Good girls say YES!! to Dorchester

Good girls know that when someone offers to take them to Dorchester, the right answer is YES!!  Bad girls can't stay contrary to their better natures in Dorchester.  Good and bad people only getter better.

For all the bad reputation Dot has around Boston as being home to barbarians, it is really home base for a very conservative citizenry.  Blue collar, salt of the earth burghers: this is the description that applies to most Dorchesterites.  Open minded, accepting, minding one's own business, avoiding trouble: these are Dorchester attributes.  Dorchesterites are more buttoned down than doubling down.

Very few people are experimenting with their sexuality in Dorchester so much as they are just enjoying it.  They aren't pushing boundaries so much as insulating themselves within two-way nourishing relationships.  The nuclear family is alive and well in Dorchester though its constituent parts may defy some people's demographical preconceptions.

People from Oklahoma may visit Dorchester and be shocked at what they see.  Dot is the ultimate sub-urbia conflated to metropolitan proportions.  People of all colors, creeds, and inclinations rub shoulders and press jowls.  Those most familiar with each other often rub and press other parts, but usually in selective pairs behind closed doors.  Don't go looking for what you don't want to see and all will be well.  That's a Dot lesson if there ever was one.     

Some parents worry when they learn their student children are settled in a Dorchester rooming house.  They needn't be.  Traditional values are valued in Dorchester.  Overall, it is as dull here for a hedonist as it is in New Alexandria, Penn.  A typical Dorchester day consists of children going to school, adults going to work, and those not doing either running errands and tending their gardens.  Nights transpire to a symphony of snoring.  Even a Puritans quickly get bored sniffing out sin in Dorchester tap rooms.

Good people say Yes!! to Dorchester's invitation for a good life.  It is a paradise for those who aspire to a middle class lifestyle made up of the tastes and values the bourgeoisie hold dear.  Those values are very near in Dorchester.  They are so close at hand you can smell them when you disembark from any Red Line train south of JFK/UMASS.

Alpha and stink

Not as famous or as deadly as the North End's Molasses Flood, Dorchester once suffered an odoriferous smell that no one has written a book about. The 'Mothball Spill' on Alpha Road in 1946 still sticks in the noses of long-time residents.

With WWII going on, a lot of Dorchester's young husbands were called to be away from home for an extended period. Their clothes needed to be stored and protected from predatory moth larvae. Mike Flannagan got the idea to undercut the big moth ball companies by buying generic mothballs and selling them under his own, local label at corner grocers in the neighborhood. He purchased pallet loads of generic, white paper bags and had then custom printed with his brand name at a shop in Adams Village. The shop did a nice job, using red ink that silhouetted the lettering: "Flannagan's Moth-o-Cide" with a picture of a moth with X's for eyes.

Mr. Flannagan travelled to Chelsea, Mass. to the Permagum Mothball Dispensary to pick up his first wholesale shipment. Permagum is a name well respected in mothball circles though the company has since shut down. Mike Flannagan had arranged to buy loose mothballs to package later in his garage on Alpha Road for later distribution. He was neither a manufacturer or a trucker, he was an entrepreneur. He rented a delivery truck and packed the back full of loose mothballs using a snow shovel.

He forgot to lock the back doors of his truck.

Alpha Road is a steep street just east of Codman Square. The pressure against the doors became too much and the latch gave. Two tons of mothballs spilled down between the gutters of Alpha Road and they skittered their way down storm drains and into exposed niches. Some of them reached Dorchester Bay. The neighborhood was effectively fumigated and even today this part of Dorchester is known for its lack of moths, cockroaches and other vermin who have developed an aversion to to the stink of naphthalene.

Uncle Lumpy

Everyone calls him Uncle Lumpy. He likes to sit in Mothers' Rest park on Washington Street watching the clouds and the traffic go by. It's a nice place to do it. He settles onto a bench like a sack of soggy oatmeal, lets his head droop onto his chest, and just sits in the seat of the contented. He can sit for hours at a time.

