal Hub post). Suffice it to say that this neighborhood in particular, and Roxbury in general, have suffered over the years.

It is not an issue of suburbs versus the urban core. It is not that commuter rail has received substantial investment over the years (e.g., the Greenbush Line or the new Wonderland parking facility in Revere), while the last significant investment in the urban core was the realignment of train service from Washington Street to the Southwest Corridor in the '80s (the South Station to airport link and Haymarket to Lechemere Green Line upgrade, notwithstanding).

The issue is that the Massachusetts General Court has kicked the can down the road. Having saddled the mass transit budget with groaning debt from public roads investment, having worked a compromise by which a portion of the state sales tax is devoted to the MBTA, the legislature seems to have thought its work was done.

Now comes a $161MM annual operating deficit and talks of savage service reductions and equally savage fair increases. (Read all about the MBTA's side of the story here.)

This must stop. The legislature must act to reverse the trend of neglect and disinvestment.

The legislature must hear from its constituents that service reductions and rate increases are folly.

Legislators must hear from us. It is not enough that we attend the public hearing at Roxbury Community College on Tuesday, 19 January, at 6 p.m., but we must also contact our legislators directly by phone and by email. Our legislators must hear from us that they cannot sit back and watch as our public mass transit system sinks into decay.

Here are links for contacting the representative and the state senator for Fort Hill.

Rep. Gloria L. Fox, Seventh Suffolk
Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz, Second Suffolk

Do not neglect to contact the Leadership of the House and Senate.

Pres. Therese Murray, President of the Senate.
Speaker Robert J. DeLeo, Speaker of the House

Elected by your representative and state senator, they are answerable to us to.

Urban wilds in Roxbury

2011-05-21T23:06:00.000-04:00

Prompted by a UniversalHub post to the blog Lizkdc Dislocation, we poked around the Urban Wilds page at the CityofBoston.gov site.

Things seemed very familiar. The names of two of the first-listed urban wilds leaped out at us: Back of the Hill and Cedar Street.

John Eliot Square Urban Wild (photo from CityofBoston.gov)

The a little more poking turned up an urban wild said to be at John Eliot Square.

It seemed a high percentage that, out of all of Boston, three urban wilds should be in Roxbury.

Then marching through all of the listings, we found five more: Iroquois Woods, Parker Hilltop/McLaughlin Woodlands, Puddingstone Garden, Rockledge, and Warren Gardens.

Who knew? While none of them are as impressive as the Allandale Woods featured on Liz Kelleher's blog, eight of the urban wilds listed on the City of Boston web site are located in Roxbury.

15 voters by 9 in ward 11 precinct 1

2011-03-15T09:13:00.000-04:00

While a poll-worker played a gentle classical guitar a glacial drip-drip-drip of district seven voters moved through the ward 11 precinct 1 polling station at Roxbury Community College. There were fifteen voters recorded on the counting machine by nine o'clock.

Bridge Boston gets its charter: Going to Milford for Boston news

2011-02-28T15:13:00.007-05:00

Fer cryin' out loud.

About an hour after the news breaks that 16 of 17 commissioner-recommended charter schools have been approved by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, only the Milford Daily News lists the approved schools, while Boston news outlets go just as far as, but no farther, than telling that only Lynn Preparatory was not approved for a charter.

Would it kill Boston news outlets to spend the extra pixels to give readers the list of approved schools; or, are they content to make us grub through their previous articles?

Meanwhile, back on Fort Hill, this vote means Bridge Boston has surmounted the charter hurdle. What remains is the financing.

And, the abutters, the neighbors, & the zoning.

Superman & subsurface charter school animus

2011-02-25T23:28:00.003-05:00

Before the response of the concerned abutters and neighbors was published on the Highland Park Community Association listserv, the comments there were trending in an interesting direction.

A surprisingly prompt grandfatherly nudge started out the short-lived discussion. A sage elder suggested, why not rename the school the William Lloyd Garrison Bridge Charter School? A few commenters seconded that proposal and one suggested the WLG Independent Living Center for Active Aging. If you get his drift.

Then the haft of an ideological knife was exposed in a half dozen further comments:

What about the adverse effect a new charter school would have on the existing schools in the neighborhood? Charter schools under perform. Charter schools exert a downward pressure on teacher salaries. Charter schools exploit recent college graduates. Why "invite" a charter school into our neighborhood when our first priority should be to quality schools and producing dignifying jobs. Charter schools cherry pick students. Boston University's experience in Chelsea is a warning to us to resist the temptation to wait for Superman to solve our education problems. Reagan's "permanent underclass" even got a brief mention.

Give the moderator, Mr. Rodney Singleton, credit. His immediate response to this spate was to invite teachers and administrators to tomorrow's second annual neighborhood summit. It's not clear where he sits on the issue, but the explicit invitation to the summit seemed to tamp down the ideological rhetoric against charter schools, per se. Especially as the concerned abutters and neighbors never use the phrase "charter school" in their Guiding Principles document, concentrating their attention on zoning and traffic issues; although, they do express concern about the city-wide character of the proposed school.

For folks attending the summit tomorrow, it will be interesting to see whether character-of-the-neighborhood issues of zoning and traffic are drowned out by an ideological dispute over settled commonwealth educational policy.

Of charter schools & bars & grocery stores

2011-02-25T00:13:00.001-05:00

Tranquility of Highland Park

The statement of the abutters and neighbors is clear: That part of the neighborhood at the head of Highland Park Ave is tranquil. The convent's property at the bottom of their ledge abuts an equally tranquil Highland Street. In the abutters' and neighbors' view, when the sisters built their extension to St. Monica's Home twenty years ago they undertook to preserve that tranquil character. The abutters and neighbors believe that the residential character of the neighborhood must be preserved and the prominent features (can we say, "amenities"?) of the William Lloyd Garrison House and the park at the High Fort must not be negatively impacted.

Concerned by the noise from a twelve-hour school day, vehicle trips generated by a 335-student school (school bus trips and parent vehicle trips), overflow parking, physical education classes at the High Fort, and a city-wide catchment, the abutters and neighbors conclude their tranquility would be shattered.

It seems helpful to draw together several examples of a proposed change of use, each of which has presented other abutters, neighbors, and property owners with similar challenges.

Bar and restaurant on Centre Street

This time last year, a busier section of Highland Park was confronted with a somewhat similar change of use. A disused former store on a 5851-square-foot lot at 85 Centre Street was intended by a potential buyer to house an 11 a.m. to midnight bar and restaurant with a 7-day liquor license for 75 patrons, including an outdoor patio.

Grocery stores in JP and South Boston

Recently, all Jamaica Plain has been in an uproar over the closing of a Latino-focused grocery store and its replacement by the upmarket Whole Foods.

At 300 West First Street, South Boston, the owner, Pappas Enterprises, has been working assiduously to attract a grocery store tenant for a 55,000-square-foot store to be built on that property. As recounted in The Boston Bulletin (17 Feb 2011, page 1), the CEO, Tim Pappas, has "presented [the property] to every market you can think of and probably some you haven't because they are out of state." The residents are desperate for a new grocery store for the area, which used to have three grocery stores. They are dissatisfied by the Stop & Shop at 713 East Broadway and would disapprove of a second Stop & Shop at the 300 West First Street address.

Neighborhood opposition & cooperation with the neighborhood

In the Centre Street example, the nuisance of off-hill patrons flocking into the neighborhood to eat, drink, and listen to jazz until midnight motivated the immediate neighbors to rise up in opposition, although slightly more distant Highland Park residents seemed in favor of the proposal.

In the Hi-Lo/Whole Foods imbroglio, retiring owners, unable or unwilling to pass the Hi-Lo brand onto a suitable successor, sold out for a nice price, exposing simmering class hostility among the churning population of JP. (See this Jamaica Plain Gazette article.)

In the South Boston example, a long-time local business with concern for the neighborhood has worked diligently to find a grocery-store tenant for its land that will satisfy the neighborhood needs.

On Centre Street, at the margin of Highland Park, the neighbors rose up quickly to oppose a non-conforming use. Near the the top of Fort Hill, the neighbors are afraid that an apparently conforming institutional use will abrogate a 20-year-old understanding with the departing owners and in so doing upend their status quo.

Two divergent alternatives

In the examples of the grocery stores, the Sisters of St. Margaret perhaps can see two diverging approaches. The sisters seem to have inclined toward the Hi-Lo/Whole Foods model, selling out for a decent price enabling them to pull up stakes for Duxbury to concentrate on their charitable work in Haiti (out of Louisburg Square in 1992, and now, two decades later, out of Roxbury). Under a purchase and sale agreement with Bridge Boston, they seem bound to play out this hand.

An alternative would have been to follow Tim Pappas's lead and work to find a new owners whose use would better conform to the current character and needs of the neighborhood.

Next hurdles for Bridge Boston

The P&S is apparently contingent on Bridge Boston obtaining a state charter, financing, and Zoning Board of Appeal approval. Given the effectiveness with which the Bridge Boston backers established the Epiphany School in their own brand new building so soon after they founded the school, we doubt funding will be a problem for Mr. Peter Keating and his colleagues.

2nd Annual Neighborhood Summit—Sat, 26 Feb from 10:30 am to noon—ish

2011-02-24T00:19:00.003-05:00

We have been bad. We received notice on the 19th and are only now getting around to making this post about the Highland Vision meeting at the Paige Academy this Saturday from 10:30 am to noon. Here is their website.

Whoever plastered notices on the light posts all along Cedar and Highland streets certainly got our attention. They were the reminder we needed.

2nd Annual Neighborhood Summit

26 February 2011
10:30 am to 12:00 pm@ 26 Highland Ave(Paige Academy)
Please join us, to craft 2011’s workplan for creating
a more inclusive, livable, and tightly-knit Highland Park, Roxbury.

Here's a sampling of the issues to be discussed and acted upon at the summit in small groups:

* Open/Green Space Initiative (coordinated by Bill Lotero and Donnie Dixon, an effort to rezone buildable city lots)
* Sale of St. Margaret's Convent
* Traffic (study & implementation)
* Tree Initiative (coordinated by Deb Hart, Zoran Djordjevic, and others)
* Neighborhood Mapping
* And more...

The summit will be short, sweet, and productive. We look forward to meeting you there.

Questions? Contact info@ourhighland.org.

Laying the final leg of the triangle—Concerned Abutters and Neighbors

2011-02-22T19:51:00.002-05:00

As UniversalHub alerted us, Rodney Singleton has published in the Highland Park Community Association Google Group the first concerted sally by "concerned abutters and neighbors" against Bridge Boston's attempt to establish its nascent K1-8 school on the grounds of the Sisters of Saint Margaret's convent. As it turns out our two previous posts duplicate Mr. Singleton's posts of the same material.

Running to just over three pages, with about 1350 words and one picture, the Concerned Abutters and Neighbors respond to the Q&As from the sisters and from the school with their own Q&A, in only three concerns posed as questions and three sets of related guiding principles posed as answers. What follows is our 400-word summary.

"What do we view as fundamental for any potential owner of St. Margaret’s Convent to expedite a mutually-amenable sale?"

There are three principles:

First, the maintaining of "the current level of tranquility" that was part of the quid pro quo of the neighbors' agreement twenty years ago to the sisters' expansion and transition of St. Monica’s Nursing Home to the convent.

Second, the Bridge Boston School does not provide a "'community-valued' contribution" to the neighborhood. It is holding a city-wide lottery on 8 March 2011; it will not be a neighborhood school.

Third, the "purchaser must maintain a residential setting that respects the historical character of the neighborhood," not adversely impacting the historic Garrison House or the Olmsted-designed park at the High Fort.
"What do we believe to be the negative consequences of having the Bridge Boston Charter School housed at the Convent site?"

As might be expected, the results of siting Bridge Boston School at the convent are a veritable yard sale of badness. (This is not surprising: see the fusillade of objections that formed the genesis of this blog, directed at Daryl Settles's proposed business venture at 85 Centre Street.)

The Abutters and Neighbors claim ten current schools for the environs of Highland Park, though only three of them are sited within its boundaries (the Paige Academy and BPS's Hale and Timilty).

The Nathan Hale school and the Timilty school already burden the neighborhood with much congestion from the many buses that serve their students.

Adding bus trips will exacerbate the traffic congestion. Limited parking on the site will force spill-over parking to nearby streets. The site's frontage on Highland Street is ill-suited to accommodating the many bus trips the school will need.

The precipitous ledge occupying much of the site is unsafe for children. The school administrators will necessarily want them to play at, and thus ruin, the Olmsted-designed park at the High Fort.
"What would we like to see happen to St. Margaret’s Convent?"
Given "the central role the convent plays in the character of the neighborhood – the Society of St. Margaret has an obligation to include the neighborhood in its plans." To the contrary, the convent has completely ignored a proposal sent to it on 8 February for a Highland Park Resident Board of Transitional Oversight.

The neighbors would rather see a library or research center, mixed-use condominiums, an independent- or assisted living-facility, a museum of African-America art, or an extension of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Bridge Boston Charter School—An Introduction and an Invitation

2011-02-22T05:00:00.004-05:00

This undated document is the second of a match pair of Q&As. The first of the set appears in our immediately preceding post.

BRIDGE BOSTON CHARTER SCHOOL

AN INTRODUCTION AND AN INVITATION

ANTICIPATED QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS:

How many students will attend the school?

If chartered, Bridge Boston will enroll 72 young children in grades K1 and K in September of 2011. Each year we expand by a grade level, eventually reaching a total enrollment of 335 students in K1 through Grade 8.

Where will school buses drop students off?

We feel that the best place for drop off and pick up is on Highland Street. For students with physical disabilities, special buses will transport them to the front of the building.

Where will students play outside?

We intend to have children play in the existing open area on the property near Highland Street, between Cedar Street and Fort Avenue. As Bridge grows larger, we hope to be able to able to use playgrounds/parks in the neighborhood for appropriate play at permissible times.

What will the hours of operation be?

The school day would begin at 7:30 am for breakfast and end at 3:30 pm. Bridge will offer extended day (after-school) programming that would conclude no later than 6 pm.

Where will teachers and staff park?

Faculty and staff will utilize the parking spaces (20) currently on the property. Bridge will seek additional rental parking in close proximity to the property as well. We anticipate that, at least for the first several years, A number of teachers will live on the property and that this will reduce traffic flow. Bridge Boston does not intend to park in the neighborhood street spaces.

How many cars do you expect?

In the first few years, we do not envision that the cars on the property will exceed the current number of parking spaces (20). We will seek community input and approval to identify nearby lots that Bridge Boston can utilize in the coming years.

How will you continue to work with the community?

Bridge Boston enthusiastically intends to work with the community in many ways. Initially, we seek to meet with abutters, neighborhood residents, and neighborhood associations to profile and discuss our school programming and logistics in depth. We will reach out to the community to create awareness of our school and to generate excitement and applications to our admissions lottery. This lottery, if Bridge Boston is chartered, will take place on March 8, 2011. We also want Bridge Boston to be an enhancement to and a resource for the community and for Bridge Boston to be enhanced by being a part of this community. Bridge will be very receptive to having neighborhood groups use the school, including the neighborhood associations.

Have you made an offer on the Highland Street property?

Yes, Bridge Boston has made an offer on the property and it has been accepted. The acquisition is contingent on Bridge being granted a charter from the Commonwealth.

Are you definitely moving to that location?

Bridge Boston hopes to make the location its permanent home. In addition to the contingency of being granted a charter, Bridge has standard contingencies that must be met, including an environmental review and financing commitment. We also need to be granted zoning approval by the City of Boston to operate Bridge Boston on the property and be granted certificates of occupancy.

Will there be construction?

Yes, but we do not anticipate any major construction if we are chartered, in order to be ready for a September 2011 opening. In the longer term, Bridge seeks to make the overall retrofit of the buildings, from a convent to a school, as minimally disruptive as possible to the community and the school.

What needs to happen to make that work?

We are making plans for environmental review and financing efforts. The most critical effort is to genuinely and thoroughly reach out to the community and to earn their support. We know what we need to do in order to obtain zoning approval and to open in September and that a key determinant to that goal is creating a positive and trusting relationship with our neighbors and the community.

What is Bridge Boston Charter School?

We are a proposed public charter school. We will learn on February 28, 2011 whether we are chartered to open in September 2011, initially with 72 students in K1 and K, eventually growing to 335 students in K1-Grade 8.

What will Bridge Boston be like, if chartered?

