3:00 snapshot #1386: two Boston neighborhoods I've never lived in

[urbpan]

Here's my dad (longtime Red Sox fan)getting a pic of Yaz's Place in Dorchester.




For six years I've been driving by this giant pear on my way from Franklin Park to Stone Zoo. Finally, while taking my dad for a drive, I decided to stop by and see what it was all about.


It turns out that this little sculpture park on a corner in Dorchester was put here in 2007 to celebrate various aspects of the neighborhood (which was a town in its own right from 1630 until it was annexed by Boston in 1870), including the Clapp pear, a locally produced cultivar.


Also there are a bunch of pedestals with various bronzed exalted objects on them, including this monument to the written word...


And this one to the telephone.


Then I took my dad down to the beach at South Boston. He's been reading about the atrocities related to Whitey Bulger and needed to see a calm healthy Southie.


A narrow one-way alley is a good place for some street hockey.


We got a couple drinks and a couple roast beef sandwiches in the Shamrock.


Much of Southie is rapidly gentrifying, but whoever owns this plot appears to be holding out.


At the L street tavern we saw one of the filming locations for Good Will Hunting, and were exposed to some casual racism (a stock piece of merchandise for the neighborhood).


We headed back through Dorchester and stopped by at the James Blake House, the oldest house in Boston (1661). This is another thing I've passed between the two zoos dozens of times but I finally stopped for so my dad could see it.


Doorways of Dorchester? There was one car parked in front of the house, but no signs of life anywhere, nor any indication that the house was ever open to the public. I walked through the open gateway, acutely aware of my white privilege--a black man trespassing as I was would have been counting the minutes before someone came to ask why I was there. Boston is less racist than it once was, but has a ways to go.

Comments

[anais2.livejournal.com]

Doc has grown amazingly observant offspring; may his tribe increase!