He isn't related to anyone in Codman Square as far as anyone knows. He's just a kind of fixture in the neighborhood. No one has followed him home to his front door, but rumor has it he lives on Alpha Road. Children call him 'uncle' because he is kind to them. He hands out coins when asked for the gumball machines at the grocers'. Unfortunately, most of the machines only take quarters nowadays and Uncle Lumpy mostly has a stockpile of pennies. No matter. Children know that a shiny penny is better than nothing and that enough of them can be exchanged for silver.

Sometimes he nurses a bottle of Old Colony brand Uva Soda. It's grape flavored and very sweet. He can an hour to finish it. Then he walks back to the market to collect his nickel deposit. He usually only holds onto the nickel no longer than a block before he donates to a child.

Dot labyrinth

Wandering in Dorchester, it is easy to get lost. There is little rhyme or reason to the street plan. There's no grid. Dot Ave runs straight as a rifle shot but every other road is either crooked or leading to unexpected destinations. You cannot intuit where you are headed, you can only hope for the best, following your nose and enjoying the journey.

There is plenty to enjoy. I was on Taft Street today, in a canyon sided by three deckers, each as different as they were the same. There were no trees, just porches stacked on top of porches next to each other in a crowded line on both sides of the pavement. I wandered a tableau of antiquated, human-scale architecture and the smells out of kitchen windows drove home the fact that this is a place where people live their lives and eat their daily dumplings.

Weaving and cutting along the twisted lanes that separate Blue Hill Avenue and Columbia Road, I was in a reverie. So much accumulated experience, all of it hard earned and hard won, settled in a part of the city few outsiders visit. I took a loop through Four Corners and got stuck in traffic on Bowdoin Street. The sidewalks were a hive and a haven abuzz with gossip and little routines, hale greetings, nursed grudges and satisfied smirks. Tourists don't visit these parts, only residents, only citizens, Bostonians, Dorchesterites all.

N'orchester, S'ochester... upper, lower, east and west...the shore and the inland cityscape... vistas stretch far in some neighborhoods and vistas are cut short in others... As much as there is blight there is so much more that is set rightly and true. A square can have any shape in Dorchester, wherever two roadways cross or people gather. This is a part of Boston in which you can lose yourself and come out with more than you brought in.

Godzilla vs. Kong

Musing, as usual, on Boston's neighborhood makeup, I thought of the 1962 classic film "King Kong vs. Godzilla." Where am I going to go with this? I'm still not quite certain but I'm sure we'll find out, also as usual, by essay's end.

In a city of neighborhoods, Dorchester is obviously the 800 lb. gorilla in the metropolis, covering the most area and holding the most population. It is no eighth wonder of the Hub of the Universe, however. It is jumbled together in a weak rogues' gallery of complacent characters.

I've been to West Roxbury twice in almost two years, both of times fairly recently. West Roxbury is one of Boston's neighborhoods but few people think of it when they think of BOSTONIA, condita A.D. 1630. Dorchester falls into the same league though it is a very different kind of place. I've been to Hyde Park more often, and I know it's part of Boston too, a little farther removed and nothing like downtown. The only commuter rail line that runs entirely within city limits serves Hyde Park and points in between it and South Station.

Roxbury itself (not West Roxbury, which is to the south) is certainly urban and has been connected to downtown Boston for centuries through commerce and Washington Street. It has been connected municipally for over a hundred years, but few people think of Roxbury as Boston either. Even mailmen deliver envelopes addressed to Roxbury 02119, not Boston. South Boston gets to be called part of Boston, the part furthest to the east, and East Boston is also a part of Boston, the part furthest to the north.

There is no Kong in Boston, but there is a Godzilla. Just as metro Boston dominates the Commonwealth's business, the image of Boston proper, downtown and its edges, dominates the fringe neighborhoods that also belong to the entire civic body. Allston and Brighton and Charlestown are all parts of Boston. The mayor, who is quite savvy, is well aware that the neglected border frontiers of the city vote for him, but others take a myopic view of what Boston is. It is a city of many parts, all of them Bostonian even if they are not fashionable.

In the movie "King Kong vs. Godzilla" the giant ape is smarter and more human than the atomic-powered dinosaur. Kong taunts Godzilla during the fight scenes and makes rude gestures. This looks familiar as Godzilla just lumbers along, trampling whatever is in his path, be it vital or defunct. Boston is an old city. Though full of tree-lined, walkable streets, it is powered by an energy that cannot be described by commonly understood physics. It is that spark, like a hydrogen bomb dropped on an iceberg, that keeps one part of the city dominating the other parts. Like nuclear fission, it is the product of many smart brains. Like the Cold War it produces a stalemate affair that occupies a lot of attention when all involved could be working together for mutual betterment rather than struggling to keep up at cross purposes.