Bridge Boston Charter School students will thrive in a challenging, joyful, inclusive K1-8 public school community that values close partnerships with families and a focus on the whole child. Our students will develop the skills necessary to excel academically in rigorous high school, reach their individual potentials, and view themselves as creators of their own futures. Through full-service programming, Bridge Boston Charter School will work to remove the health and social obstacles that hinder student learning. We will provide expanded learning time and after-school extended day programs; a curriculum which includes art, music, and physical education; instruction to meet each student's individual needs; small classes averaging 18 children; and an intern program including college graduates working under the direction of highly experienced teachers to allow smaller classes and more individual attention. Our founding group has strong community ties and proven experience with excellent schools, including Epiphany School in Dorchester.

Why do we want to have our schoolhouse at 17 Highland Park?

We love this site and this neighborhood. We have founding board members who live on Elmore Street in Roxbury, have taught at Roxbury Community College, and have worked at nearby schools. These beautiful and gracious buildings have a legacy of service to Boston residents, which we seek to maintain, including the original home of William Lloyd Garrison, a leader of the abolition movement in the mid-1800s and the later legacy as a home for African American senior citizens and most recently a home for the Sisters of the Society of St. Margaret.

What will happen to the Garrison House?

Bridge Boston intends to carefully maintain the Garrison House and use it for faculty housing and offices.

How would our school utilize the buildings and protect the neighborhoods character?

Bridge Boston would begin with 72 students, and would then expand by a grade each year. We do not envision needing to change the exterior of the buildings in any substantial way. Any and all improvements to the property will be aesthetically tasteful and appropriate. We will only seek to ensure the safety and smooth operation of the school. We will utilize the buildings for school programming and some housing for faculty/administrators.

How can you get more information about the school?

Please refer to our website, www.bridgebostoncharterschool.org, or contact Bridge Boston Board members Peter Keating at petekeats@aol.com or Makeeba McCreary at makeeba.mccreary@gmail.com

Could your child attend Bridge Boston?

We would love to serve your child and your family. If we are chartered, we will hold a public lottery on March 8, 2011. We will only be enrolling students who will enter K1 and K next September (students who will be 4 and 5). The school will enroll a K1 class every year as it grows to its full capacity of 335 students in grades K1-8. Please go to our website or contact our Acting Executive Director to fill out an ‘Intent to Enroll’ form to enter your child in our lottery. Our school is free, supervised by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and is open to all students. Free buses will be provided by the Boston Public Schools.

How can you get more information about the plans for the site?

We hope to attend the Fort Hill Civic Association meetings at the Society of St. Margaret Convent to talk about our plans and would be honored to attend future meetings of additional community organizations to provide updates. We enthusiastically look forward to meeting you and working together to maintain your beautiful neighborhood and to serve Boston students and their families.

Q & A Document from the Sisters of St. Margaret

2011-02-21T20:41:00.001-05:00

The following document was circulated to a neighborhood mailing list on 18 February. We hesitated to republish it as is, because it is not our document and we are adding nothing to it. However, it appears nowhere on the convent website and it is clearly of interest to those who do not subscribe to the neighborhood lists.

A similar document from the Bridge Boston Charter School was circulated the same day. It also does not appear on the school's website. We intend to republish that tomorrow.

Q & A Document from the Sisters of St. Margaret -

February 10, 2011

Although we will miss our neighbors, our current building at 17 Highland Park Avenue is too large for us and we cannot afford to stay here, especially at a time when we are focusing our limited resources on our mission in Haiti, whose people are suffering.

Who is buying the property?

We do have an agreement with the Bridge Boston charter school dependent upon their charter acceptance, which is expected to be decided by the end of February. Although the property is zoned residential, we have not marketed the property to private developers at this time.

Although we will miss our neighbors, we hope they understand that the sale of the property will allow us to focus on our mission of helping the people of Haiti, where we have had a presence since 1927. In the recent earthquake, we lost the building that our Sisters live in.

How will the community be affected?

While this is a wonderful community and we will miss it, we rarely have neighbors attending our services and many of the residents that were once active here have died or moved away.

We believe Bridge Boston, if they advance as a potential buyer, would be a wonderful partner for the community.

Where are you going?

We are consolidating our convent in Duxbury, at a property our order has owned since 1903. But in many ways, our home is everyplace our mission work is happening.

What will happen to the Garrison House?

The Garrison House, attached to the convent, is part of the National Register of Historic Buildings, a designation that potential buyers will be aware of. If the owner is Bridge Boston, they intend to carefully maintain the Garrison House and use it in the immediate and long term for faculty/administrative housing.

Will you have any presence in Boston?

Yes, we are committed to our mission in Boston which includes involvement in the B-Safe Summer Program and the Generations Incorporated afterschool tutoring program at St. Stephen’s Church. We also work with an arts program at St. Martins and St. Augustine’s in addition to our Chaplin work at the Suffolk County House of Corrections. Several of our sisters will continue to live in Boston at a small residence in order to complete their work.

Where is the Fort Hill Civic Association going to meet?

We have welcomed the Fort Hill Civic Association here for many years and appreciate the work they do in the community. Bridge Boston has indicated that they would love to continue to have the Fort Hill Civic Association meet at the property.

What if the deal with Bridge Boston doesn’t go through?

We would pursue other select like-minded institutions in the event that this deal does not happen.

When can we talk to Bridge Boston more about their plans?

They plan on having many community meetings.

Is this contingent upon them getting a charter or ZBA approvals?

Yes.

For more information contact:

Sr. Adele Marie or Sr. Carolyn

617-445-8961

The nuns to decamp from Roxbury to Duxbury

2011-02-20T21:57:00.007-05:00

It was late January when we first learned that the Sisters of St. Margaret were selling their property to the Bridge Boston Charter School.

Then, representatives of the sisters and of the charter school attended the 8 February meeting of the Fort Hill Civic Association.

Concerns of neighbors were recorded in the minutes of the FHCA meeting. Those concerns were traffic, lost privacy and potential for property damage for abutters, increased noise, decreased property value of the neighborhood, and unknown changes to the identity of the community.

A Boston Globe article from 13 February also announced the news and gave some history on the sisters, described their long involvement in Haiti, and recounted the reasons for their move from Fort Hill to Duxbury. The sale is apparently dependent on the Bridge School receiving its charter and on approval from the Zoning Board of Appeal.

The Boston Globe reported three days ago that "Massachusetts education commissioner Mitchell Chester today endorsed 17 out 23 applications to launch new charter schools," among which is the Bridge Charter School. The full Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is scheduled to vote on Commissioner Chester's recommendation at its meeting on 28 February. Commissioner Chester recommended nine other Boston charter schools in addition to Bridge Charter School.

Here is a letter of 23 January from Sister Superior Carolyn and Sister Assistant Superior Adele Marie prepared for the SSM web site in which they announce the sale of the convent and the society's move to Duxbury.

The convent website gives the street address of the convent as 17 Highland Park Street, but the City of Boston Assessing Department lists 125 Highland Street. The assessed value of the land and buildings at #125 is $1,630,800.00, of which $511,400.00 is for the land. The plot is large, 66,668 sq ft. The year 2008 saw the land and buildings assessed for $2,360,900.00, but the assessed value has decreased each year since.

The convent's conference center is sited on an adjacent, 5,298 sq ft lot at 18 Cedar Park, which is assessed only for the land at $86.000.00, with a zero dollar assessment for buildings. The owners for #125 are given as ST MARGARET SOC OF and ST MONICAS HOME, while the owner for 18 Cedar Park is SOCIETY OF ST MARGARET MASS CORP.

It is of historical note that the convent's property includes the home of William Lloyd Garrison, where he lived from 1864 to his death fifteen years later.

We will make several more posts over the next few days discussing neighborhood reaction to the announced sale.

Flikr source for the photograph of the William Lloyd Garrison House

The Boneless Cat

2011-02-15T18:42:00.008-05:00

Four and a half months since spotting a mother cat and her three young kittens on our back porch, the three-ring kitten circus has dispersed. (See the three immediately preceding posts, but one.)

The mother cat was quickly adopted out.

The two TNRed cats are spotted infrequently. At the height of the recent storms, we put out food and water. Someone else in the neighborhood is feeding, for the food wasn't devoured as we expected.

Pictures of two of the three kittens sat on the Charles River Alley Cats website until late January, when their listing disappeared. We haven't heard back from our CRAC helpers in time of need, but we presume the kittens got better socialization than we could provide and were successfully adopted.

The remaining kitten now has the form and gait of a mature cat, retaining the lunatic playfulness of a kitten. Boneless cat used to be just words to us, but this kitten sleeps upside down, four legs akimbo, belly exposed, utterly secure of her place in the world. It is gratifying to have made our small contribution to her charming character. It was a privilege to have provided aid to six neighborhood cats, helping to find home for four of them.

The original resident cat is still grumpy about the interloper, but she deigned to play briefly with the kitten last week. The two of them, just now, are content to sit on the same hot radiator, dozing and peering out the window.

65 voters at 5 pm at Ward 11 Precinct 01

2011-02-15T17:37:00.000-05:00

Today is the preliminary election for a replacement city councillor for district seven.

65 votes were registered on the counting machine at the Roxbury Community College voting location for ward 11 precinct 1.

We saw signs for Jackson, Williams, Carithers, and Mills, but no campaign workers. With six precinct workers, it seems an expensive way to run an election.

Today is the special preliminary municipal election; the polls close at 8 pm. The general election ("special municipal election") is 15 March.

Here is the Boston Election Department website with information for the district seven special elections and for the municipal elections in the fall.

Charles River Alley Cats save the day

2010-11-16T17:28:00.017-05:00

Three rescued kittens

Working with a clueless, but willing, helper, Charles River Alley Cats have saved four strays from a harsh winter. (Skip to the bottom of this post to see how you can help save the day for other Fort Hill strays.)

To make explicit what was hinted at in previous posts, in early October, using tuna fish, we successfully enticed three kittens into the house and closed the door behind them. Then using the kittens themselves as bait, augmented by more tuna, we were able to lure the Mother Cat into the house and close the door.

We had never really experienced the expression Climbing the walls until we saw Mother Cat levitate from floor to ceiling, seemingly counter to the laws of physics, in a wild attempt to escape. The raw animal power was humbling to witness.

Mother Cat is a Classic Hallowe'en Cat. What's not to love?

The trapping of these four mammals was assisted by much telephone counseling from a friend in Dorchester who manages a small feral colony and has many years experience. We are mostly dog people, so dealing with cats for us is like negotiating with extra-terrestrials.

Enter Charles River Alley Cats.

The day after we trapping Mom and kids, we approached them at an adoption event at the Petco in Brighton, desperate for advice, and it was all business.

Friendly and empathetic, but all business: How many cats, what was their health, what was their behavior, were there other ferals still outside, what was I feeding them? Do they have fleas, have they been wormed? Then it was onto How big are the kittens, they should be spayed or neutered at two pounds, are you up for trying to trap the fathers? Are you going to adopt them, do you need help finding homes?

To cut a long story short we were able to trap and return two more strays, one who was obviously one of the fathers and a female. We say "one of the fathers," for we, ignorant as we were, learned that the kittens in a litter may not have the same father. Promiscuous mating can do that.

A Charles River Alley Cat trap with a post-operative Father Cat lurking in back.

We learned how to manage the feeding and the cleaning of the cage of a trapped cat with judicious use of a sheet and a cage fork.

Post-operative feral female posing with a cage fork.

We witnessed the inside loading dock of the Animal Rescue League, stuffed to the walls with about one hundred (we counted) cages of recently spayed and neutered animals. The TNR movement has adopted a clipped ear as the signal to others that a stray has already been TNRed.

We learned that all-black cats—the classic Hallowe'en cat—are very hard to place in "forever homes."

We learned that we were totally unprepared to understand kitten- and mother cat–psychology. Mother Cat kept horning in on our attempts to socialize the kittens. And, the most social kitten in a litter adopts the same behavior as the least social one. It pays to segregate the cats and socialize them individually, but let them play together.

We also learned that being entertained by a three-ring Kitten Circus in the kitchen with playtoys and ping pong balls and empty cardboard boxes was better than watching TV.

As far as input and output, it is amazing how much food moves through a nursing cat and her litter. We have scooped more clumping litter than we ever though possible. (What is the environmentally best way way to deal with this waste?)

We were definitely emotionally unprepared for how hard we were affected by giving up Mother Cat for adoption. And, by how much we missed the two kitten who were passed over into the hands of more capable foster homes.

So, here's the pitch—

Charles River Alley Cats does everything they do on a shoe-string.

They charge a modest fee when you adopt through them. But, they still need your assistance. They need you to give them cash. They need you to give them cat food, kitty food, cat carriers, feeding dishes, cat litter. If you can name it, and if has to do with a cat, they can use more of it . Check out the donation page on their web site.

Charles River Alley Cats needs you to volunteer for them. Whether you have only thirty minutes a day to give, or carpentry skills, or just a little spare space in your garage or basement, you can help Here is the volunteer page.

But, most of all they—and all of us—need for folk to have a care for the local cats.

If you have a cat, get it spayed or neutered. If you want to experience the lunacy of a three-ring Kitten Circus in your kitchen, you can adopt some already-born kittens without breeding new ones. Or, you can temporarily foster some kittens.
If you have a cat you can no long care for, surrender it to an organization that can; don't just dump it outside to fend for itself. That's just not fair.
If you have strays living in your corner of Fort Hill (and, you almost surely do), think hard whether you are able to trap-neuter-return (TNR) some or all of these co-residents.

Whether you think cats are weird and inscrutable, extra-terrestrial creatures or whether you dote on cats, there is something you can do to make life easier for these deserving, neighborhood animals.

We'll tidy up some details in a later post.

Feline Yin and Yang on Fort Hill

2010-10-22T22:27:00.003-04:00

Two of three rescued kittens.

We've buried more than our fair share of stray cats. It's usually during a harsh winter. Sometimes it has been after a collision with an automobile in the summer.

It's never pretty. It's never easy.

In the winter, one has to pick a location, clear the snow, and hope the digging isn't too difficult. It can be a hard job of work to break up the frozen ground with a pickax or mattock. Never mind the trouble shoveling through the damned Roxbury rocks.

In the summer, the grave has to be dug deep enough to discourage Nature's recycling scavengers from picking up the scent, digging up the carcass, and settling down to a tasty, foetid bite to eat.

In summer or in winter, after rigor mortis has set in, it is hard to sensitively balance respect for the remains of the deceased cat with digging a reasonably sized hole for the grave. In the absence of rubber gloves, and in a howling wind, fitting the furry body into the too-small hole using only the business end of a shovel...is...well, emotionally taxing.

As we said, it's never pretty; it's never easy. And, we always hate it.

So, when Mother Cat and her litter of three kittens showed up on our porch, it seemed necessary to do the right thing. To treat with respect the feline co-inhabitants of our little square of green space in the city. To reduce the chances of another mid-winter burial.

And, to return thanks for the colony's work to thin out the verminous squirrel population: three carcasses, and counting.

It's a Zoo on Fort Hill

2010-10-02T05:00:00.046-04:00

A couple of comments at UniversalHub tell us that it's a Zoo on Fort Hill, with raccoons and skunks. We've seen opossums, too.

And cats. Feral cats.

A jet black mother cat was zonked out on the back porch the day before yesterday afternoon. She had three rambunctious kittens who were alternately nursing and batting at the foliage being driven to and fro in the strong winds. The mother was so sound asleep that we were able to approach within three feet to set down tuna and a water bowl.

By the time we returned with dry food and the camera, the mother cat was up and about, hissing and walking to the other end of the porch, attempting to draw our attention away from her litter.

Wanting to be responsible fellow urban mammals, we withdrew to watch. Holy moley. Nursing cats need a lot of food, for Mother Cat inhaled the tuna and then went to work with a vengeance, wolfing down the dry food.

Graduating from urban mammal to responsible urban citizens and thinking that three more fertile cats were not the best demographic addition to the neighborhood, we consulted the internet to see what we could read about feral cats.

Perhaps we could squeeze out a low-effort post to Jonas Prang, decorated with a few shameless kitty pics. Hopefully we could figure out what to do about these cursorial carnivores. (And, perhaps take our minds off yet more human carnage in Roxbury.)

After two hours of reading, we put the hope of a low-effort post to rest. And, the hope of low-effort action to do the right thing by these...well...kitties.

TNR: Trap, neuter, and return [ASPCA web site] seems to be the fashionable response to feral cats. Trap and kill—the run-of-the-mill response to vermin—causes a vacuum effect. Destroying a stable feral population merely invites new feline neighbors to move in to replaced the ones recently slaughtered.

A modest amount of googling for feral cats yields a stunning amount to read. In an American society besotted with dogs and cats, why were we surprised?

