A new blog about Fort Hill/Highland Park, Roxbury

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.