A city is made up of many neighborhoods and many component parts and constituencies. When one gets the upper hand, through an accident of history or by design, the status quo lives on past its useful shelf life. What is Boston? It is Dorchester and West Roxbury and Hyde Park and Roxbury and Charlestown and Allston and Brighton, as much as it is the Back Bay and South Bay and South Boston and the Fort Point Channel and the North End and what remains of the West End and East Boston. What does Boston have in common besides the Common? A lot, but most of that is swept under the rug, lost in the tug and the bombast of gorilla versus dinosaur.

So does Kong beat Godzilla or does Godzilla beat Kong? I don't want to ruin the ending for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet. Let us just say that Castle Island is no Skull Island and leave it at that. If you are interested.....

Peter Lorre Eyes

Laurie Masters, who lives on Tremlett Street, is certainly the biggest Peter Lorre fan in Dorchester, and is probably the most devoted Lorre fanatic in all of Boston. She is twelve years old and has memorized most of the lines this character actor ever spoke on film.

I visited the Masters' household on Tremlett Street and, indeed, there is a shelf in the family's DVD collection dedicated to the work of Peter Lorre, from his first 1929 appearance in Die Verschwundene Frau to his last, in 1964's The Patsy. There are also stacks of old comic books and movie magazines full of both fictional and factual adventures of Laurie's hero. Why would a young, 21st century, tween girl fall in love with a film star who began his career before the Great Depression? To find out, Laurie, her mother, and I discussed it over #3 Value Meals at the Mc Donald's in Codman Square.

Laurie explained, "We have the same name." I pointed out that the subject of her admiration was born László Löwenstein. Laurie replied, "But he changed it to make it better." I couldn't argue her point, at least from a typographical point-of-view. I pressed further to discover what made him attractive to her. "He has the eyes a girl can fall into and lose herself," she answered. "When I get married," she continued, "I want to marry a man with Peter Lorre eyes." She probably won't have much competition.

Ms. Masters then stood up and started to perform impersonations of her hero. She recited lines from The Maltese Falcon, from Casablanca, and from the various Mr. Moto films and she did it all in perfect imitation of Mr. Lorre's accent and mannerisms. She was at ease and the dining room wasn't overly warm, but she appeared to be nervous and sweaty. If it weren't a skinny, under aged, African-American girl speaking the lines, people would have thought Peter Lorre had returned from the grave. Laurie's mother dipped a french fry into the cup of barbecue sauce we were sharing and then wiped her fingertips before patting my hand. "You see," she said, "Laurie loves the Mr. Moto movies the best."

Do lightning and genetic combinations strike twice? I hope for Laurie Masters's sake she finds her dream man. It may take her awhile (doesn't it always?) but if a modern day Lazlo Lowenstien exists in Dorchester, we are sure this young lady will find him someday.

Peter Lorre's least favorite role, but Laurie Master's pick from his oeuvre:

Ever spring

Where do the dead leaves go in Dorchester? I don't know. The wind tosses them in autumn and then they disappear. The trees remain. The trees cut their spindly silhouettes against winter skies but the leaves are naught but memories before the first snow falls. This is a tidy neighborhood. When the climate warms, buds burst from broken twig tips.

There is salt still caked around the cracks in the streets. I swerve to avoid the piles on my motorcycle during my morning commute. From a distance, I mistake them for ice. They are salt, the opposite but just as treacherous of what they are meant to prevent, but a hazard nonetheless when leaning in at a tilt on two wheels. One season blends into the next in Dorchester. Life goes on according to its rhythms. What you supposed yesterday is likewise true today. The streets are navigable and safe, but only if you keep your senses sharply alert to potential danger.

In October, the trees are golden with burnished rust ,and honey brown, and orange and yellow like a freshly stuck match head. In February, the trees are kindle sticks waiting for the right breeze to blow them down. The ground is hard with hoarfrost and ice crystals that glint prisms in the rising sunlight. I haul my back tire over the remnants of winter's churned and refrozen ground and then I speed off, free as a canary out of a cage, along Boston's pockmarked roadways free of ice, if not hazards.