So, to conclude this post we will provide just one more shameless kitty pic of our new neighbors. And, we'll give a lightly annotated list of pages that seem useful for learning what to do about feral cats.

Commonwealth Cats, with a Peabody mailing address, may be what we need if we can bestir ourselves to trap this mom and her kits.
The resources page at Commonwealth Cats yields a link to the band-width-heavy web site of Alley Cat Allies a 501(c)3 organization with $4 million annual budget and net assets of $2.8M. Perhaps they would make a small contribution so Jonas Prang can get these cats neutered. We have to give them credit, though, for they make it easy to read their annual reports from FY 2003 to FY 2009. [3.4MB pdf] And, they offer to send you their IRS 990, useful to see how 501(c)3s are overpaying their executive staff.
Drop Trap Design is a blog that tells how to build and operate a drop trap. It also tells that cats are apparently so stupid that one can trap them over and over and over again, and they never catch on to the scheme.
Neighborhood Cats is pleased with its design for Tomahawk's Feral Cat Trap.
There is the sweetly-named, local, Jamaica Plain HubCats, though this site hasn't been updated since March 2008.
Here is STOP Clinic (Stop the Overpopulation of Pets), operated out of Weymouth.
And finally, there is the inevitable Wikipedia article on feral cats.

Oh, and one more thing: It seems mother cat has her own trap 'n' kill program, for skin and bones laid out just a few cat steps from the nursing cat are all that remain of one of the resident squirrels.

Make that trap 'n' kill 'n' eat.

Two days later, the bones are gone and only the pelt remains.

Refuge Church of Christ

2010-10-01T05:00:00.025-04:00

The former Fellowes Atheneum in March 2010.

The Refuge Church of Christ at 46 Millmont Street, opposite the Lambert Playground, has a new (to us) sign out front.

The sign announces that the church has received a matching emergency grant from the Massachusetts Preservation Projects Fund. The recipients and amounts from the current grant round 16 (Award selection June 9, 2010) have not been posted to their web site.

Other grant recipients in Roxbury from this fund have been the Roxbury Presbyterian Church (round 11) and Hibernian Hall (round 10).

The National Trust for Historic Preservation made a $5,000 grant [page 14 of a 44-page pdf] to the Refuge Church of Christ in their fiscal year 2009.

Beyond the pestilential aggregator advertising sites, the Refuge Church of Christ has no web presence. Their fundraising consultant Jillian Adams, Building Legacy, features a picture on her web page and displays a short testimonial quote on her Results page.

The comprehensive Emmanuel Gospel Center Church Directory does provide a telephone number and an impressive list of personnel for the Refuge Church: Bishop R Lawson (founder), Bishop Theodore Hester Sr, Rachel Adams (Secretary), and Jo-Ann Gay (Secretary).

McGinley Kalsow of Somerville is listed on the sign as the preservation architect. It appears this is their second project in Roxbury after the Shirley-Eustis House, and they give several projects in close-by neighborhoods on their impressive portfolios page: the Union United Methodist Church in the South End; St. Brendan's and the former St. Margaret's in Dorchester; and St. George Cathedral, St. Vincent de Paul, and Gate of Heaven in South Boston.

Jack Aniceto is the masonry contractor. He has worked on a number of significant local projects and his skill with masonry restoration vastly surpasses the poor quality of his German-based web site.

Refuge Church of Christ Phase 1 Emergency Stabilization.

Destinations off the hill: the walking route to Kenmore

2010-09-28T05:00:00.001-04:00

Edward M. Kennedy's funeral mass was said 29 August at the Mission Church. In many ways this minor basilica is a much more impressive building from the back than it is from the front.

In an earlier post we sung the praises of Fort Hill's location, briefly listing some of its nearby cultural, educational, and transportation options. Still speaking from the stance of a Fort Hill booster, this post will take a more practical slant and try to take a liability—poor transit options on the NNW to NW of Roxbury Crossing—and turn it into a benefit.

For the most part, the transit options from Fort Hill are particularly fine and varied. The Orange line is excellent for those going NE to the city center or SW to Jamaica Plain. The 19, 22, 23, and 28 buses serve reasonably well for those going S and SE to Dorchester. The 15 and 41 do a decent job when heading due E. At the best times of day the 66 is tolerable going W into Brookline.

But, the MBTA has nothing quick when one is heading N or NNW to the Longwood Medical Area, to the Gardner Museum, to MFA, to the Fens, or to Kenmore.

It is in this direction that the old libel against the T is so true: Should we walk? Or, do we have time to take the T?

When headed NNW, it is always best to walk or to bicycle. And, walking works just fine. Early last week (perhaps on the same day Iseut was collecting an oral history on the Mission Church Grammar School) we headed out to the Kenmore office of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. (Via the MBTA, we would have to take the 66 bus and change to the 65. Or, schlep in on the Orange Line, doing a walking transfer at Back Bay-Copley to head back out to Kenmore.)

Here is the route we took:

Tremont to Gurney, cut through the vacant lot to Smith, Smith to St. Alphonsus to Huntington.
Take the unregulated crosswalk just inbound from Ward Street to avoid waiting at the dangerous light at Longwood.
Then head inbound on Huntington to Evans Way and cut through the park to The Fenway.
Take either crosswalk over The Fenway (in front the Gardner Museum or further up in front of Simmons) and descend to the level of the Muddy River (see the great field of daffodils in the springtime).
Rise up from the river at Park Drive, taking your life into your hands at the crosswalks there.
Pass through the Field of Geese under which the Muddy River is buried.
Cross over to the north side of Park Drive at the crosswalk.
Then it's a straight shot through the snarling intersection at Boylston and up Brookline to Harvard Vanguard.

With one twiddle, Google figures it to be 28 minutes; we walked it in 20 with five minutes to cool down. (Google wants you to take Parker Street to Ruggles, when the back way up Smith Street is a much nicer walk.)

Walking this route is not only a practical mode to reach an appointment in Kenmore, but it is also an interesting walk. Here is a handful of briefly annotated photographs depicting what can be seen along this route as far as Isabella Gardner's unfortunate backyard.

The Maurice J. Tobin School is easy to miss, hidden behind the shade trees on Smith Street. This mural is seen from the playing fields on the east side of the school.

Not the best looking side of St. Alphonus Hall, as seen from the same playing field. At least it's been properly boarded up with plywood painted to match the stone. The worthies at RCC should take notice.

One hopes that this sign can be preserved. As few as five years ago, the internet was bereft of any hits for Pilate's Daughter; it was all Pilates all the time. Now Google yields a fair amount of notice for the search string. Perhaps John Clifford could tell us something from a first-hand perspective.

Every spring, the management company at Mission Main plants what becomes a tsunami of impatiens by season's end. The begonias don't do too badly either.

Devotion to Our Lady is laudably strong on Smith Street, with at least three effigies—but no blue bathtubs. The less laudable inflatable pumpkins, reindeer, and Santa Clauses are due to erupt anytime now. Chacun à son goût.

A view of the "new", formerly infamous Boston State College building viewed from St. Alphonsus Street. A middling building of its kind, we're hoping that auditorium is working out for MassArt, it's current occupants.

The former site of a grifty little gas station at the corner of Ward and St. Alphonsus streets, this park is a great improvement.

It's a shame about Isabella's carriage house, but we're hoping the trustees have made the right bet.

Rush Hour Bicycle Census at Columbus & Cedar

2010-09-27T05:00:00.025-04:00

1885 Ordinary, with the small wheel in front. From Patent Pending Blog.

We performed another bicycle census at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and Cedar Street this past Thursday, 23 September 2010 between 5 and 6 pm. The temperature was in the high 60s, the wind was calm, and the skies were clear. We posted ourselves on the outbound side of Columbus Avenue just north of Cedar Street.

Our previous census was done on 3 June 2010 from 5:18 to 5:40 pm. We counted on our fingers while waiting for a #22 bus to show up. We counted 103 bicyclists. This was done over a 22-1/2 minute period, yielding an hourly rate of 275 bicycles/hour.

This time, equipped with paper and pencil, we performed a more deliberate census making tallies for each five-minute interval between 5 and 6 pm. For both the inbound and outbound directions we counted helmeted and unhelmeted bicyclists, walkers, and runners.

Surprising to us, the hourly rate was 213, a 22% drop from the 3 June count. Put another way, in the 25 minute interval between 5:15 and 5:40—approximately the same time period of the June count—there were only 95 bicycles compared with 103 in 22-1/2 minutes.

One oughtn't generalize from only two counts, but we would have thought that with the students back in town there would have been more bicyclists, not fewer.

Here is a summary of the results for bicycles:

Bicycles	Helmeted	Unhelmeted	Total
Inbound	15	26	41
Outbound	132	40	172
Total	147	66	213

And for Pedestrians:

Pedestrians	Walkers	Runners	Total
Inbound	17	2	19
Outbound	23	3	26
Total	40	5	45

The split between helmeted and unhelmeted bicyclists was 70:30, far different to my guesstimate on 3 June of 95:5. The split between outbound and inbound bicycle traffic was 81:19, remarkably close to my guesstimate in June.

Another observation is that the unhelmeted inbound riders—going against the homeward commute—exceeded the number of helmeted riders, while outbound the helmeted riders outnumbered the unhelmeted ones by a greater than a 3-to-1 margin.

There was one recumbent bicycle (outbound) and one bicycle rigged for freight (inbound) with an extended frame in the rear. There were two outbound scooters not included in the count. The were only two bicyclists traveling in Columbus Avenue proper; they were both inbound and were included in the count.

Bell Biker Bicycle Helmet. Photo by Melissa Lew from America On the Move.

Feeling stimulated? Some of ARRA's $787B comes your way

2010-09-25T00:05:00.011-04:00

First it was Talbot Avenue, crosswalks, bike lanes, parking strips, and 'adjusting' the Codman Square traffic flow. Very nice.

Then it was Blue Hill Avenue, done at the beginning of rush hour, that made Morton Street/Rt. 203 an attractive alternate route. Didn't MLKing Blvd get redone, too?

Now tonight it sounds like Marine One is hovering low, in front of Roxbury Community College. Our stimulus dollars have arrived circa your house.

The spreader machine with its dump truck tender is surprisingly quiet. It's the growler in the picture on the bottom (and its mate) that make all the low rumbling noise.

The politicians want you to know that all that American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dough is well spent. Here's what the Feds have to say. This is the Commonwealth's take on things. The City of Boston provides its accounting here.

Moving on: A wistful farewell to the Third Decade

2010-09-24T05:00:00.003-04:00

This delightful photograph is from an occasional series TD ran depicting various attempts of too-large-vehicles to slalom down his too-small street.

The Third Decade announced back in June that he was ending his six-year-long affair with blogging and will continue canoodling exclusively with Twitter and Facebook.

More's the pity.

From C'mon, Bush, Talk to the Colored Folk and the continuing saga of Homeownership in 2004 to Boloco and From Filenes to Ferdinand in 2010, it was a good run. And in between, he was eying the cute guys on the Orange Line and sharing ruminations on how the city worked—and didn't work.

We keep checking the blog, hoping TD will change his mind, but that seems not to be in the cards.

It's too bad that TD changed the blog layout with the last post. The elegantly narrow, black and white streetscape is gone, replaced with a vapid green layout. (On what other local blog have we seen that theme?)

Moreover, with the hasty change in layout, the navigation has been broken so that one has to twiddle with the url to get early pages.

And he can't count very well, for his 30s were his fourth decade, not his third.

Sigh. We sound jilted, don't we? Abandoned for the ephemera of tweets and feeds, where it's hard to discriminate between noise and signal.

Third Decade, we'll miss you.

Why we can't have nice things

2010-09-23T00:23:00.008-04:00

Here are some of the handsome murals on the pillars at the Roxbury Crossing T stop.

Our favorite one is on the far left. We love the fanciful combination of the Chinese gate framing the mosque's minaret. The colors are dark and rich.

Its mate, on the right, frames the Mission Church's towers in a vaguely Moorish gate. It uses a lighter palette of blue and pink.

We thought they were a sensitive addition of public art to the second-rate design of that train station.

A vandal seemed to think otherwise. He seemed to think that his personal graffito would improve things.

Our mothers might say: This is why we can't have nice things!

Is it Fort Hill? Or, Highland Park? Perhaps it is the Roxbury Highlands?

2010-09-22T08:00:00.003-04:00

This nice map appeared on eeka's blog last year. Quibbling, we would rope in the triangular Veteran's Park at the northeast corner. That yields only five long boundary streets, without that short pesky stretch of Shawmut.

Jonas Prang's focus is on the area of Roxbury bounded by Malcolm X Boulevard, Washington Street, Marcella Street, Ritchie Street, and Columbus Avenue.

Some folk seem to get agitated when the supposedly down-market moniker "Fort Hill" is used instead of the leafy appellation "Highland Park." The exalted epithet "Roxbury Highlands" has some adherents, too.

We think that any of the three names works just fine. And, work they do in different contexts.

Google Maps labels the area Highland Park, unless one zooms in too close.

Drop "Roxbury Highlands" Boston into maps.google and get this.

Do the same with "Fort Hill" Boston and get some other Fort Hill located in Hingham.

The neighborhood organizations seem to split the difference between Hill and Park. So a web site entitled "Highland Park Neighborhood" gives the "Fort Hill Civic Association" as the neighborhood's de facto town meeting, while also listing meeting times for the "Highland Park Neighborhood Assn."

Then, the on-again-off-again Our Highland describes itself as a" one-stop website for everything Highland Park, Roxbury."

For another example, in helping some folk to find housing in Greater Boston, we've been cruising through the Craigslist listings.

At the time we did our search, in boston/cambridge/brookline > housing > apts by owner, there were no apartments in "Highland Park," nor were there any in "Roxbury Highlands."

One is a little luckier with "Fort Hill." There were nine listings.

Alas, of these only five are unique, and only three of these are actually listed by the owner. The four other listings are broker-generated for the same, apparently haplessly unrentable, apartment.

Does this make "Fort Hill" more exclusive than "Mission Hill" with its 23 listings?

[An addendum: Iseut addressed the issue of names for Fort Hill in a post in March. A few other folk weighed in with comments, some more helpful than others.]

Youth Resources for Greater Dudley

2010-09-21T14:01:00.016-04:00

While rummaging around the internet, we turned up this document, published just last month, Neighborhood Briefing Document: Greater Dudley [2.5MB pdf]. It is published as Issue 58, August 2010, of the Emmanuel Research Review.

From the table of contents page:

"The Greater Dudley Neighborhood Briefing Document was researched and written by Rudy Mitchell for the Youth Violence Prevention Funder Learning Collaborative, with funding provided by the State Street Foundation. Design by Grace Lee. Layout by Steve Daman."

The work is copyrighted, 2010, by the Youth Violence Systems Project, and performed under the aegis of the Urban Ministry Resources of the Emmanuel Gospel Center.

Running to 64 pages, the paper is a background document intended for "urban pastors, leaders, and community members in their efforts to serve their communities effectively" [cite]. It provides a twelve-page history of Roxbury, from the birth of John Craft in 1630 to the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan (2004) [21MB pdf from the BRA].

For the document's purpose, the author clips Roxbury Highlands in half, including only the census tracts north of Cedar Street in the Greater Dudley study area (pdf page 17), though on the east side of Washington Street, Greater Dudley stretches beyond Malcolm X Park to Elmore Street.

The study details characteristics of the population (trends and ethnic/racial composition using Roxbury data as a whole; age, language, family structure, and economics and income from US Census tract data) and housing (owner-occupancy, also from Census data).

Then community institutions are enumerated and youth-oriented programs briefly described: the 42 Churches and Religious Institutions, plus the three convents and two mosques, the twelve schools (plus Gordon-Conwell's Center for Urban Ministerial Education, Northeastern University, and Roxbury Community College, and mistakenly mapping the Timilty School in Dudley Square in addition to its actual location in Eliot Square), the 29 Community Organizations and Programs, and the five Neighborhood Organizations.

Some Boston Police Department Youth Crime Statistics (2008) are given, concluding with a brief survey of Community Newspapers and Media and a two-page bibliography. Together with the newspapers and radio station, Both Ends of Dudley and Jonas Prang are the only two blogs listed.

Other Boston neighborhood studies for Uphams Corner, Bowdoin/Geneva, Grove Hall, South End/Lower Roxbury, and Morton/Norfolk are available at the EGC web site.

The first photograph, perhaps it aptly could be titled "The Three Young Men," was taken by Chase Grogan, Roxbury Presbyterian Church. The second, taken from page 4 of the Briefing Document, is an original oil painting by John Ritto Penniman (c. 1782-1841) of Meetinghouse Hill, Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1799. Art Institute of Chicago.

