Not Much Ado

‘S 'bout time I added another update I think, time flies when you are having fun.

Speaking of fun, spring has really sprung here; the weather has been noticeably warmer now for a couple of weeks, but the kicker is that all of the trees have come into leaf in the last week. It always surprises me how quickly it happens in this part of the country. One week the trees are bare and you turn around, and they are green and leafy.

Big fun in the neighborhood over the last couple weeks; a film shoot is taking place up our street a couple blocks from the house. The film; ‘The Company Men’ stars Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones, not that we have seen them in the neighborhood, but the local press has been keeping us filled in on their every move. The shoot is taking place at what we called for lack of a better title the ‘Munster House’; actually know as the Hodgden House it was built in the 1860’s towards the end of the ‘estate ‘ period in the Roxbury Highlands. The house has been in disrepair for the better part of 50 years, going from Italianate mansion to rooming house and apartments, and vacant for many years. It is now owned by a cab driver. One of the more endangered old houses in the neighborhood, the owner has barely had the funds to keep the house standing let alone actually make any repairs. The plot of the film revolves around the Affleck character, once a corporate hotshot who looses his job and goes to work for his brother (Costner) who is a contractor. The house happens to be one that they are working on over the course of the story. The upside of the filming in and around the house is that the film company is putting a substantial amount of money in the actual repairs of the house as the house transitions from derelict to repaired over the course of the film.

The house in transition.

The downside of the film shoot is that they keep blocking off the street for days starting early in the morning until early evening. The street happens to be narrow and one way, and the only straight route over the hill to the other side, and is the main route I take in the morning to take the boy to school, the first couple of mornings he was late for school in part because of the longer route. It isn’t like I could just take the next block over either, the streets were laid out in the 1830’s tend to meander all over and are often one way going the opposite direction.

Speaking of construction, the houses that are being built behind us are nearing completion. The last couple weeks have them digging up the street and sidewalks while installing the utilities. The houses dominate the view from the back of our house and make our humble home look even smaller and humbler. It will be strange having some one living so close. When we first moved here 8 years ago, we were the only house on the block with vacant lots to the back and to the side of the house. With the completion of these last two houses, what had been vacant land will now contain 10 units of housing, which is 6 to the side and 4 to the rear. It used to be that ours was the only car parked on the block and we could always park next to the house. That has changed dramatically, and god forbid you don’t have a space by 8:00am on Tuesday mornings when they are sweeping the streets and parking is prohibited on one side.

Before: October 20, 2008

Current: May 3, 2009

The other one: May 3, 2009.

In the broader picture, work is slowing down. The last few weeks were hectic with a variety of student groups performing in the theatre, of ten with four or more events in a given week. I’d like to say that they were all brilliant productions, but alas they all seemed to blend in to one mass of student bodies bouncing around the stage to pop tunes played and a painful volume. I was most disappointed by the burlesque troupe, I was hoping for something a little different from the other dance groups. But alas ‘twas not to be. Whereas the other groups we attempting to be ‘artistic’, the burlesque troupe was a little more ‘wink-wink’ about flouting their sexuality on stage, where it could have been more crass and in your face, in reality it was more of the same.

Good news; the triangle across the street from us that has been a vacant lot for 30 years or more which the neighbors have been tending for nearly as long is soon to come into the possession of a local land conservancy, and will

And they by ended the academic year, as classes ended Monday a week ago. I had two more events in this weekend, both of them benefits for worth causes, which featured a lot of good live music on stage. Unfortunately both events were poorly attended, and I doubt if either made any money for their chosen charities. It is kind of a shame to see the tacky student shows packed with kids, and when something of a higher artistic merit comes along the house is empty. I understand that the students are going to see and support their friends onstage, but it is still a little disheartening.
All that is left now is commencement exercises on the 17th and a few events scattered over the next month.

Beyond that life has been busy but pretty routine, get up in the morning, work and go to bed at night.

I am always raving in these pages about the neighborhood, here is a video that a local organization Roxbury Cultural Network put together.

History on a Roll

1st Church Steeple

Patriots Day

Last Monday was Patriots day in Massachusetts, and contrary to popular belief it is not named after the football team, it is a state holiday to commemorate the battles of Lexington and Concord, which were the opening salvos in the revolutionary war in 1775. It also happens to be the day that the Boston Marathon is run, but that is a whole other story.

