Clean Streets II

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?