Sofrito! Tropical Foods vs. C-Mart

2010-09-20T23:34:00.002-04:00

Sofrito!

It's time to prepare a mess of sofrito before winter sets in. Then it goes into everything: black beans, fried white cheese, soup, poached chicken breasts. If it's heated, put some sofrito in it.

There's no need to be picky about proportions, just go with your gut. There's dozens of recipes available on the web, but you don't need to slavishly follow any of them.

What you need are these basic ingredients, plus a blender or food processor, and ice cube trays:

tomatoes
red onions
red peppers (or green peppers or both)
cilantro
garlic

In addition culantro (racao) and ajices dulces (ajicito pepper) are good if you can find them.

Chop things up a bit with the kitchen knife and toss everything in the blender or food processor. Run the blender or food processor, but not so long so that you have a puree. You want to be able to see the individual ingredients.

Then spoon the mixture out into ice cube trays and freeze. Sofrito keeps fresh in the refrigerator for a couple or three days, so if you don't have enough ice cube trays for the whole recipe, freeze the batch a bit at a time.

Once the sofrito is frozen, dump it out into double-bagged Ziplock bags and put the bags in the freezer.

As we've pointed out elsewhere photojournalism is not our specialty and neither is writing about food. So, we had the presence of mind to photograph the end result, but not to photograph the marvelous pile of fresh ingredients at the start of the preparation.

The afternoon we prepared our winter sofrito we needed cilantro, culantro, garlic, and ajices dulces, already having the other ingredients on hand.

So, we took the 41 bus to Dudley and walked in-bound on Washington Street to Tropical Foods, 2101 Washington St.

After looking around and failing to find them, we asked a manager where the culantro and the ajices dulces were. He repeatedly tried to direct us to the cilantro, but we insisted on culantro. The cilantro looked ratty anyway.

Finally the manager (an Anglo as it turned out) told us to ask "that guy—he speaks Spanish."

"That guy" knew right away that culantro was the same things as racao. He pointed us to the mezzanine shelf where both culantro and ajices dulces were available, pre-packaged.

After looking at the garlic ($1.99/lb), we thought we could get better looking garlic at C-Mart (Washington at Herald Street) and we wanted to see if they carried culantro and ajices dulces, so off we went to take the Ridiculous Silver Line to Chinatown.

C-mart didn't have ajices dulces, but they did have culantro, labeled in Chinese characters. The cilantro came in big bushy bundles. The culantro was cheaper at C-Mart; the garlic was cheaper at Tropical Foods. (The best cilantro was at Russo's in Waltham: $1.29 for a big happy-looking bunch.)

So here's the price comparison:

	Tropical Foods	C-Mart
Cilantro	ratty looking	$0.79/bunch
Garlic	$1.99/lb	$2.58/lb
Culantro	$12.50/lb	$6/lb
Ajicitos	$7/lb	unavailable

We try to keep this blog focused on its catchment: south of Malcolm X, west of Washington, north of Marcella/Ritchie, and east of Columbus. Since some essentials, like food, lie outside these bounds occasionally we'll stray afield (but, see here and here).

[We're no html jockeys for sure. The table looks fine in Blogspot's Compose and Preview modes, but gets a huge amount of head room when published. The table tag, without the angle brackets, looks like this: table style="background-color: white; width: 276px; height: 211px;" border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0". Blogspot supplies the width and height parameters.

If anybody sees what's wrong, we'd appreciate a comment .]

The Old Sad Dudley Manor on Centre Street

2010-09-14T15:54:00.010-04:00

The Board of Regents & Roxbury Community College (RCC) are making their mark in Highland Park.

As the owners of record of 167 Centre Street, the Regents had been leasing out the premises to to long-time tenants, F.I.R.S.T Askia Academy. For many years FIRST Academy held a Christmas Tree sale from the adjacent RCC parking lot. They were decent neighbors, keeping to themselves and keeping the grounds in reasonably good shape.

But some time before February 2010, FIRST Academy pulled up stakes and left. We had first noted that the building was vacant toward the end of February. [The Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center and The Dimock Center seem to be the only non-aggregating sites on the web that describe FIRST.]

It is a gracious house and we wanted to write about it, but hesitated to bring attention to it when it was vacant and disused.

We needn't have worried.

The picture at the beginning of this post is what in-bound commuters on Columbus Avenue see when they look across the parking lot after passing the intersection with Centre Street. The careless, unpainted boards of plywood fairly cry out to those passing by Abandoned! Disused! Vacant! Disinvestment!

We know times are tough for everyone. We're sure that at the time this boarding up was done, it was done with the best intention of securing an important community asset. The plywood, no doubt, seemed a responsible guard against squatting, vandalism, and worse.

And yet, we wish there had been more thought given before these plywood sheets were slapped up. When RCC was being built there was talk of making the Dudley Manor into the president's house. What a grand president's house it would have been. But a "residential treatment program for recovering substance abusers" was a righteous use, too.

At the end of August, City Councillor Rob Consalvo proposed (with Councillors Maureen Feeney and Steve Murphy concurring) an amendment to a city ordinance governing maintenance of foreclosed property. It would have enabled the Inspectional Services Department to require owners of foreclosed property to secure the windows and doors from the inside to make the property look more secure and less offensive. If the City government considers compelling absentee landlords to treat the streetscape with respect, RCC might do well to reconsider how it has defaced the Dudley Manor. [Universal Hub article from 8/25/10 1:26 pm]

This summer RCC undertook a significant program of resetting all the granite coping on its three brick buildings. No doubt there was other work done at the roof line as well that was not obvious from the ground. The community is happy that the college is taking care of its buildings.

But, the old Dudley Manor house should receive at least as much care from RCC as do the new buildings. Perhaps there is a plan for this historic house. It would be nice to learn what it is.

Here is the Dudley Manor on a warm February afternoon before its plywooding.

Curiously, there is very little to be found about the Dudley Manor on the web. Except for the mention on the Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center site, it is not even clear that the building should be called the Dudley Manor.

Eid al-Fitr at Jack Crump Field

2010-09-10T10:26:00.024-04:00

This morning was a classic September, New England morning, with the promise of warmth, and the boding of approaching winter. At 6:45 am, the temperature was in the high 50s, slowly rising with the sun. The sky was bright blue, sparsely dotted with slow-moving, puffy white clouds. There was a brisk wind. It was chilly enough for a wind breaker, and warm enough to have regretted bringing it when the sun was high in the sky.

I stood watching from the bleachers as the men and boys streamed past toward the eastern end zone of the Jack Crump football field. At the other end of the field, toward the 40 yard line, the women and children were arriving.

At one point early on, a large pleasant women in a vast black niqab shooed me away from the (unmarked) children's section and told me to sit on the bleachers where the men were. Never did instructions from Security seem so unexpected and congenial.

There were men and boys of every stripe streaming onto the field. Of hats I saw knitted skull caps—white ones and black ones—Afghani pakols, keffiyehs, and turbans. I even saw one fez. There were a few men in formal black suits, medical personnel in scrubs, young men casually dressed in jeans and shirts open at the collar. Many men were wearing light, calf-length thobes, some stopping to pull them from their backpacks and don them before going down to the field. Almost every man seemed to have a prayer rug and a plastic shopping bag for his shoes.

Eventually a man came to the bleachers and shooed all the able-bodied men out of the bleachers and down onto the field.

Advertised for 7 to 7:30 am, Takbeer seemed to stretch on toward 8:15, with many different men leading, in turn, from the microphone. Young men and boys were especially urged to come forward, so much of the time the chant, while earnest and charming, was oddly childish and atonal. Once prayer started at around 8:20, though, there was an experienced and mellifluous adult chanter.

Periodically, during takbeer, a warm-voiced and inviting man instructed the crowd on worship etiquette. There was brief instruction on what already should have been done—the rising, the washing, the breaking of the fast—and what yet should be done—the contribution made before the prayers, the embrace of the joy of the day, the passing on of the joy, smiling, making contributions to charity.

The men were reminded that they should apply a pleasant scent to their bodies, perhaps borrowing some from the man sitting next to them if they had forgotten. The women, too, were asked that they use some scent—not over much, so people distant from them couldn't tell, but only enough so that those they embraced or greeted would smell it.

The assembled were encouraged to visit the mosque, browse through the souk, and to partake of the doughnuts and other food there.

Then folk were instructed to straighten their lines. Volunteers helped ensure that, looking left and right, the aisles between lines of worshipers were clear and straight. Then the prayers began.

This was my first experience of Muslim worship, so I was surprised when a scant twenty minutes later, around 8:40, at an obvious break, many of those assembled began to leave or stood and chatted with neighbors while a sermon was delivered. The great majority stayed seated, but the fringes of the crowd broke out into a festival atmosphere of greeting friends and remaking acquaintances.

There were perhaps two to three thousand people present on the field, far short of the ten thousand anticipated in the parking plan. Police presence was much less than one might expect for an event of similar size, with senior police officers (gold badges) unobtrusively tooling around in green-colored, Boston EMS electric carts. There were fewer than a half a dozen Special Detail motorcycle police officers on Tremont Street half-heartedly directing traffic at the intersections of Prentiss Street and at Malcolm X Boulevard. Gloria Fox, Byron Rushing, and Chuck Turner's presence was announced. Mayor Menino was expected, but had not yet arrived.

These three days are when the supplications of the faithful are especially heard. But, this morning seemed somewhat subdued in spirit, with less palpable joy of gratitude for the blessings from the Creator. Next year the religious calendar won't conspire with the civil calendar to make the fifteen hundred-year-old Eid al-Fitr coincide with the anniversary of a nine-year-old tragedy. Perhaps in 2011 residents of Boston will feel freer to express their faith publicly and joyously. Kudos to the public officials who came out early this morning to express their solidarity.

It is embarrassing to this non-Muslim that we can't mind our own business. Whether it is people outside of Manhattan voicing their beside-the-point opinions on the business of New Yorkers when they should be worrying about zoning issues in their own communities. Or, whether it is an incendiary, small-time, fringe preacher in Gainesville who should take to heart this line from the Orthodox Lenten prayer: Grant me to see my own errors, and not to judge my brother or sister.

Having not known beforehand how to break fast, when I returned home, I ate three dates.

The ISBCC's web site was unfortunately updated only very late this week with information on today's event. Elsewhere they say that their "website has been compromised."

A calmed Centre Street

2010-09-10T08:00:00.001-04:00

Delightful portulaca flourishing at the switch-back onto Fort Ave.

Over the years the traffic on Centre Street between Eliot and Jackson Squares has calmed down. In the '70s when the street was wider and nobody parked on Centre Street, because nobody could afford a car, through traffic raced across this part of Highland Park at speeds of 35 to 45 mph. Two particularly dangerous spots were the crest of the hill at Linwood Street and the five-way intersection with Cedar St. and the switched-back Fort Ave.

Centre St was quicker to Dudley, North Dorchester, and the Southeast Expressway than going down Columbus Avenue. And, the reverse was true, too.

Over the years the street, which had been made wide for streetcars, was narrowed. Then, after a long, labored campaign with the city, a traffic light was installed to limit the weekly accidents at Cedar St.

Columbus Avenue was rebuilt and its grade raised, and the exciting traffic rotary that was Jackson Square was eliminated. No longer a straight shot directly into Jamaica Plain, Centre St. was bent almost at a right-angle at Highland St to make a perpendicular intersection at Columbus Avenue with Heath Street.

A truck prohibition was placed on Cedar St. (Careful readers will be happy to note that there is no prohibition on elk, but, to the contrary, they are explicitly permitted on Cedar St.)

Eliot Square was reconfigured and traffic lights were installed, further discouraging through traffic.

Then Centre St was repaved and made quieter because heavy trucks and fast-moving cars no longer went rocketing through the pot holes. Except for the short stretch south of Cedar and north of that little stub of New Heath Street, which remained crater-ridden.

But, just this past week even that stretch of Centre St has been repaved, making the road even quieter.

With the tinkering with the lights at Eliot Sq., giving east-bound Roxbury St. priority, and making through Centre St. traffic wait for 30 seconds for a green, it no longer pays to cut through Highland Park.

The next desirable disincentive may be to implement parking restrictions to cut down on the number of Orange Line commuters, Roxbury Community College students, and Friday afternoon Mosque worshipers who use Centre St for subsidized parking.

Perhaps a residents-only restriction from 8 to 10 am Monday through Friday and noon to 2 pm on Friday would do the trick.

It will be important to implement parking restrictions carefully. Most residents make use of on-street parking. Some run small businesses out of their homes and need unrestricted visitor parking.

Quiet neighborhood the night before Eid crowds arrive

2010-09-09T22:49:00.010-04:00

A quick circuit down Gardner Street, up Malcom X Blvd, to Roxbury Street shows the no stopping event signs to be up. The few remaining cars parked on Roxbury Street between Malcolm X Blvd and Eliot Square leafleted. Ashur Restaurant is hopping at 10:15 pm, so Elmwood Street still has customers parked there.

The mosque is locked, but the lights are burning bright inside. The poster on the front door says the event parking tickets could be had for $10 each.

The best, unregulated parking for those who arrive early enough is probably the dozen or so spaces on King Street.

On such a crisp and quiet night just before bedtime, it's hard to believe there will be 10,000 folk flocking to Crump Field in seven to eight hours' time.

Illegal Boston Police parking opposite Headquarters is as perennial as weeds

2010-09-08T08:00:00.003-04:00

Click on the photo and enlarge it to see four public servants conducting important police business. The car blocking the sidewalk was in gear and drifted dangerously forward as your reporter walked by.

Illegal Boston Police parking continues unabated on the sidewalk of inbound Tremont Street opposite Police Headquarters.

The entire parking lane of southbound Tremont St. has been given over to Police Parking, from Whittier St. all the way to Malcolm X Blvd, but that doesn't seem to have changed things a bit.

In fact, a stroll by One Schroeder Plaza today shows that not only do the Boston Police need the parking legally designated as official police parking, but they also need to block the MBTA bus stop just north of Prentiss Street on the outbound side of Tremont. And, the illegal police parking extends into the right-hand turn lane at Roxbury Crossing

This problem is as perennial as weeds. Universal Hub reported on a variation of this problem in February of last year. This past June, on another story at Universal Hub about the larger problem of People using outlying neighborhoods as alternatives to downtown garages, a commenter noted the illegal parking.

One wonders whether this year's worshipers for Eid al-Fitr will be permitted to use this clever parking strategy on Friday, or if it is restricted to only police officials.

Darryl Settles's Corner Bar & Kitchen finds a landing pad

2010-09-07T17:58:00.014-04:00

Darryl Settles's latest venture, Darryl's Corner Bar & Kitchen, has opened on the border between Lower Roxbury and the South End. This is the location of the long-time Boston landmark restaurant, Bob the Chef's, and, most recently, of the Stork Club.

Here is how Mr. Settles describes the core concept behind his establishment: "When we first started working on the Darryl’s Corner Bar & Kitchen concept we knew we wanted to be a Great Bar with a great kitchen as opposed to a Great Restaurant with a great bar. The distinction is important."

In anchoring his establishment around a bar, rather than a restaurant, Mr. Settles asserts that the "Corner Bar has always been an important part of our community, whether as a meeting place for revolutionaries or respite for the working man."

With the gentrification of the South End and Northeastern's salient into Lower Roxbury, it seems revolutionaries are scarce on the ground. (Lucy Parsons, anyone?) With the unemployment rate nearing Great Depression levels in Roxbury, the class of working men and women is getting much smaller, too. Perhaps students and the white collar class will make up for the missing proletariat and revolutionaries.

Despite the conceptual emphasis on the drinks, Darryl's Corner Bar & Kitchen does not neglect the kitchen. Here is a three-page pdf of the menu (sans prices).

Mr. Settles has been working his publicity machinery well. A google search for the bar's name yields a solid 50 hits of press announcements and reviews. The Bay State Banner has published a feature article.

That corner of Columbus Avenue and Northampton Street ("the intersection of friends, food, and music") is a quick 7 minute bicycle ride and a brisk 20 minute walk from Mr. Settles's first choice of location for his bar and restaurant, so residents of Fort Hill have yet another convenient choice for drinks and dinner.

A little more than six months ago, Mr. Settles investigated 85 Centre Street on Fort Hill as a possible location for his bar and restaurant.

Iseut via UniversalHub brought Mr. Settles's Fort Hill designs to our attention, providing the impetus for this blog. The first twelve posts conclude with this coda. Those posts chronicle some of the kerfuffle Mr. Settles's proposal provoked on the Centre Street side of Fort Hill. It is bizarre that these posts, from a infant blog with a grand total of 40 posts, aspiring only to cover a tiny part of a middling city, consistently show up high on the first page of a google search on the words Darryl Settles.