In September, wet leaves are as slippery as ice. In spring, wet leaves are a half-forgotten memory. Where do the leaves go? They go where all dead dreams in Dorchester go: into the scrap heap, the ash can, the garbage bin dumster, back-loading truck full of yesterdays gone and discarded, swept up, bundled up, collected for sanitary disposal. Every season in Dorchester offers its own hurdles and enticements. The weather is a pleasure year-round for different reasons every month. Some dreams don't die, however.

Dorchester lives on. It is a community that wants to thrive, just as the first settlers wanted to make their mark on a new continent in a new colony on Massachusets Bay that was settled before Boston itself was founded. The settlement of Dorchester precedes the settlement of Boston by a few months. Dorchesterites were here first. Boston gets the glory but Dorchester does the work. Where to the dead leaves go?

You won't find any dead leaves on Dot Ave. You'll find dead wood in the bloated organizations that make up the banks, the hospitals, the remaining factories, the investment houses, the lobbyist firms, the law offices, City Hall, in Boston proper. Dorchester is full of rent-seekers but it is also full of people making a living parlaying their professions, their knowledge and experience. Capenters, electricians, plumbers, paper-hangers, bricklayers, linemen, grouters, mechanics and machinists all make good and perform their tasks well in Dorchester, Mass., a part of Boston.

I don't see dead leaves in Dorchester. I don't see skeletal siluhoettes. As I zip form one end of Boston to another though Dorchester, I see people getting by, adding their might and their rights and their ability to build a great city more solidly tenoned into the puddingstone that makes up the foundation. Boston is a world-class city. It is world-class because the people of Dorchester helped build it. The surroundings are proof that no detail is neglected. There are no dead leaves in Dorchester.

North-South is obsolete

Dorchester is traditionally divided into North Dorchester and South Dorchester. This may have made sense when the neighborhood added density during the years of streetcar expansion just after annexation. The more populated areas were located closer to Boston proper and the more rural and suburban parts, with the exception of the factory hamlet of Lower Mills, were farther away. Dorchester in the 21st century looks much the same if you cross it on a north-south axis.

From a demographic point-of-view, Dorchester should be split east-to-west, though the demarcations are a bit hazy. Like time zones, the boundaries between East Dorchester and West Dorchester zig zag between each other. Demographically speaking, the neighborhoods closer to Dorchester Bay are a world apart from those further inland. It is a matter of income brackets, ethnicity, and urban culture. I'm not telling any secrets when I say that most of the crime headlines in the daily papers are generated in the western half of Dorchester while most of the heart-warming, human interest stories, such as they happen to appear, are set in the eastern half of this great part of Boston.

Columbia Point, Savin Hill, Neponset Circle, Pope's Hill, and Adams Village are very different from Morton Village, Codman Square, Geneva-Bowdoin and Upham's Corner. But the two opposing poles intermix and intersect. There is a big difference between the areas surrounding Field's Corner and Ashmont Stations, and the one around Shawmut Station which sits between them like a rose between two thorns. Despite the real estate hyperbole about new developments around Peabody Square (Ashmont Station), this neighborhood isn't gentrifying. That said, Ashmont Hill contains some of the most beautiful mansions in Boston. The Kennedys hail from there originally; and Melville Avenue between Codman Sq. and Fields Corner is home to what I think is the most perfect house in all of Boston. That's saying something in a city rich with beautiful domestic architechture, the Back Bay included.

There are other examples in Dorchester of pockets of affluence amid rot just as there are examples of acres of ruins surrounded by tidy , working-class burghers minding their own business and tending their gardens. Dorchester is larger than the imagination, neither wholly black nor white but all the shades of a polyglot palette. Currents cross and mix in Dorchester. It is called the Dot for a reason, but it isn't flat. It is well-rounded but more an orb, a point where gravity coheres a collection of citizens around a common goal: making thier surroundings as livable and good as they can.

Tiny's Uniform

With a name as silly as the "Peppermint Squad" it goes without saying that the elected leader should be an oversized man named Tiny. This is the case.

