My secret Boston

[Editorial correction 01/27:  It appears the assessment below may have been a bit hasty.  I was waiting for February 1 to investigate further but apparently My Secret Boston is up and running more than I discovered when I looked it over the other day.  I'll spend the weekend poking around further and update then.  As for not knowing where Newton is, I can't apologize for that.  -WK]

If you haven't heard, a new website is being launched on February 1st.  It's called "My Secret Boston Dot Com."  It's some kind of insiders' guide, sort of what we do here but with a bigger budget, and actual staff who get paid actual salaries from paid advertisements.

I was interested to learn what the site's "secret" Boston Irish Bakery would be.   I've never heard of it, but that's not too surprising because it's not in Dorchester.  If you spend most of your time in Boston, I'll bet donuts against dollars that you haven't heard of it either.  This hidden Boston Irish bakery is hidden in the town of Newton.  It's some joint called the Keltic Krust.  Not a bad name; maybe Kandy's Kozy Keltic Kellar was already taken.

I'm coming up on three years living in Boston and I can't tell you where Newton is.  That qualifies as being both secret and hidden in my book.  If I had a secret Boston, I know I'd keep it a few towns removed.  You know, where all the insiders are.

No one has asked me to write an article for Their Secret Boston, but if I had to name a good Irish bakery, I would write about Greenhills Irish Bakery at 780 Adams Street.  It's in Adams Village, which is part of Boston, diagonally across the street from the Eire Pub, which is an Irish pub.  The Prime Minister of Ireland dropped by last year.  The bakery is next door to one Irish grocery and across the street from another.

I can't speak for the town of Newton.  I've never heard of it.  I doubt it's any more Irish than Adams Village, a place that's almost as Gaelic as Dublin.  No offense to the people who run the Keltic Krust.  I'm sure they make fine bread.  When I want my bread crust spelled with a 'c' however, the way Celt is spelled, I'll stay within city limits and visit the Greenhills Bakery.

No word yet on how far off the Orange Line I have to travel to find a hidden Boston Chinese Restaurant.  The site officially launches February 1.  I'll find out soon after that, I'm sure.

Schrodinger's Dorchester

Bright boys live in Dorchester.  You can read by the light of their dreams.

Your street address won't predict your destiny, but your zip code will.  If you reside in Dorchester, good things wait while you catch up to what your future holds.

Sharp sisters live in Dorchester.  There is the teenager just becoming giddily aware of the power that resides in her body and brain.  There is the middle-aged matron whose experience has made her patient and smart as well as strong and sturdily, solidly, stolidly, unmistakably beautiful.  There is the wrinkled seer who has seen everything that has come before and still welcomes tomorrow, knowing that tomorrow, while similar, will be better than every day that came before.  Life pulses in Dorchester, Mass.

It takes a keen intellect familiar with the surroundings to cut through bull feathers and poppycock.  The people of Dorchester know how to do that.  They aren't fooled by politicians' promises.  They aren't fooled by bait or switch.  The people of Dorchester know their neighborhood like Einstein knew physics.  It's instinctive.  Like Schrodinger's cat, Dorchesterites purr in front of their hearths, contented to say the least.

Smart Boys Live in Dorchester by whaleheadking
Many tee shirt designs available at Zazzle

Two Dorchesters

I've been thinking about a statistic I read in the Globe recently.  I'm not going to look it up or link to it because it's a stat that's already been stuck in my mind.  How accurate it may be, I haven't researched, but some variation is part of common, ingrained perception and, quite likely, part of common reality in this part of Boston.

The average household income in Dorchester is $28,000 a year.

Whether that sounds like a lot or a little depends on where you begin to measure.  For our regular readers who live in Hinton, West Virginia, it's a little for the Boston area.  Very little.

Living where I do, by the JFK/UMASS MBTA station (that's the subway to you Hintonites), I don't see any abject poverty.  Believe me: $28,000 will not support a nuclear family in Boston.  The rent on a two bedroom apartment will consume half that and more, not including utilities.  This may explain the lack of nuclear families in Dorchester, but again...I don't see a lot of single parent households where I live, not that I'm taking a detailed census or spying on my neighbors.

Some parts of Dorchester are like the part I live in.  Adams Village, Neponset, Pope's Hill, Ashmont Hill, Jones Hills, Mount Bowdoin, the Polish Triangle, Point Norfolk, Lower Mills; they are all fairly stable, middle class, whatever middle class means.  Let's say the people I pass on the street don't seem to be going without.  They are also primarily located near train stations and they are also predominantly white.

I do not like to dwell on racial differences on the Matrix.  I usually make it a point to avoid discussing them, but they exist.  Different parts of Dorchester have different ethnicities, to be sure,  The same differences in skin color and income that demark other places also occur in the Dot.  It isn't pretty, but it is true.  Sometimes it's good, sometimes not.  Again, it depends on where you start to measure.

If I looked at the tax records for my neighborhood, I suspect the average income isn't dragging the neighborhood average downwards.  This part of Dot is full of college students working part time jobs, but they are paying market rate rents and living, as some scholars do, at the local bars soaking up cheap food and suds.  Just eyeballing the lay of the land, I suspect what lowers Dorchester's median income figures are the neighborhoods roughly west or northeasterly of Washington Street: Four Corners, Codman Square, Talbot Avenue, Norfolk Avenue, Columbia Road, Blue Hill Avenue, East Cottage Street, Bowdoin/Geneva, and other terrain that doesn't have names for its neighborhoods, just a collection of pins on a police station map.

There are two Dorchesters.  Both of them are equally welcoming and equally convivial. I've never witnessed a crime being committed in Dorchester and I have been down most streets and I am out most hours of the day and night.  I have never been uncomfortable.

There is a different culture to the west than there is to the east of Dot Ave, which is an approximate, handy boundary line.  The east is whiter and more asian (whether Vietnamese or Chinese it's hard to say).  The west is darker and more hispanic (or Haitian or Cape Verdean).  You can't really say one side is old Dot stock and the other side is new.  African Americans have been a majority in some parts of Dorchester for more than half a century.  They aren't immigrants.  They are Dorchesterites.

East plus West equals the middle ground, which is somewhere near Field's Corner.

I've been thinking about this over the past few months and, unlike my usual folderol, I thought I would work through more serious musings in public.  I'm trying to develop a Dot-view that is more panoramic than the one I have now.  As I say, I have been almost everywhere, but as a transplant, I have been almost everywhere as someone passing through, or as someone from Savin Hill,  rather than as a native.  A fellow citizen, perhaps.  Some people live in a Dot microcosm.  I am  one of them.  I want to take in more of the macro view.

I don't usually solicit comments but I invite you to add your observations and thoughts.  Let's discuss.

Windy City

Windy City Pizza has the most colorful brochure of all Boston's pizzerias. Chicago is known for a first class pie and the Windy City Pizza logo sports an image of the Sears Tower. The menu boasts that they serve zero trans fat but a look at the photos should make an artery-conscious reader question that claim.

Windy City Pizza is well known for the specials advertised in thier front window that faces Gallivan Boulevard, at #516, just at the entrance to Adams Village on the right if approaching from JFK/UMASS. They deliver to a limited area between 11:00 and 11:00 and a fifty cent gas charge will be added to the bill. With the prices gas is selling for these days, you might save some money on delivery rather than picking up your order yourself. Check them out at windypizza.com.

If you are going to go, order the M8 special. You will save $10.60 and have enough leftovers to last the rest of the week. Not a bad bargain in gourmet fast food.