Despite our previous opposition, we are very pleased that Mr. Settles's has found a congenial location for his bar and restaurant. We are sorry that some on Fort Hill were disappointed that that location was not at 85 Centre Street. But, we are confident that Darryl's Corner Bar & Kitchen will flourish "at the intersection of food, friends, and music." (So far, the church at 85 Centre Street has remained a reasonably quiet and considerate neighbor.)

The timing of the opening of Darryl's Corner Bar is auspicious for the jazz festival that Mr. Settles founded ten years ago, The Berklee Beantown Jazz Festival, is set to start next week on 15 September and is to run for the next ten days.

The festival is located on Columbus Avenue between Burke Street and Massachusetts Avenue, right on the front steps of Darryl's Corner Bar. [This image is owned by the Berklee College of Music.]

Caring for Street Trees: Kudos to Boston Interiors

2010-09-07T15:40:00.006-04:00

It's tough being a street-side tree in the city. So few make it to maturity. Drought, dog urine & feces, rough handling prior to and during planting, pollution, bicyclists securing their rides, and truck drivers in a hurry breaking off low branches. [Vehicular arson also belongs on this list. BostonPOPS via UniversalHub]

Especially the truck drivers: UPS, NStar, National Grid, Boston Water & Sewer Commission, and the countless unnamed contractors with trucks too big for them to handle all take their turn roughing up the street-side trees on Fort Hill.

Occasionally, however a truck driver comes to the neighborhood who deserves positive comment.

Kudos, then to the driver of the Boston Interiors delivery truck this afternoon who took care to slip his high truck carefully beneath a mature sycamore tree on Centre Street opposite his delivery address.

I'm sure he thought he was getting set up by a neighborhood crank, for even after I spoke with him to thank him for his care, he drove by, stopped, and took a picture of my house after I had taken these two of his truck. It's a suspicious world we live in.

Despite the risk of being taken for a crank, commending careful delivery truck drivers makes all the more sense as Fort Hill neighbors volunteer their time to plot locations for new trees.

Working with the city they have identified a first round of planting sites on Fort Hill. Taking into account size, color, fragrance, and hardiness, they are seeking to enhance the country feel of Highland Park.

Powahouse 'Percent For Art 'Competition

2010-09-03T08:00:00.005-04:00

What if every building, whether commercial or residential, private or public, were required to erect a work of art where it abuts the public domain? Why not turn our streetscapes into enticing cultural destinations in their own right? [From the Call for Entries]

Sparking a discussion about the state of legally mandated Percent For Art programs in the local construction industry is the impetus behind the "Powahouse %4ART Competition," not to mention the creation of a fine piece of art that will do Kittredge Square proud.

Under the aegis of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Placetailor, Inc. has issued a Call for Entries in a design competition for an installation of public art to compliment a three-unit condominium project (floor plans here) to be built on historic Alvah Kittredge Square at the corner of Highland and Linwood Streets.

Placetailor, Inc. is "a design/build company that makes, repairs, and alters urban environments such as streetscapes, workplaces, and rooftops."

One of their recent projects on Fort Hill is the Pratt House, formerly a wreck of a 160-year old gunsmith’s cottage wedged between Dudley and Kenilworth Streets, next to O'Aces Hair Salon. It is now a 750-square-foot, air-tight, super-insulating home. These two pictures were taken during construction in March 2010.

The entry deadline for the "Powahouse %4ART Competition" is 20 September 2010. The Jury members are: Celia Grant, Director of Marketing & Creative at Associated Industries of Massachusetts; Chris McCarthy, community leader of the Kittredge Square revitalization initiative; and Gretchen Schneider, public artist, architect and educator.

Even while the owners of the Alvah Kittredge House are shamefully failing minimally to fulfill their civic responsibilities, it is good to know that other developers are willing to go beyond common expectations to help make flourish the neighborhoods in which they find their profit.

10,000 expected at Crump Field for Eid Al-Fitr on Friday, 10 Sep 2010

2010-09-02T08:05:00.014-04:00

In an email addressed to members of the Highland Park community, the BRA's Muhammad Ali-Salaam has announced a city parking plan for 850 vehicles to accommodate the 10,000 worshipers expected for Eid Al-Fitr on Friday, 10 September 2010, from 7 am to 10 am.

The event is planned for the Jack Crump Memorial Athletic Field [google satellite image] just north of the Madison Park High School. Ali-Salaam informs us that if "the weather doesn't cooperate, then we will pray at the Roxbury Mosque (ISBCC) in shifts."

Five Highland Park and Madison Park streets will be posted as restricted "Special Event No Parking" to provide 230 on-street parking spaces for attendees of the event.

These streets are Malcom X Blvd, Roxbury St, Madison Park Ct., Ruggles St., and Elmwood St.

Lot parking will be available for 320 vehicles in a portion of the Roxbury Community College lot between Cedar and New Heath Sts, in the parking lot behind the Mosque, in the municipal lot adjacent to Ruggles Ct., and in the Blair lot at the east end of Ruggles St. between Washington St. and Harrison Ave.

In addition, 300 garage parking places will be available at the Renaissance Plaza Garage by Ruggles Station.

For those who decide parking might be a problem, Crump Field is a five to ten minute walk from the Ruggles and Roxbury Crossing Orange Line stations and from the Dudley bus station.

Ali-Salaam also says that planning for the event "is being headed by Chuck McAffee, Headmaster of Madison Park, and we are also coordinating with the COB Parks Dept, Boston Police, School Police, and MBTA Police."

[Edited to correct the date.]

Urban Amenities: Access to Abundant Mass Transit

2010-06-06T17:40:00.005-04:00

Fort Hill is blessed with an abundance of mass transit options.

Within easy walking distance are 21 bus lines and 1 rapid transit line. By a rough count there are over 40 bus stops along the Fort Hill roads of Centre, Dudley, Roxbury, Columbus, and Washington streets, plus Malcolm X Blvd, not to mention the 2 rapid transit stations of Roxbury Crossing and Jackson Square, and the bus depot at Dudley Square.

If one is physically able, there is no absolute need to own a car on Fort Hill just for food shopping.

There are two Stop&Shop supermarkets within walking distance, or easy busing distance, at Brigham Circle and on the fringe of Jamaica Plain.

Tropical Foods is located on Washington Street just in-bound from Dudley.

In addition, there are three corner markets on Fort Hill (Juba and Marcella market, and Fernandez III, detailed in these two earlier posts).

If one can stomach riding the Fraudulent Silver Line, then Chinatown beckons. The closest store is Ming's Market (not sure what it is called now) at Washington and East Berkley streets.

Future posts will list the Fort Hill mass transit options in more detail.

Sharing the Sidewalk with Toddlers

2010-06-03T16:38:00.007-04:00

Anonymous called me a name in the comment (to this post) that have I just deleted, not a particularly bad name, but certainly unnecessary to get his point across. The rest of his post was this:

"And if you were hit by a bike while walking in the middle of the bike path, it would be the righteous bike rider's fault, right?"

Which misses the point completely, because I'm actually on the side of rational transportation policy, presumably his side. After all I was sufficiently interested in promoting bicycling to stand there and count them rather than reading a book until my late bus came.

I have been a devoted bicylist—for years. I have consistently commuted in 3°F weather. I have been doored more than once. I have been smashed up onto the hood of a left-turning automobile (whose driver I called a much worse name, you can be sure). I've twisted my front wheel and fork in trolley tracks. I can repack my bearing races and restring a wheel. I'm just not bicycling now.

Pedestrians, bicyclists, and mass transit users are all getting the transportation shaft. Too much of the infrastructure is devoted to a losing game—personal automobiles powered with petroleum products.

The fact that I find I have to disdain a marked pedestrian way in preference to a marked cycling way and the fact that an imprudent bicyclist may ride too fast and collide with me have less to do with where we walk and ride than it condemns the social choices we collectively have made concerning allocation of resources among the various transportation modes.

Forgive me for reposting this picture (from the previous post) which shows the sign directing pedestrians to walk on smooth concrete in a straight line adjacent to six lanes of traffic, and directing bicycles to bumpy macadam in an inefficient undulating path. Forget the lack of appropriateness of each path to the intended users.

Rather focus on the small group of children, toddlers, actually, and their chaperons to the left of the photograph. I wanted to take a better picture of them, but I did not want to agitate the adults by being a stranger photographing their young charges.

Every day, when the weather is clement, approximately two dozen toddlers take a very slow walk along this segment of the Southwest Corridor Park. Sometimes they are pulled along in a wagon, sometimes they walk together holding onto a rope, as a way to keep them safe and well-marshaled.

It is a perfectly natural activity, something we all would applaud. They obviously do not belong on the designated pedestrian sidewalk next to the Columbus Avenue traffic sewer. They obviously belong on the safe way, among the trees and birds. They ought to walk at their accustomed pace, only being careful to keep together and keep on the path.

It ought not be necessary for them to keep to the right, heed bicycle bells, listen for shouts of "ON THE LEFT," or have any awareness of their surroundings.

It is incumbent upon all walkers, wheeled persons (inline skaters, skaterboarders, unicyclists, bicyclists, and everybody) to slow to an appropriate speed, to the point of dismounting if necessary, to ensure these children can enjoy their morning walk without danger.

This is not an optimal situation. Two to three lanes of Columbus Avenue ought to be devoted to human-powered transportation. Those lanes ought to be full to the brim with humans powering their own transportation. The children and other pedestrians ought to be able to enjoy their walkways unmolested.

This is not yet the state of affairs. And, until it is, we have to share the road.

A final note. Adam Gaffin, in his business at UniversalHub, may have to tolerate name-calling in the comments on his site, but I do not. I'm interested in what folk have to say, but I will delete without fail comments that are not polite.

Rush Hour Bicycle Census at Columbus & Cedar

2010-06-03T00:12:00.014-04:00

While waiting 22-1/2 minutes on a weekday evening for a #22 bus at the outbound Columbus Avenue and Cedar Street stop, I did an informal bicycle census. [NB: maps.google has the outbound bus stop south of Cedar Street, when it is actually located north by about ten yards.]

I shouldn't have been waiting for that long. I should have had only a four minute wait, but I wound up waiting five times that long. I arrived at the bus stop at 5:18 pm. The next two scheduled buses (5:22 pm & 5:31 pm) did not run. As I waited for the outbound #22, four inbound #22s passed by. When I finally got picked up at 5:40 pm, two #22s were headed outbound in tandem.

So, making lemonade out of MBTA lemons, in the 22-1/2 minutes, I counted the following:

103 bicycles traveling (outbound & inbound) on the Southwest Corridor bike path
1 bicycle traveling outbound in the Columbus Avenue travel lanes
1 recumbent bicycle
a mother-daughter pair (two bicycles), the helmeted ten-year-old with pretty pink streamers on her handlebar ends
a handful of fixed-wheeled bicycles, but the vast majority of the cyclists looked like every day Joes and Janes riding home after work or school.

About 20% of the bicycle traffic was traveling inbound, the other 80% was headed outbound.

In addition, there were:

2 outbound scooters
about 15 pedestrians, equally mixed between inbound and outbound

Of the pedestrians about half were walking on the path marked for bicycles and the other half the sidewalk marked for pedestrians. Were I to regularly walk this route, I too, would be on the bicycle path, for it is farther away from the smelly traffic sewer of Columbus Avenue. I'm sure that would be inconvenient for the righteous bicycle commuters, but I'd still chose to walk as far away from the motorized vehicular traffic as I could.

I'm surprised that there is that much bicycle traffic. I'd noticed that the bicycle traffic in the SW Corridor was much greater than in previous years, but I never expected to count that many bicycles, even at rush hour.

Streetsweeper Fans

2010-05-14T18:00:00.000-04:00

Clean Streets III was a somewhat quirky post, but it was sufficient to net six visitors looking for these search terms.

fmc 984 sweeper
fmc 993 sweeper
hako citymaster 1200
wayne 984 sweeper
wayne sweeper

For those who doubt the enduring attraction of these fine machines, here is a link to streetcleaner0's Flikr Sweeper set.

ISD Apparently Takes an Interest in Alvah Kittredge's House

2010-05-12T11:20:00.006-04:00

The City of Boston Inspectional Services Department (ISD) has apparently taken a recent interest in the Alvah Kittredge House [Previous article].

About two weeks ago fluorescent green caution tape bearing the city seal, ISD's name, and the instruction to keep out, appeared draped across the slap-dash chain link fencing stretched around the house's ramshackle porch.

One might wonder what city regulations are in violation, but it's possibly a shorter task to list the ones not in violation.

A Blighted Legacy Taunts Alvah Kittredge Square

2010-04-22T01:15:00.049-04:00

The annual clean-up of Alvah Kittredge Square is scheduled for this weekend. From 9 to 11 am this Saturday, 24 April 2010, the "neighborhood scrub down" takes place. A sweet little announcement came to the neighborhood email list asking the neighbors to turn out, to bring flowers to plant and ideas for an after-school program, and to shovel around some city-provided mulch.

If there is enough time and willing hands, folk will walk down to Highland Ave and Centre Street to dress up that corner. The email even includes a pretty picture from Roxbury Highland's glory days.

The Friends of AK Park report they have secured commitment of significant funding from several foundations, have received a promise of help from Mayor Menino, and are confident of additional funding for a reconstruction of the park.

That's not all. The Project Review Committee of Highland Park is considering plans for the construction of a new rowhouse, "a landmark green building, producing more clean energy than it consumes" on the square at the corner of Highland and Linwood streets.

But, wait ... there's still more. It seems that the community garden at Alvah Kittredge Square is soon to be upgraded with a water supply, a concrete walk-way, a (wrought-iron!) fence and gate, and division into thirteen garden plots.

It's been a struggle over the years, but with the development of the apartment buildings facing the square, the investment of many owners and renters, the work of Historic Boston with the rowhouses on the square, the community garden, and other efforts, Alvah Kittredge Square has come a long way.
Except for one small detail: Alvah's house.

This poor derelict presides over the square from its address of 10 Linwood Street. It is a wreck and it continues to slide toward destruction right before our eyes. Here is the facade on a recent morning, propped up with scaffolding.

Here are photographs of the rear of the building and of its west side.

Will the scaffolding be sufficient to keep the rotted wood from tumbling onto the sidewalk? Does the blue tarpaulin partially draped over the roof really keep the rain out?

In a photograph from the web site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, dated July 2004, the Alvah Kittredge House looked like this.
Given the current scandalous neglect, in a very few more years there will be nothing left of this historic treasure to restore.

The Roxbury Action Program (RAP)—whose name adorns the front of the building—owned this house in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Preoccupied elsewhere in the neighborhood, RAP sat on the house and allowed it to deteriorate like any feckless, absentee landlord. Since that time RAP has pulled up stakes from 10 Linwood Street and has conveyed the property (probably in 1999) to Alexander Leroy who is trustee of something called the Linwood St Realty Trust.

10 Linwood Street is listed with the city as commercial property, assessed at $179,900.00, with an annual property tax of $5,285.46 for fiscal year 2010—plus interest and fees of $271.95, as nothing has been paid against the tax bill this year. See the roller-coaster valuation history at the City of Boston On-line Assessing web site.

Mr. Leroy, and his do-nothing trust, are dreadfully misusing this historic house and the neighborhood in which it sits, just as the Roxbury Action Program did when it was the custodian.

Diligent neighbors can plant flowers and plan gardens, committed owners can invest, build, and renovate, and responsible and successful charities can lend a hand.

But, until Linwood St Realty takes its civic duty seriously, Alvah Kittredge Square will continue to be taunted by the irresponsibility manifested in this wreck.

Or, Alexander Leroy & trust can get out of the way and convey this piece of historic Fort Hill to someone who can do the job.

This status quo is shameful.

An addendum: On page 40 of this Notice of Taking, [1.465KB pdf] the Collector-Treasurer announces that it is his "intention to take for the City of Boston On Tuesday, the Fifteenth day of December, 2009" 10 Linwood Street, among other "parcel(s) of real estate for non-payment, after demand, of the taxes thereon" of $5,975.20.

Clean Streets III

2010-04-20T14:30:00.031-04:00

Odd-side street sweeping rolled around to Centre Street for a second time this season, but it seemed there was only ticketing and not the towing that Iseut reported on 6 April.

The guys at the DPW have new toys to sweep the streets with. They've been spotted in Jamaica Plain, East Boston, and Roxbury, so perhaps the entire city fleet has been replaced. These photographs were taken at the Highland Street DPW yard.

Here are photographs of the old sweepers.