We care little of either the football team or the marathon, so that leaves the commemoration part of the holiday for us. As I have mentioned before, our little neighborhood of Roxbury was once a separate town from Boston and was nestled on the first high ground once one passed out of the city and across the narrow strip of land (the neck) that connected Boston to the mainland. All roads out of Boston passed through Roxbury. This made it a strategic location when it came to the Revolution. What had been town square and is now the grounds of the 1st Church of Roxbury had been the site of much to-do in that period, and a number of the local community group had organized events to commemorate that on the grounds. I think this was the first year that we actually planned ahead for the event, usually we kind of remember sometime after breakfast, and by the time we are ready to go most of the events are over at about 9:30 we met our neighbors from across the street and walked the two blocks to the church. The festivities were already in progress, and a good number of our other neighbors were gathered in front of the church for the speeches and awards. The highlight of the morning’s events was the reenactment of the ride of William Dawes to warn the citizens of Lexington that the British were assembling to attack. Dawes was one of two other who went on the ‘midnight ride’. After a pronouncement from the rider and a reading a parody of the original poem, adding Dawes into the events, the rider was off, to supposedly follow the path of the original ride. I was concerned for the safety of both the horse and the rider, the route has changed a lot in 235 years, and they didn’t have Boston traffic back then.

Friends and family gathered

After the rider disappeared into the traffic. I went into the church to listen to a talk on one of the local African American patriots of the era. Although the talk was interesting, I was more interested in the church. Built in 1804 it is the oldest wooden frame church in Boston. The congregation has shrunk over the years, and while the church is in solid condition and has been maintained, it has not been heavily restored, and many of the original furnishings are extant. It is showing it’s age like a fine patina over the structure with just enough age and peeling paint to let one know that is has been in service a long time.














The next event of the day was a trolley tour of the historic sites in the neighborhood that was narrated by a local state Senator who spent many years in the neighborhood. I like to think that I have learned a lot about the local history, but I jump at the chance to hear from local residents. This turned out to be a gold mine of a trip. There were many people on the ride that were old time residents, and there was much discussion and many memories that rolled out at each stop on the trip. It was fun and enlightening.



One of the other activities of the day was tour of the Shirley-Eustis House. This is the only remaining royal governors house remaining in the country. Located about a mile from our house in what is now a densely populated urban neighborhood, when it was constructed from 1747-1751, the location was open country that backed up to the slat mashes of the South Bay. The house was a private residence until roughly the civil war but then was divided into apartments and later abandoned. It was rescued by a private organization in 1913, but wasn’t restored and opened to the public until the 1980’s.

We drive by the place on a regular basis but never had the opportunity to actually visit the house. After the trolley ride we drove over to see if we could join one of the tours. Much to our disappointment we had missed the last one of the day. As we were about to leave the proprietor of the house saw recognized us from earlier in the day and mentioned that the caretaker was giving a private tour a little later to a couple of friends. He offered to include us on that tour. We jumped at the chance, and after a short wait, we were treated to a leisurely casual tour of the house. The caretaker turned out to be a dental student at a local university, and while he had a good grasp of the history of the house. He wasn’t a longtime resident and didn’t know a lot of the local history and lore. The 4 other people on the tour were not locals either, so we were able to add what we knew of the local history into the details of the history of the house I think everyone came away a lot richer for it. The house has been restored to a period of the late 18th century when most of the interior details has survived from some how thy had managed to find furniture and other artifacts that had once been in the house, as well personal affects of some of the more rebound residents, and while the house was not packed with antiques of the period, it was enough to give the feeling of how the house might have looked and functioned at the time. Most interesting to me were a couple of cubbyholes where behind a small door one could see some of the old interior walls left from another configuration of the house that dated to a period later that the period of the restoration.

What a day! I have not been inundated with that much living history in a single day. I just hope that I can retain a small bit of what I heard and saw.

The Great Hall

The Great Hall looking towards what had been South Bay

The Master Bedroom

A hidden nook showing old renovations, note the painted 'wallpaper'.

Preservation Blues: or a Digression on Local History

Preface: The following entry has been perking in my head and on my flash drive for over a week. What was going to be the usual ramble about the week’s events but somehow morphed into a little bit of a local history essay. I have become quite interested in the history of my immediate neighborhood, and I think this may be the first essay looking into the history of a particular building or event in the neighborhood.

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I skipped karate last week to attend a community meeting regarding historic preservation of the neighborhood. It was sponsored by the local community center up the street, and in addition to being attended by a good representation of neighbors, also present were representatives from several local and state wide historic preservation organizations. The purpose of the meeting was twofold; to give the residents tools to help preserving their own homes, but also to look to preserving some historic structures in the neighborhood that are in danger.

This part of Roxbury known now as Highland Park has a unique place in Boston and architectural history. First settled in 1630, at the same time as Boston, it was the next stop on the road out of Boston which was then a narrow peninsula. Roxbury was the first high ground and a commerce center and cross roads to points north, south and west. By both luck and effort it now contains houses from every period from the mid 18th century on.