Tiny Phillips is six feet four inches tall, weighing in at 315 pounds. He rides a Honda Metropolitan. This scooter's owner's manual states that the maximum weight the suspension can support is 250 pounds. Tiny rides with impunity in defiance of the manufacturer's specifications and he has ridden this little Metro for three years requiring no more maintanence than an annual oil change. The brakes have been tightened but that is routine for the cables on this trusty machine and have nothing to do with the heft of the primary driver. The tires have been checked and psi added, but again, this is nothing an elfin scooterist wouldn't have to do. Tiny's Metro jumps at green lights like a thoroughbred, going from 0-15mph in 4.3 seconds. He has escaped many a startling scrape because of trustworthy, Japanese engineering.

As leader of the Peppermint Squad, Tiny wears his badge of office proudly. Massachusetts has a helmet law so everyone, motorized or not, on two wheels is required to wear a helmet to protect thier cranium from miscalculated turns and short stops. Everyone in the Peppermint Squad wears a helmet even when they cross into Rhode Island, Connecticut, or New Hampshire where the headgear isn't required. They are citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, after all, and they put personal safety before personal independence. Thier helmets are a mark of state pride.

The Peppermint Squad's leader, as specified in the club's constitution, is required to obey all of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' civil statutes regarding required safety equipment. Head protection and eye protection are de riguer for all members of the squad when they are on patrol. The leader wears something else that sets him off from the rest of his pack. He doesn't always ride in the lead but he sports a badge of authority that separates the head from the body.

Before embarking on a group ride, as required by institutional bylaws, the elected leader of the Peppermint Squad dons a red bandanna around his neck, knotted in the back and with the edge of the long crease perched on the tip of his nose. The club's founders felt this gave the leader a vigilante look that was true their original intentions and lent an air of lawlessness and rebellion. The leader may look like a bandit but he is one of the good guys.

The Peppermint Squad isn't lawless. They employ hand signals when turning and they are the least troublesome of Boston's two-wheeled gangs, but they don't always obey the letter of traffic regulations. They enjoy lane splitting and running late night red lights that are red for no apparent reason besides an automatic timer. They zip through traffic like a warm blade through cottage cheese. Their engines run hot but their tempers are even.

Tiny Phillips, current leader of the Peppermint Squad embodies all the clubs traditions and intentions when he straddles the frame of his Honda Metropolitan and calls a fresh ride to order. His big butt on the seat of his little steed marks him in the pack as much as his badge of office. He has been leader of the Peppermint Squad for two years. He is a natural politician who rose quickly through the ranks. He doesn't wear a bandanna over his face to disguise himself. He stands out in traffic enough. He wears it to distinguish himself. The other members of the Peppermint Squad recognize he has earned the right to cover his features and they rally around him.

Rewound Prank

Digital media have mostly replaced analogue but there are still boxes of cassette tapes tucked into basements, back closets and attics. Boys will be boys and their eager hands are made for mischief. Parents cannot keep their attention focused on their little rapscallions all the time. As long as the transgressions are minor, there is little need for parental intervention no matter the litter left afterward.

Mothers’ Rest is the most poetically named park in all of Boston. It is just north of Codman Square, on Washington Street in Dorchester. It occupies a bluff that overlooks Dorchester Bay and the rainbow painted gas tank on the bay’s shore. It seems a band of boys got their hands on a cache of antiquated cassette tapes stashed off Codman Square.

Sometime between 6:00 and 8:00 yesterday evening, someone unraveled what appears to be ten or twelve old cassettes and wove the tape quite loosely in the fence work at Mothers’ Rest. The wind picked up overnight and completed the job, tying the shiny, brown tape strands between the bars, around tree branches and bench feet. Mothers’’ Rest was rustling and unfurling with quarter inch thick tape. What sounds were originally recorded are unknown.

A public works crew was dispatched to the park armed with trash bags and pocket knives to cut the stray tapes off the objects around which the wind had wrapped them. The perpetrators had tossed the tapes willy-nilly and the gusts off the Bay finished the work, creating tangles more complicated than the biggest granny knot. No one suspects girls have committed this act of minor vandalism. One mother, witnessing the clean up, commented, “Boys will be boys.”