(Photo credits. Above: Globe Staff Photo / Mark Wilson. Right: Boston Zest)

If you are in search of a hobby, there seems to be a small, but dedicated, group of folk who are interested in street sweeping equipment—like rail-fans, but with rubber tires and rotary brushes.

Here's a list of popular equipment, plus a Flickr street cleaning fan site: Elgin Pelican (always a classic!), Wayne 993, FMC 984, Elgin Streetking, Johnston 4000, Hako Citymaster 1200, FMC Vanguard 3000, Verro City, Mobil M9D, LMV B62, NIMOS Sweepers, TENNANTS, Zamboni, Wayne 2984, Olympia, Wayne Sweeper, Aebi MFH 2200, Athey Mobils* to get you started.

Boston's street sweeping equipment vendor, American Sweeping, seems to favor the classic Elgin Pelican. Here is an encomium to this great machine on the occasion of its 90th anniversary. This is the Elgin Sweeper Company web page.

The Midnight Ride of William Dawes

2010-04-16T09:37:00.011-04:00

Every year on Patriots' Day since the 1980s, there has been a celebration in the Roxbury Highlands of William Dawes's 1774 ride from Roxbury to Lexington, bringing notice to the American guerrillas of British infantry movements.

This year, the 380th anniversary of Roxbury's founding, is no exception, with the annual celebration occurring on Monday, April 19, from 8am to 12:30pm.

Discover Roxbury has the details. There is free breakfast, presentation of the Warren I. Brown scholarship, a lecture by the local architects of Donald Stull and David Lee [their corporate web site], and a trolley tour of the neighborhood.

Open, and free to the public, on that day are the Dillaway-Thomas House (183 Roxbury St), the Shirley-Eustis House (33 Shirley St), and the Eliot Burial Ground (Washington St. at Eustis).

The ceremonial equestrian unit, the National Lancers, is providing a couple of horses and a Dawes facsimile for the ceremony in the yard at the First Church, before setting off on this route to Lexington. The National Lancers have a hodgepodge of photographs from 2008 at their Picasa site, starting with this picture (presumably of William Dawes with his dear mother).

Of course, Wikipedia has an article on William Dawes, too. WGBH did a short feature back in 1991. The Fort Hill Civic Association has some pictures of the 2006 festivities half-way down this page. Wicked Local Brookline has this 2008 story. Visit this historic marker the next time you are near Harvard Square. The Paul Revere House website shows the routes of Revere, Dawes, and the British.

And then there is the Jimmy Hatlo They'll Do It Every Time rendition.

Urban Amenities: The DPW Yard & Salt Shed

2010-04-15T14:14:00.021-04:00

Again, this is not precisely what one would immediately consider an urban amenity, but we shouldn't forget the benefits Fort Hill gains by having the Boston Department of Public Works (DPW) yard and salt shed on its southern flank.

Having this mountain of salt nearby, with the resulting stream of snowplow trucks entering and leaving the yard, means that Centre, Dudley, Roxbury, Marcella, and Ritchie streets are the first to be plowed and salted and are kept clear of snow and ice throughout every winter storm. I can't speak for the other arteries in the neighborhood (Highland, Cedar, Thornton, Guild, and Milmont streets), but Centre Street and Marcella and Ritchie streets are kept pretty clean of snow even at the height of a storm.

One can argue about the environmental impact of spewing salt all over city streets so that Boston drivers can continue driving ... well, like Boston drivers ... even as the first flakes fall. One might also consider if the DPW takes sufficient environmental caution with its huge cache of salt. One might ask if creating a hard-pack snow surface would be better than insisting on plowing right down to the blacktop. (Google Seattle salt sand snow for a variety of views on Seattle's recent experience on the subject.)

But, as long as Boston maintains its current snow removal policy, we should be glad the DPW houses this operation in our neighborhood.

However, in a 29 March 2010 letter to the BRA Board of Directors, Councillor Turner addresses the development plans for Jackson Square. In this letter he states that the presence of the DPW yard and salt shed limits the potential for economic development on the Roxbury side of Jackson Square. He relates that DPW officials have been unwilling to even discuss the long-term prospects of moving the operations of the yard and salt shed to another location.

Councillor Turner would rather the DPW relocate its Highland Street yard and salt shed somewhere else so that the real estate could be devoted to economic development in Roxbury.

See this 14 August 2009 article, "Urban Edge proposes new first-phase plans," in the Jamaica Plain Gazette Online for details on the problems siting housing next to the salt shed. The article claims that salt for half the city comes from this shed. Universal Hub has this 2010 photograph of operations at the West Roxbury salt shed [maps.google satellite view] at Millennium Park.

I don't have strong opinions on the matter, but, for as long as they last, I'm happy to enjoy transportation side effects of our neighborhood hosting this DPW operation.

Urban Amenities: Location, location, location

2010-04-05T10:36:00.015-04:00

From this prospect behind the Dillaway-Thomas House at the Roxbury Heritage State Park the view encompasses from Back Bay to South Station.

While not perhaps an amenity, per se, Fort Hill's location must be one of its single greatest assets.

Central to the City of Boston, Fort Hill is within easy striking of the entire city, whether on foot, by bicycle, or by mass transit. It is even convenient to drive, if you know the secret parking places closer into the city center.

Walking or bicycling inbound, the Southwest Corridor Park is a green slice through Roxbury and the South End directly into the city. Going southwest, the Corridor leads all the way to the Arboretum.

The Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Gardner Museum, the Fenway and Muddy River, Symphony Hall are all easy bicycling and walking destinations on a bright spring day. Even closer are Malcolm X and Harris Park and the National Center of Afro-American Artists.

These schools are all within walking distance: Northeastern University, Simmons College, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Massachusetts College of Art, Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Massachusetts School of Pharmacy, Emmanuel College, and Wheelock College. (What have I left out?)

Slightly farther away are the the Back Bay and the Charles River Esplanade. In the other direction, Leverett Pond, Jamaica Pond, and the Arboretum are all within easy bicycling and walking distance. Franklin Park and the Franklin Park Zoo are a short distance down Seaver Street.

Even if these destinations seem a little far to walk for our tender American feet, Fort Hill is served by over 40 bus stops, 2 rapid transit stops, and 21 different bus lines.

For those of us who only think in an automotive mode, Fort Hill is close to Storrow Drive, the Mass Pike, and the Southeast Expressway. Route 9 leads the way west to Newton and 128. This means that employment flexibility is maximized as measured by commuting time. In addition to the center city, Andover, Braintree, Waltham, Cambridge, Burlington, and Lexington, are all feasible commutes by car. They have the additional benefit of being reverse commutes, as well.

The next posts will examine the wealth of MBTA options that runs through and adjacent to Fort Hill.

Clean Streets II

2010-03-31T12:36:00.011-04:00

From April Fools' Day to the end of November, eight months of the year, Boston Department of Public Works street sweepers ply the roads and avenues of Boston and Fort Hill. The day after the end of the March Monsoons, street sweepers were spotted on Centre Street in Roxbury and, during a quick shopping trip, on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain.

Residential sweeping—and enforcement—starts in earnest on Monday. It will be interesting to see whether Boston engages in a paroxysm of towing on Fort Hill as they did last year, or whether this season of street sweeping will be introduced with only a plague of tickets.

Whichever method is chosen, there will be some very surprised and unhappy residents and commuters in the early days of next week.

The DPW publishes its street sweeping schedule from a remarkably obtuse user interface. The Search by Street Name feature, which is what the average user really wants, is grayed out and not yet implemented. Instead one has to either paw through the entire street sweeping schedule of a particular DPW district, assuming one knows what district contains the desired street. The best way to manage this cumbersome list is to use the browser's search (usually Ctrl+F) to find your street .

Otherwise, one must choose an ordinal number (sic, 1st through 5th!) and one or more days of the week. If you choose just a day of the week your query returns no results. This form seems it would be more interesting to DPW personnel than to Peter Parker.

In a nice touch, the Boston DPW provides the street sweeping schedule for the Mass Department of Conservation and Recreation. This information is also available at the DCR's own web site.

Using the same clumsy interface the DPW offers email reminders.

It is hard to know whether to congratulate and encourage Boston for offering this information on the web at all, or whether to wonder how many years it will take for IT in this little corner of www.cityofboston.gov to catch up to industry standards.

Urban Amenities: Clean Streets

2010-03-29T10:24:00.014-04:00

The weather warms, the snow is long gone, and folk are out puttering in their yards, beginning the slow preparation for spring. It's not unusual to to be slightly appalled at the urban trash and litter left behind by the receding winter and snow.

The ubiquitous plastic bags, the fast food containers, cigarette packages, wind-blown paper and cardboard, soda cups, and beverage containers, all moldering in a fecund, smelly matrix of decaying leaves.

It is the city, after all, and it's hard to keep on top of things, when the wind howls and the snow sleets against the face. So, when the weather begins to relent, a couple of hours raking, scraping, and sweeping outside, a little industry, and the front of the property is presentable again.

But, what about the back of the property? Do property owners feel responsible for the back of their parcels?

On Roxbury Street, in two cases, the answer seems to be no.

The Louis Prang House and the old firehouse on Centre Street are reasonably well-kempt.

But, these parcels front both Centre Street and Roxbury Street. In contrast to the clean sidewalks on Centre Street, these property owners permit disgusting conditions on Roxbury Street, to the point where the sidewalk isn't really passable.

The City of Boston and the Prang Estates Associates are the responsible owners of 27 and 29 Centre Street. Perhaps as part of their spring cleaning, they will cast an eye on their Roxbury Street frontage and clean their act up.

The Cruz Management Company claims Prang Estates and Prang House as part of their management portfolio. The tidy bit of landscaping depicted at the right is just around the corner from the trash in the three photographs above.

It wouldn't take too much effort for Cruz to extend its perimeter of concern from merely in front of their office entrance to just up Roxbury Street. With our new neighbors in the mosque and the new Ashur Restaurant taking reasonably good care of their property, it would seem to be the neighborly thing to do.

There is one more point: Roxbury Street, from John Eliot Square to Elmwood Street, is heavily parked by commuters. If we don't show respect for our environs, keeping our streets clean, then the commuters won't either. It is a struggle on Gardner Street, with commuters dumping trash out of their vehicles, but the battle, so far, is totally lost on Roxbury Street.

Open Space II: King Street Playground

2010-03-24T15:29:00.022-04:00

I was mistaken in my most recent post about the King Street Playground.

Two recent visits showed the George Robert White Play Space to be locked at night and, during the day, to be open, peaceful, clean, and picked up.

Much less than the usual amount of end-of-winter, wind-blown urban trash was present. There were two make-shift bird feeders, unsurprisingly full to the brim, given the recent deluges.

Pawing around in Google produced a brochure from Native Landscapes who designed the rehabilitation of the play space. Their plan for the play space is on page 13 of this link [4.2 MB pdf].

What I had remembered as, and probably was, part of the playground apparently has been conveyed to the ISB.

Regrettably the George Robert White Fund only owned the parcel at the corner of Roxbury and King streets.

This little park contains a well-proportioned shallow sunken pool. Perhaps in better days it was an infant wading pool or contained a fountain.

Before the mosque was built it was an quietly exquisite place to sit unmolested, contemplating the huge willow tree that graced the parcel that now bears the mosque, with the bustle of Roxbury Crossing in the background. One can see the modern granite bollards in the picture above.

The picture to the right shows the corridor of land from the mosque's parking lot to Roxbury Street.

It suffers in comparison from other disused lots in the neighborhood only in that it has been disturbed more recently and nature has had less time to reclaim it.

Given a couple of more years of passive neglect, it will blend right in with the rest of the disused lots.

Urban Amenities: Open Space I

2010-03-23T18:08:00.008-04:00

One of the best things about Fort Hill—besides being located on a hill in view of Dorchester Bay—is its parks and open space. Of all the close-in neighborhoods of Boston, Highland Park seems to have the highest ratio of open space.

This open space consists of city parks, a State Park, designated Urban Wilds, community gardens, the vestigal Roxbury Common at the First Church, playgrounds and playing fields, and, of course, the numerous unimproved lots, the dubious legacy of the plague of arson in the 1970s and '80s.

One city park, Clarence "Jeep" Jones Park, located at the bluff on Malcolm X Boulevard, has been improved at least twice since the '70s.

In the sweetheart deal conveying the 88,000 sq ft parcel at 100 Malcolm X Boulevard to the Islamic Society of Boston, ISB was to have maintained the park, and the King Street Playground, for a period of ten years until 2013.

The ISB fell on hard fund-raising times and has been just able to complete phase 1 of its planned mosque and cultural center. It has so far failed to fulfill its obligations for maintenance of Jeep Jones and the King Street Playground.

The Boston Parks and Recreation 2008 Annual Report [1.3MB pdf] contains a very brief notice of a $885K state grant for capital reconstruction of Jeep Jones and the Ripley Playground.

For its second improvement, crews have been busy at Jeep Jones during the winter. It seems the park will open soon with new fences, planting, and hardscape. The basketball courts are gone, but the new design invitingly opens onto John Eliot Square.

However, the King Street playground and the corridor of ISB-owned land at Roxbury Street remain a wasteland.

Got Milk? II: You bet. Fernandez III has milk

2010-03-20T18:00:00.005-04:00

Fernandes III Market (2665 Washington St, Roxbury) has milk. And, five kinds of beans.

About ¾ of the stock space seems to be devoted to beer, wine, and liquor. The other 25% to food and household products: mops, paper goods, some canned goods, 15# bags of rice. You can definitely make a decent dinner shopping from Fernandez. There is even a small ice cream case.

It was definitely nice that there was no attitude.

So, there are three places to purchase milk on Fort Hill.

Got Milk? Amenities for the body

2010-03-13T00:12:00.007-05:00

It hadn't been my intention to ignore amenities for the body by focusing three consecutive posts on amenities for the spirit, but Elder Mitchell's flock was so quickly industrious with their new sign that it seemed ungracious not to make immediate note of it. The good people of the Mission Church had filled their parking lot—and seemingly the church building, too—as I went by Friday evening around 8 o'clock.

Got milk?

One of the essential basics of a corner store—beyond cigarettes and lottery tickets—seems to be milk. Fort Hill is blessed with two, nicely distributed, corner stores, one roughly at the north end, and the other at the south end of the hill.

At John Eliot Square is Juba Market and Café. At the corner of Highland and Marcella streets is the Marcella Market. They are very different in almost every way.

Juba Market is just getting started, but the merchandise is still surprisingly spare. There barely seems to be enough stock to justify one quarter of the square footage Juba is renting. Focused on the Timilty School perhaps, candy and snacks are the extent of things. Oh. And, milk. And, sodas.

The day I was there, tradesmen were working to install the commercial stove in the open in the back. The extremely pleasant man working the cash register volunteered to me that they would soon be serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Now, the Marcella Market is an entirely different kettle of fish. This place is packed to the gunnels with absolutely everything you need to entertain the first, second, and third cousins when they and their families stop by unannounced.

There was cooking oil, beans (three kinds), rice, canned goods, paper plates, disposable roasting pans, desserts, some lunch meats,plus the obligatory sodas. And, milk. The merchandise is packed so high they need a 7-foot stock boy to fetch down the paper goods from the top shelves. The signs in the window advertise an ATM, but I missed seeing it among the tightly packed shelving units.

Marcella Market is stocked with an abundance of attitude as well. When I entered the store the gentleman behind the counter drilled holes into me with his eyes and the card players paused their game to inspect the new arrival. I circuited the small store for perhaps a full sixty seconds trying to take it all in. When I returned to the the front of the store a pugnacious little cannonball of a man stood belligerently between me and the door. "What do you want?" was his greeting.

As I said, Juba and Marcella markets are very different, but in common, both are run by immigrants and both have milk, though Marcella Market has a Dun & Bradstreet and, if this posting is to be believed, was on the market last June for $30,000 (no inventory).

Now, I'll be honest. I haven't been by to Fernandez III Liquors to see if they stock milk. I'll try to obtain that bit of intelligence in the next week or so.

Got Faith? Legend's on the Hill morphs back into a church.

2010-03-11T18:22:00.015-05:00

Mission Hill boasts the Mission Church and now Fort Hill has its own Mission Church, too.

The Fellowship Mission Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc. erected its new, well-lighted sign at 85 Centre Street this afternoon. They seem to be one of three churches in the metropolitan area affiliated with the Mission Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a diocese of the larger COOLJC.

A quick peek in the door shows a a spic 'n' span buff-colored interior with a wooden lectern already in place. So far, there were no chairs or pews, though.