The neighborhood has had an interesting history. It spent its first hundred years as a quite farming village located at a cross roads for the main roads out Boston to places like New York and points north. Briefly during the revolution it held an important position as the location of two military earthwork forts overlooking Boston during the British Occupation, some of which you can read about in William McCullough’s book 1776. From the late 18th and into the early 19th century it was mostly farmland, orchards actually. Both the Bartlett Pear and the Roxbury Russet Apple are claimed to have been developed here. The soil wasn’t really good for vegetable farming the salient feature to the land in ‘rocks bury’ is the abundance of Roxbury Puddingstone that is just below a thin layer of soil and makes up most of the highlands. In the 1830’s and 40s’ a number of estates erected in the area by prominent Bostonians, notably Alvah Kittredge, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and author and chaplain of the US Senate, Edward Everett Hale. Their houses still exist today.

After the Civil War, the neighborhood began to change dramatically; the large estates were broken up and divided for housing. The construction of the Cochituate Standpipe in 1869 brought abundant water to the area, along with annexation into the city of Boston, brought services and utilities to the neighborhood that the lack of had hindered growth before. A building boom took place in the 1870’s when numerous brick brownstones were constructed along with other forms of single and multi-family houses. The growth and economic stability maintained into the early part of the 20th century. Around the time of WW- Roxbury started to become the center of the African American community in Boston adding to the already broad mixture of Irish, German and Jewish population.

The neighborhood continued to thrive until the 1960s, when demographic changes and white flight hit Boston like many other cities, and the affluent middle-class left the cities for the suburbs. The neighborhood suffered the same blight of many inner-city neighborhoods across the country. It was ignored by the city and redlined by banks and Roxbury became the de facto black ghetto in Boston, notorious to the degree that it earned a mention in Randy Newman 1974 song ‘Rednecks.’ Plagued by drugs and gangs at it’s low point the neighborhood had a occupation rate of barely 30%, every block was lined by abandoned buildings and the night was often illuminated by fires and the abandoned house burned. The sense of abandonment by the City of Boston the residents of Roxbury reached its zenith in 1986 when the residents petitioned to incorporate as a separate city named Mandela. The petition was defeated, but in the early 90’s a coalition of ministers, police and city officials formed to fight the drug and gang problem, and amazingly were successful to the degree that it was called the Boston Miracle. That, the economic boom of the 90’s, and a general movement of populations back to the cities help bring people back to the area.

When we moved here in the spring of 2001, the neighborhood had begun to stabilized and had begun to grow again. We didn’t know the history of the neighborhood at the time; our choice of places to live was based on character, convenience and price. But for me it was a wonderful surprise when I began to learn the history of the surrounding neighborhood.

So going to this meeting was a one more stop on learning about the local history, and giving me a chance to invest in preserving some of that history as well. The various preservation organization, offered a variety of information and tools for saving some of the more endangered buildings in the neighborhood. And it was enlightening to hear the stories of some of the neighbors who had lived their whole lives here and how the neighborhood had changed and how the residents had survived over the years. A lot of time was spent discussing what we as a neighborhood could do for some specific properties that are privately owned, but are neglected and in immediate danger. Someone brought out copies of a study that had been done 10 years before on the neighborhood outlining the efforts that had been taken up to that time and designating the 10 most endangered dwellings in the neighborhood. Much to my surprise our house had been one of them. In the intervening time one of the structures have been lost, 6 have been restored or rehabilitated, and 3 remain in danger.

The one that everyone was most concerned about is the Alvah Kittredge House. Built about 1836 by one of the individuals who were instrumental in the development of the Highland Park neighborhood. The neoclassical centerpiece of what was once a large estate, it later belonged to Nathaniel J. Bradlee, renowned architect known and the ‘Builder of Boston’ and was responsible for a variety of important buildings through out Boston. That the house has survived nearly 200 years in itself is amazing. The estate was broken up and sold after Bradlee's death in 1888 and the house was reduced in size and moved to face a side street were it has served as a private residence, a rooming house, and most recently the headquarters of Roxbury Action Program, a community organization that was instrumental in preventing the neighborhood from being torn down in the 70’s for Urban renewal. Unfortunately the house proved to be too expensive for them to maintain and has been vacant for about 15 years. And so it sits, decaying even though it is on the National Register Historic places since 1973.

We came to no conclusions in the meeting, and no specific plans of action were arrived at, but a renewed energy and focus was found. We will be meeting again in a few weeks to take the next step in generating those plans and focus.