This announcement comes from their Facebook wall:

Fellowship Mission Church now has an address! 85 CENTRE ST. Boston (behind Rox Comm College) Come & be blessed - Fri 8pm prayer 4 power & prosperity! Sun 11am Worship & Praise - You will leave more blessed than when you came! See you there!

85 Centre Street was the proposed location of Beehive developer, Darryl Settles's latest entrepreneurial venture, Legend's on the Hill. When neighborhood opposition grew Mr. Settles withdrew consideration of his various proposals. It seems, denied a nice profit on a commercial-land venture, the property's owner has thrown his lot in with Elder Marshall on a spiritual venture.

It has been an interesting couple of years for this lot of land, from disused building to neighborhood store to disused building to putative church to proposed bar-restaurant and back to a church, again.

As noted earlier on this blog (4th & 5th paragraphs of this post), churches are not always the best neighbors. It will be interesting to see whether Fort Hill's Mission Church will be a good neighbor, whether they will successfully evangelize the neighborhood or whether the congregation will come entirely from off the hill, and whether the residents will reminisce about the good-ole days when the building was quiet and disused.

Next posts: Got Milk?

Spiritual Amenities II: Timothy Baptist Church

2010-03-09T10:34:00.008-05:00

Some folk's thoughts about the social ferment on Fort Hill in the '70s cluster around the housing activism of the Roxbury Action Program and the counter-cultural activism of Mel Lyman, American Avatar, and white revolutionary communes [re-published articles from the Bay State Banner 30 years apart].

A different side of the developing social fabric of the '70s was in the arrival, in 1977, of the Timothy Baptist Church. Founded in 1967 by Dekalb, Mississippi, transplant Dennis L. Grace, the church bounced around from Norfolk to Bowdoin to Nelson streets in Dorchester, before settling in the old Latvian church on the 10,000 sq ft parcel at the corner of Highland and Morley streets.

The Timothy Baptist Church, Inc. web site is remarkable for any church or business. It is broad and deep. It enables the reader to learn a great deal about the church and its leadership, from their views on Believer-baptism to the family.

The building itself is wedged in among the backyards of its residential neighbors. It is in good repair, with at least five split-duct air conditioning units, so perhaps, during the warm months the windows remain closed and the sound of the music and worship does not intrude too much on the neighbors. The parcel does not contain any parking, so Highland Street was parked up to the gills at 2 pm on a recent Sunday afternoon.

There is a full church hall beneath the handicap accessible worship space. The picture gallery [an exquisitely annoying Smilebox page] shows lots of smiles and children.

Looking for a Christian house of worship on Sunday morning within easy walking distance? The Timothy Baptist Church could fit the bill: Sunday School for all ages at 9:30 and worship at 11 am.

Spiritual Amenities on Fort Hill: I

2010-03-07T15:42:00.010-05:00

Some on Fort Hill have bemoaned its lack of "urban amenities." A Highland Parking vision process seems to be just beginning, so those seeking a greater number or variety of urban amenities have not had a chance to elaborate what they mean by these words in a broad public forum.

Given recent controversy, certainly a neighborhood place to get a drink of alcohol, hear some nice jazz, and be able to break bread with friends was central to these desires. Or, perhaps, the dark horse chance of a jazz-tavern only rushed in from the margins of possibility with talk of Mr. Settles's Centre Street club.

Some folk have expressed simple desires: to be able to purchase a gallon of milk, to get a take-out sandwich, or to do laundry without having to walk off the hill. Sometimes the fabled dry cleaners on Alvah Kittredge Square gets a mention in the litany of wouldn't it be nice if....

Given the concentration of artists on the hill, it would be natural to yearn for well-lighted gallery or studio space, or for an intimate performance venue for music or drama.

Art, drama, and music provoke challenge and provide comfort to the spirit and soul. So, too, does religion.

The proposed use at 85 Centre Street has veered recently from nothing to church to bar to something unknown. Since the controversy has provoked a Highland Park vision process and since a recent proposed use for #85 was spiritual—and may yet be—it seems topical to consider current religious uses on the hill: the churches, mosques, and other spiritual amenities.

It would be too easy and too obvious to start with the landmarks. So, instead, the next posts will briefly examine the less obvious houses for the spirit.

Zipcars just off Centre Street, Fort Hill

2010-03-06T15:23:00.006-05:00

Zipcars adjacent to Centre Street, Fort Hill. Four of them. Who knew? Three of them were on the road the afternoon this photograph was taken.

These cars are located in the first four spots at the entrance to the Roxbury Community College parking lot, north of New Heath Street.

Merton Place and Newark Street, depicted in the Google map, seem to have been obliterated by the parking lot. The, then out-of-date, 1992 edition of the Arrow Street Guide lists Newark as "from 166 Cedar to south of Mertron pl" [sic] and Merton Pl "from 133 Centre to 33 Newark."

Zipcar has ten locations clustered around Brigham Circle and littered throughout the Longwood Medical Area, but, except for this small incursion at Centre Street, the rest of Roxbury is total bereft of this mobile urban amenity.

Trekking east, Dorchester Avenue is the closest to Fort Hill. Westward to Jamaica Plain (5 locations), the closest is just outside of Hyde Square. The only Roxbury neighborhoods known to Zipcar are Mission Hill and, "Fenway/Longwood".

Some of the parking spaces Zipcar rents in Dorchester go for $130 per month. I wonder how much RCC gains from these four spots.

Darryl Settles withdraws 85 Centre St Bar and Restaurant Project.

2010-03-04T10:30:00.007-05:00

In a Monday evening email to City Councillor Chuck Turner, State Representative Gloria Fox, City of Boston Neighborhood Coordinator Keith Williams, and various neighbors of 85 Centre Street, Darryl Settles wrote that he has decided, after much soul searching, not to go forward with his project for a bar and restaurant at that location. He thanked the neighborhood for its time and consideration, and wished it the best in its vision discovery process.

It has been a tense month. We are glad this episode in the on-again, off-again development saga of this parcel seems to be over. We, too, wish the best for Mr. Settles.

The concerns of the neighbors on Centre Street should be your concerns, too.

2010-03-03T15:06:00.019-05:00

We’ve been told that the proposal for a bar/restaurant at 85 Centre Street has been withdrawn. If we get confirmation of that, we’ll post it.

This is not the first time for 85 Centre Street.

Even if the most recent proposal has been withdrawn, we still think it important to round out the reasons why this proposal is a bad idea. Every decade or so it seems a new proposal for a bar/restaurant crops up at 85 Centre Street. It was the Society of Vulcans at one time, and various private social clubs at others. Each time it seems the neighbors on Centre Street have to shout for their concerns to be heard.

Mr. Settles isn't the issue.

Given all that can be learned about Mr. Settles, he probably is the very best entrepreneur the Centre Street residents could hope for. If this blog hasn't shown high enough regard for Mr. Settles’s reputation—if not his approach to the neighborhood—here is a fine article from Restaurant Confidential on this "quintessential entrepreneur." But, Mr. Settles’s business reputation isn’t the issue. Once Mr. Settles has moved on to his next venture, the neighbors will still be living next to a bar and restaurant being run by the successor owner/manager.

A new bar and restaurant is the issue, not Mr. Settles.

Current aspects of the neighborhood

On the face of things, it should be easy to understand the neighbors’ concerns.

The neighborhood has a status quo. It is up to those who wish to change that to demonstrate why the lives of the Centre Street neighbors will be improved—not the other way around.

Here are a few characteristics of the neighborhood, some positive and some not so positive:

Residential
Families with children
Large number of long-term residents
Significant numbers of residents who moved to the neighborhood for its current character
Busy and urban during the day
Quiet and unhurried during the evening
Significant impingement by the immediate institutions and urban infrastructure (Roxbury Community College, Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center, the mosque, the Orange Line, Fenway Park)
Heavy day-time and weekend traffic
Heavy day-time parking
Vehicular traffic traveling too fast at all hours

Likely changes a bar/restaurant would bring

Here are a few of the negative changes a bar/restaurant would introduce to the neighborhood (We’ll leave it to proponents to list the positive ones):

A business establishment dropped into an otherwise residential neighborhood
A liquor license, with the inevitable noise and disorderliness
Increased day-time traffic (employees and liquor/restaurant supply deliveries)
Increased night-time traffic
Increased day-time parking congestion (employees)
Night-time parking congestion (customers and employees)
Noise from arriving and departing parties to the bar/restaurant
Noise from the normal business operation (music on the patios, kitchen exhaust fans, emptying of garbage into the dumpsters)
Odors from the kitchen exhaust fans

It would be surprising to learn of a residential neighborhood that would welcome these negative changes.

Commercial use up the hill isn't very popular either.

In fact, commercial use at 74 Highland/13 Dorr at Alvah Kittredge Square was recently turned down at a neighborhood meeting. From the distributed notes to that meeting:

The consensus was that although some retail or non-housing uses may be desired in the neighborhood (convenience store, laundromat, etc.) that the down side of these uses in terms of feasibility, security, traffic/parking and other concerns outweighed the benefits.

If these are concerns are to be respected two blocks away at Kittredge Square, they ought to be equally respected, just down the hill, on Centre Street.

In the next posts, we'll discuss the desire for a more urban amenities, and suggest ways this desire could be met. If the proposal for 85 Centre has been withdrawn, we'll post that, too.

Tidying up the details on 85 Centre St & Darryl Settles

2010-03-02T18:15:00.025-05:00

There are just a few details of fact and hearsay to tidy up regarding Darryl Settles and 85 Centre Street, before concluding the inaugural spate of posts for this blog.

For the record, here is a transcription of the Boston Licensing Board notice for the 27 January 2010 hearing.

Telsa Hospitality Group, Inc.
d/b/a "Legend's on the Hill"
85 Centre Street
Roxbury, MA 02119

Pursuant to MGLA 138, 15A you are hereby notified to appear at the offices of the Boston Licensing Board.

William F. Arrigal, Jr.
-Library
Room 809A
--City Hall - Boston

Wednesday January 27, 2010 10:00 AM

Has applied for a C.V. 7-Day All Alc. Bev. License-To be exercised on the above premises-In whole of said building, including in one room on first floor with kitchen and restrooms in rear, main entrance on Centre Street and exit to patio areas in rear; dining room and storage in basement; office on second floor; and including an attached greenhouse outdoor seating are [sic] for fifty (50) patrons and adjacent outdoor patio for twenty-five (25) patrons on private property between the hours of 11:00 AM-midnight.

Darryl Settles, Manager

2:00 AM Closing Hour

Please contact Cynthia Fulton from this office if you have any questions

The Licensing Board can be reached at
One City Hall Square, Room 809, Boston, Massachusetts 02201 617-635-4170 Fax: 617-635-4742

In the event, Mr. Settles withdrew his application to the Licensing Board just before the 27 January Board meeting. His application did not come up.

Here are a few comments on this notice. The areas listed in the application are:

1. "one room on first floor with kitchen and restrooms in rear"
2. "dining room and storage in basement"
3. "office on second floor"
4. "attached greenhouse outdoor seating"
5. "patio area in rear" and "adjacent outdoor patio"

And all this was proposed for a building with a gross first floor area of 1254 sq ft. Now granted the current owner is hoping to add more square footage to this, for he has been excavating beneath the first floor—reportedly without getting city permits or notifying DigSafe.

As for area #3, there is no second floor. Judging by the brick construction and exterior conditions shown in the accompanying photograph, the current structure will never bear a second story.

Regarding area #5, this building really has no rear. Zooming all the way in on the City of Boston Assessing Department map, of the property shows a postage stamp's worth of land between the rear exit an the lot line.

The photograph on the right shows that surveyor stakes have recently been set on the back lot line. There are two visible, and they show just how tight the current building is to the back lot line. It's hard to say for certain, but it looks as though the new, below-grade, cinder block construction impinges over the lot line.

Regarding area #4, the attached greenhouse seating clearly must be meant for the adjacent, Dover Amendment parking lot at #79 Centre St.

Reported conversations with various neighbors

In separate conversations with various neighbors, Mr. Settles asserted that he was planning on a "hamburger joint," a "small cafe with a few tables," and that he was applying for the the CV 7-Day All Alc. License just so he'd be able to keep all his options open. But, he really wouldn't want to close any later than, say, midnight.

In conversation with another neighbor, Mr. Settles has since said that the excavation of the current owner has so damaged the structural integrity of the building that it cannot be saved for any purpose.

In discussions following this revelation, Mr. Settles has asserted that he would want nine apartments [sic!] above (presumably on the top two floors) with unspecified commercial space on the first floor. Hearing the gasps, he recalibrated to say that perhaps six apartments on top and an art gallery on the first floor (with provision for alcohol and live music) made more sense.

Mr. Settles also asserted that he would arrange with Roxbury Community College for valet parking.

The payoff for this post

Mr. Settles's main interest seems to be just to get his project started. Even though the existing building can not possibly support the business envisioned in the Licensing Board application, it will enough for Mr. Settles to commence renovations, only to discover—surprise!—that he has to raze the building, expand the footprint to include most of the 5158 sq ft on both lots, excavate a proper foundation and basement, and then build something to suit his obvious ambitions.

Start with a humble burger joint and end with the desired jazz-bar and restaurant seems to be the ad hoc strategy, with nods to residential development along the way.

The next posts will use the facts and observations laid out in these ten posts to argue the conclusion that Darryl Settles ~~and his ideas are~~ this idea is wrong for Centre Street.

An addendum: We've let our rhetoric carry us away. In poking around in the Registry of Deeds web site, we learned something we did not know: Mr. Settles was involved with the development of the condominiums at 147-151 Centre Street. So far as we know, these are a fine addition to the neighborhood.

Blowing Darryl Settles's Horn

2010-03-02T10:42:00.013-05:00

The photograph at the left is owned by the Berklee College of Music. It depicts the Beantown Jazz Festival on Columbus Avenue, Roxbury. It is reproduced here to give one measure of Darryl Settles's undoubted success at attracting crowds to his business ventures.

By all accounts Darryl Settles is a notable entrepreneur, restaurateur, and businessman.

He took over—and made over—Bob the Chef's in a time when folk weren't that eager to think of its Northampton Street location as the fashionable South End. He had a good 17-year run with that business, before moving on to the Beehive Restaurant, which actually is located in the South End.

Ten years ago Mr. Settles produced the first Beantown Jazz Festival. Starting from an amazing 10,000 attendees in its first year, the size swelled to 80,000 attendees in 2009. He continued producing it until Berklee College of Music assumed responsibility for it seven years later. The Beehive restaurant remained a prominent sponsor in 2009.

By his own account, Mr. Settles's contributions to the Boston community are broad and extend from hunger and homelessness to minority health issues and Gay Pride. While he used to live in Roxbury and has now moved to Newton, Mr. Settles maintains his civic connection to Boston.

He claims membership on the boards of the Huntington Theatre, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Berklee College of Music Advisory Board.

Mr. Settles was appointed to the board of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority on 22 Feb 2008 by Governor Deval Patrick.

His restaurant business ventures are prominent enough in the Boston community that when news filtered out that someone was interested in opening a jazz bar & restaurant on Fort Hill, there was speculation about it in the foodie press (Grubb Street article 1 and 2).

Here is Mr. Settles's own take on his accomplishments at his D'Ventures Limited web site. Here is his more expansive take [20kb pdf] at the vestigial web site of Bob's Southern Bistro.

Mr. Settles has had his share of public business problems (e.g., this Globe article about a business dispute with his Beehive partners), but these are to be expected.

The entertainment publication Stuff@Night named Mr. Settles, in 2001, "One of Boston's Most Powerful Players." In 2005, 2006, and 2007 they named him as one of the "100 Players of Boston's Nightlife."

At this point the reader may be thinking, "We are all sure that Darryl Settles is a fine and successful businessman, but, What is the payoff for this post?"

The payoff for this post is not another encomium to the social and capitalist prowess of Darryl Settles. He does not need a Jonas Prang for that.

The payoff for this post is a warning.

Mr. Settles is wired fully into the Boston business community, into the Boston charitable community, into Boston and Commonwealth politics. He is a board member of the Convention Center. He served as an associate commissioner of the Metropolitan District Commission. He serves on the board of the MFA and various other cultural institutions.

Mr. Settles clearly has pull, and, no doubt he has some push, too.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether Mr. Settles has the "pull" to to push an inappropriate venture onto an unwilling neighborhood.

The next few posts will show conclusively that a jazz-bar and restaurant does not belong in the residential environs of 85 Centre Street.

Centre Street's Dover Amendment Parking Lot

2010-02-28T23:26:00.015-05:00

The photograph to the right (taken on a Sunday afternoon) shows the Dover Amendment Curb Cut associated with the so-called "church's" Dover Amendment parking lot. This curb cut has removed two or three parking spaces from a neighborhood already struggling with limited parking. The parking lot, seen in the photograph accompanying this post, has never been used.

This post is somewhat tangential to the posts to date, but it gives the reader some sense of the prior "development" of the parcel at 85 Centre Street. It has not been an entirely happy story. Here is the most recent installment.

When the so-called "church" purchased the building in March of 2003 for $370,000.00 according to the Registry of Deeds spiffy web site, the neighbors were less than enthusiastic. A church seemed the wrong use for this residential neighborhood. The neighbors had visions of increased parking problems, loud music, and folk who did not live there having an adverse impact on the neighborhood.

Kathleen Burge, in a 2 March 2008 Boston Globe article waspishly entitled "Divine Right," details what happened when churches moved into vacant buildings in neighborhoods near to Dorchester's Four Corners. The particular circumstances of of Four Corners and Bowdoin-Geneva differ to those of Fort Hill, but the aggravation visited on a neighborhood by a congregation coming from outside the neighborhood promised to be much the same: parking congestion, noise, and alienation of the congregation from its neighborhood location.

Burge's article seems to have been occasioned by Omar M. McRoberts's socio-theological research published in his book Streets of Glory. The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy website has a brief interview with McRoberts that enlarges on Burge's Globe article.

But, what about the Dover Amendment?

The Dover Amendment limits zoning authorities in Massachusetts from restricting land use by religious and educational institutions. When you are a "church" you can do what you want with your property. Google "Dover Amendment" to learn more.

When the, so called, "church" bought the property, they "improved" the lot at #79 by paving it over and placing pieces of wood in the gutter as a sort of ramp. When the city caught them doing this without the correct permits, they had to attend a hearing to gain approval for their neat work. Being a, so called, "church" they were able to skirt neighborhood objections, and get post hoc approval for the blacktop and permission to install a curb cut.

Their curb cut has removed two or three parking spaces from an already tight parking situation. Their curb cut and parking lot has never been used. From the photograph at the top of this post one can see that twenty feet of brick hardscape has been removed, and concrete installed instead.

As far as the adverse impact on the neighborhood? Parking is worse, but the neighbors have had few complaints about noise.

Why have there been no complaints about noise? Might it be because church services have never been held at this location? A suspicious reader might suspect that what was bruited about the neighborhood as a "church" was in fact no more than a front for speculation—a speculative front that used its protected "religious" status to "improve" the property by right, making it more attractive for resale.

Assessed building & land values for 79 / 85 Centre St

2010-02-26T13:50:00.019-05:00

The photograph depicts 79 & 85 Centre Street viewed west by southwest from the corner of Linwood and Centre Streets. Parker Hill is visible in the far background at the horizon line. The metal and glass roof of Roxbury Community College is visible in the near background. One abutter's property is visible at the left margin of the photograph.

It's all about money.
Since it is all about money, it seems prudent to fetch the assessed values for the plots at issue.

There are two lots: 85 Centre Street upon which the building in question sits and 79 Centre Street, the adjacent lot (more about which in a future post).

85 Centre St (map)
This is the building depicted above and in earlier posts. The first link is to the City of Boston Assessing Department's record. The second link displays a map.

The lot size of 85 Centre is 1581 sq ft. The assessed building value is $119,400, and the assessed land value is $38,100, yielding a total value $157,500. The information at the map link confirms the land value, but gives a greater assessed building value of $136,900.00 for a total of $175,000.00.

The property type of this lot is Commercial.

79 Centre St (map)
This is the lot that sits north of 85 Centre Street (or to the right in the photographs).

Previously this lot was unimproved green space. We'll say more about its improvement in a future post.

The lot size of 79 Centre is 4270 sq ft, and the assessed land value is $84,100. The information at the map link gives a greater assessed land value of $100,700.00.

Both parcels together measure a total of 5851 total sq ft. The combined assessed land value is $122,200.00 (or, $138,800.00), the assessed building value is $119,400.00 (or, $136,900.00), and total assessed value of the land and building is $241,600.00 (or, $275,700.00 if you believe the figures on the Assessing Dept. map).

The property type of this lot is Residential Land.

The owner of record for both properties, according to the Assessing Department's web site, is Victor Feliciano. He appears to be up to date on his 2010 property taxes.

The assessing map seems to indicate there is yet a third lot to the south of #85, but when searching by address or lot number, the assessing database comes up empty handed.

Our next post will talk about post hoc Dover Amendment curb-cuts and parking lots.

Zoning on Centre Street, Roxbury

2010-02-21T09:00:00.009-05:00

Edward Cooper offers the viewer an apple—presumably a Roxbury Russet, while City Councillor Chuck Turner points to the colonial orchards in the background.

The Back Story
Today's post is the fourth in a series describing the nature of the Centre Street Neighborhood. For those just arriving, the back story is this: an entrepreneur would like to drop a 7-day, 2am-closing, fully-licensed bar/restaurant into a residential neigborhood, which is otherwise devoid of commercial activity. The impetus for this blog is to explain in detail why this is bad for the neighborhood.

Zoning on Centre Street, Roxbury
Here is the BRA zoning map for Roxbury North. (Pause before you click; that link fetches a 6MB pdf. It's pretty interesting, but pretty large. Set the Zoom percentage at 75. Then scroll around to find Centre Street.)

The map shows the entire stretch of Centre Street from Eliot Square to Columbus Avenue is classified as 3F-4000. The 1 Centre Street auto repair shop is included in the Eliot Square Multifamily Residential/Local Services Subdistrict. There are two small open space subdistricts (OS), designated urban wild and parkland.

It is a bit of work, but plowing through Volume III, "Neighborhood Districts," for the Roxbury Neighborhood District one finds Article 50. (This is another pdf. Unless you are on a dial-up it's a safe click at only 1/3 of a megabyte.) The entire zoning code seems to be rooted in this BRA web page.

The reason why the reader is being dragged through these obscure pdfs is to come to Table B of Article 50.

Table B, beginning on page 57, lists all the imagined uses for a parcel of land and is specific about which uses are Allowed (A), Conditional (C), and Forbidden (F). In the table, the first column lists the use. The next columns are for Two Family (2F), Three Family (3F), Rowhouse (RH), Multifamily Residential (MFR), and Multifamily Residential/Local Services (MFR/LS) subdistricts.

The pay-off for today's post is found on page 62, and is this:

Bars and Restaurants of all sorts are Forbidden in the subdistrict in which 85 Centre Street is located. Restaurants with entertainment are a forbidden use. Private clubs (those serving alcohol and not) are a forbidden use.

In fact, it seems that the only non-accessory uses Allowed in 3F subdistricts are some kinds of residences, and houses of religion.

The next post will detail some facts about 85 Centre Street from the City of Boston Assessing Department.

Centre Street on a winter evening

2010-02-18T19:09:00.026-05:00

The flash photograph is of Paul Dudley's Parting Stone, located at the head of Centre Street.

In the evening on the old road to Dedham, however, things change and settle down from the bustle of the day time. The waves of folk who use Centre Street to meet their transportation needs recede. Parking becomes available. Traffic diminishes. The inexpert u-turns cease. The commuters are gone and the neighborhood returns to the Centre Street residents.

The greatest noise in the later evening is the low susurration of Columbus Avenue traffic and the slightly louder Orange Line, commuter rail, and Amtrak regional trains. The Amtrak Accela makes barely a whisper. Ambulance and Fire Department traffic is considerably less than in years past as they now tend to use Columbus Avenue. When the wind is still, one can just hear the bing! bing! of the Orange Line announcements. Occasionally one can hear the Mission Hill church bells tell the quarter hour.

On a recent Thursday night around 10:30 pm, there was only the occasional car and one The Ride van. Later at 12:40 am, five minutes passed between cars. There were few pedestrians. After midnight, the frequency of passing cars and pedestrians falls off even further. The silent bicycles go unnoticed.

The loudest audial events in the evenings on Centre Street are made by the Centre/Eliot and Heath St buses. Then, by eight-thirty or nine o'clock, their sound falls silent too, as the last bus of the evening goes by.

This quiet is even more pronounced—and valuable—during the warm spring, summer, and autumn evenings. With the windows open one can hear the urban night life: the wind in the trees, the call of the mockingbird, the wings of the bats, the insects, the rustling in the underbrush of the neighborhood raccoon, skunks, the opossum family, and the feral cats. Overlaid on this natural activity is the sound of the arriving cars of one's neighbors and the quiet conversations of the few pedestrians conversing among themselves as they walk home.

At night, as with the rest of Highland Park, folk aren't generally in the neighborhood unless they are coming to the neighborhood. With the exception of the drivers who prefer Centre Street over Columbus Avenue and those who use Cedar Street to cross over the hill, if you are driving, walking, or riding your bicycle in the neighborhood, it means you have a residential destination in the neighborhood.

It means you live here, or you are visiting someone who does. Highland Park, including the Centre Street neighborhood, is not a destination for others in the city.

The next post will be about the zoning for the Centre Street neighborhood and its current, limited, commercial activity.

Day time traffic and parking on Fort Hill's Centre Street

2010-02-17T09:58:00.026-05:00

Traffic and parking on Fort Hill's Centre Street is different day to night.

This photograph, taken around 9:30 am, shows commuters beginning to stack their cars up on the north-bound side of Centre Street adjacent to Fort Avenue. Three cars parked here between the time this photo and the next were taken. The driver of the latest car seemed to be a Roxbury Community College (RCC) student.

Centre Street during the day
During the day there is substantial traffic on Centre Street, including MBTA and Boston Public School buses. Commuters heavily use Centre Street for commuter parking. There are those who commute to RCC as well as those automobile users who park and then walk down to the Roxbury Crossing T station. It is easy to spot the commuters, hurriedly attempting failed U-turns (that turn into dangerous three-point turns) as they cruise for the remaining spots.

It is strange to tell, but true, that there are commuters from Highland Park who shave five minutes off their commute by driving—instead of walking—from their Highland Park home to park on Centre Street before walking the rest of the way to the Orange line portion of their commute.

On Fridays and other Muslim holy days, worshipers at the mosque also take up on-street parking on Centre Street, Linwood Street, and beyond.

Weirdly, because of the Ruggles station shuttle to Fenway park, enterprising Red Sox fans have also used the Centre Street neighborhood for parking on games days.

On days when regional and state-wide track and field competitions are held at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center, contestants and their supporters use Centre Street for parking. In addition, diesel buses that are used to transport athletes from all over eastern Massachusetts, and which park in the Cedar Street RCC parking lot, labor up Cedar Street and then, turning left, head towards Dudley to turn onto Malcolm X Boulevard to pick these athletes up after the competition.

During the day, the street is episodically hectic. The traffic lights at Eliot Square tends to slow folk down, discouraging to a limited extent 'cut-through' traffic that really belongs on Columbus Avenue before turning down Malcolm X or Melnea Cass boulevards.

The adjacent photo depicts the Centre St/Cedar St/Fort Ave intersection.

This traffic light at Cedar Street is a positive life saver. It took the neighborhood ten years to finally get the city to install it, but it has tamed a very dangerous intersection.

However, at the crest of the hill at the partially blind corner at Linwood Street there are frequent accidents and many close encounters.

The other significant commuter route is Heath to Centre to Highland to Marcella Street. This is used by folk coming from Brookline and Jamaica Plain to cut through to Townsend Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard and on to other parts of Roxbury and Dorchester.

The #41 Centre/Eliot bus to Jamaica Plain uses Centre Street as does the less frequent #14 Heath/Dudley bus. The other significant bus traffic, as previous noted, relates to the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center.

There is significant day time foot traffic as resident pedestrian commuters of Fort Hill walk down Fort Avenue, Linwood Street, and Highland Avenue, joining with the automobile commuters, and down Gardner and Cedar streets to RCC and to the Roxbury Crossing T station. The stream is reversed in the evening as folk trudge back up the hill home—and to their cars.

Over the years the number of bicyclists using Centre Street has increased. In the seasonable months one can see (and hear) the occasional skateboarder and in-line skater.

The next post will address traffic and parking in the Centre Street neighborhood in the evenings and at night.

What is the Centre Street Neighborhood really like?

2010-02-15T18:51:00.014-05:00

Overwhelmingly residential with a tiny bit of business at one end.

Some folk think that Centre Street is a great place to put a bar. After all, there isn't much there. There is a bar on Washington Street, which is one of two north-south marginal streets of Fort Hill. Why shouldn't there be another bar on Fort Hill's other north-south marginal street?

A marginal street. We think that when many people think of Centre Street, they do so in a marginal kind of way. In many people's mind, not only is Centre Street geographically on the margin, or perimeter, of Fort Hill, it really isn't so much a part of Highland Park as a way to get in and out of Highland Park.

A thoroughfare on the margins of consciousness. Centre Street: when driving, a way to speed from 'up the hill' to Jackson Square, to Roxbury Crossing, to Dudley Square, and to places beyond. Centre Street: when walking, a short respite after Gardner or Cedar streets before the laborious trudge home up Highland or Fort avenues, or up Linwood Street. Not really a part of my neighborhood, but necessary to get to my neighborhood.

But, for those who live there, Centre Street is not on the margins of consciousness. Centre Street is front and center of their daily lives.

Over the next couple of posts, this blog will explore the current status quo, the current character of the Centre Street neighborhood.

Here is what you will find on a leisurely walk from John Eliot Square to Columbus Avenue: Housing. Single family housing. Two- and three-family houses. Mostly wood frame, but with a sprinkling of brick row houses. Mostly buildings built in the mid- to late-1800s, but a couple of new houses built in the last ten years. There is one park at Linwood circle, and some privately owned property that is zoned as an urban wild. Centre Street Terrace has been developed as apartments, as has the building at the corner of New Heath Street.

Centre Street in Roxbury is overwhelmingly a residential street; however, there are a handful of non-residential uses. Located at the small numbers of Centre Street are two businesses: a Volvo repair shop at #1 and another car repair yard/Budget Truck rental shop at the corner of Highland Avenue. The Juba Market probably has a John Eliot Square address. One can argue either way whether it could be considered a Centre Street business.

After leaving Eliot Square, Centre Street is entirely residential for 1/2 mile to the other Roxbury end of the street. At the last address on the odd-numbered side of the street is the FIRST Askia Academy at 167 Centre Street, a long-term residential substance abuse treatment facility.

The former nursing homes (residential again) at the top of Gardner Street have been become apartments on the one side, and a two-family house on the other side.

The conclusion is that any use that is not residential does not conform to the current character of Centre Street. The status quo is residential.

The next posts will address traffic and parking.

Someone else's party at 85 Centre Street

2010-02-12T23:42:00.009-05:00

An early poster on the UniversalHub comment thread said it best:

I can't blame the neighbors for not making someone else's party their priority.

Over the next several days we'll post some facts and opinions about the neighborhood surrounding 85 Centre Street and about the impact Mr. Settles's proposal would make to that neighborhood.

Suffice it to say today that it seems many have pinned their unrealized hopes and dreams for Fort Hill to Mr. Settles's business play at 85 Centre Street.

Some earnest Fort Hill voices have been heard on the subject, but the voices of those most affected by Mr. Settles's proposed change to the Centre Street status quo have not been heard.

As we pledged to Iseut on the UniversalHub comment thread we should all focus on the issues, not the personalities, as the neighborhood debates Mr. Settles's proposal and as this episode works itself out.

An Urban Amenity at 85 Centre Street

2010-02-10T19:11:00.011-05:00

Universal Hub highlighted a blogpost written on 28 Jan 2010 by Iseut (her second post on the topic is here) about development plans for 85 Centre Street, Roxbury, by former Fort Hill resident Darryl Settles. Further information can be found littered among the posts at the google groups Highland Park Neighborhood Watch and HighlandParkBoston.

For a first post on this blog, we think it's sufficient to point to Iseut's advocacy on her blog and to our testy exchange in the comments at Universal Hub. Our four most pertinent comments are here, here, here, and here. Iseut's gracious reply is here.

It's good for all concerned to ratchet back the emotions so that all the various constituencies on the hill can work together to sustain and improve the neighborhood. Bashing fellow neighbors with our blogs is hardly the way to do this. For our part, we'll do our best to honor the soccer maxim to play the ball, not the man.

It is good as well to note the fact that the Hawthorne Area Neighborhood Association discussed the issue on 8 Feb 2010.

According to the published minutes, they voted in favor supporting Mr. Settles venture move forward, with the caveat that he must attend a meeting, facilitated by [City Councillor] Chuck Turner, with immediate abutters ... to discuss his detailed proposal, and all options for 85 Centre Street, before full community support is granted.

We'll be back with more, as the situation progress.