Dorchester Historical Society

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1744

A recipient of the Illustration of the Day has asked what is going on with the building at Edward Everett Square, known as three different addresses.  As of March, 2012, the City of Boston Assessing Department has the parcel at the point of Columbia Road and East Cottage Street listed as 166 East Cottage Street.  The Inspectional Services Department seems to have it at 1299 Massachusetts Avenue, although in early years, an owner promised to file all applications under the address 708 Columbia Road.  The property owner is shown as Yellow Brick, LLC.

The building has been under construction for a number of years—the structure for a full three stories was added a few years ago, but progress has stopped.  The building once housed the New England Brake Center, and the building seems to have been owned by the Brake Center into the1990s.  The original building, built between 1910 and 1918 as a garage, had two stories at the curve but only one story back along both sides. 

For a short period in 2009, the curved portion of the building housed a produce market.  An article that appeared in the Dorchester Reporter in early 2009 said: Purchased by developer Steven Turner in the fall, the V-shaped building has been vacant since the early 1990s, exposing its skeletal structure to thousands of motorists who flood this six-pronged intersection each day. The city began to renovate the square in 1995 and marked milestones in the initiative in 2007. The fresh paint and new windows on the lone remaining eyesore are another significant breakthrough.

Permit application #4679 dated June 9, 2003, requested a change of occupancy from a garage to a furniture showroom and office space, to erect a vertical addition, to combine 5 lots into one parcel of 17,220 square feet (Ward 07, parcel 3957 at the point, and parcels 3598, 3599, 3600, 3601 along East Cottage Street).  The Assessing Department continues to maintain all the parcels as separate tax entities on their website.

In 2010 an attorney’s letter filed at Inspectional Services detailed proposed use of the building once improvements had been made: first floor local retail 4507 square feet; second floor place of worship for Church in Boston Inc.; third floor five residential units to be used as a parsonage, housing ministers, deacons and deaconesses; plus 29 parking spaces.  The letter seems to claim that the building owner can make use of the building in this way as of right under the zoning rules.  A change of occupancy seems to have been approved on September 22, 2010.

The permit applications for ongoing repairs and improvements as well as the change of occupancy on Sept. 22, 2010, seem to reference application #4679 filed in 2003.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1743

Journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Theodore White spent his childhood in Dorchester.  Perhaps his most famous books are those with the title The Making of the President (1960, 1964, 1968, 1972).

Theodore White: A Childhood in Dorchester

By Anthony Sammarco in Dorchester Community News, August 30, 1991.

In the first chapter of Theodore White’s book In Search of History, he describes in vivid detail his youth in Dorchester at the turn of the century.

The chapter, “Exercise in Recollection,” creates a vivid impression of an immigrant’s viewpoint of a town settled by Puritans escaping the Old World, and creating a new society based on the Augustinian view of a “City upon a Hill.”

White, however, gives us the viewpoint of his childhood in Dorchester from that of an American born to Russian Jews.  Theodore White (1915-1986) was born on Erie Street, a nondescript street adjacent to the Midlands Line Railroad.  Near his home was Grove Hall, a bustling shopping district that once boasted a magnificent estate, Grove Hall, for which the intersection had been named.

The area had changed dramatically after the annexation of Dorchester to Boston in 1870, and White recounted that “it was then a bustling market street ancillary to the main shopping artery of Dorchester/Blue Hill Avenue.  Storekeepers had transformed Erie Street from the quiet residential neighborhood my grandparents had sought as Jewish pioneers in the district into a supermarket bazaar.”

Boston’s Amenities are Next Door

The aspect of immigrants in Dorchester was an important factor in the development of the town, for the town’s proximity to Boston allowed for both the affluent and those less fortunate to enjoy the same amenities.  The cool breezes from Dorchester Bay during the summer, the same panoramic views of both the Harbor and the Blue Hills and the same enjoyment of the exotic animals at Franklin Park Zoo were enjoyed by both the descendants of the Puritans and the newer arrivals from Eastern Europe.  The streets radiating from the former “Upper Road” (now Washington Street) attracted ethnic enclaves that had distinct connotations from Irish, Jewish, or German settlements.  White speaks of inner-city neighborhoods as being a part of a ballet that “is different in each city.  In the larger cosmopolitan cities of the Eastern Seaboard, old stock Protestants gave way to the Irish, who gave way in turn to Italians or Jews, who gave way n turn to blacks.”

Inspired by His House

However, being the grandchild of Easter European Jews separated White from his contemporaries.  He lived with his family in a two-family house that had been purchased for $2,000 in 1912, in a neighborhood that once attracted more affluent residents.  The house, unprepossessing by today’s standards, was an important feature in his youth, as “the house on Erie Street … connected me, unknowingly, directly to the New England past.  It might have been gardened by John Greenleaf Whittier, and its garden was the most beautiful on the block.  All the New England flowers about which I read in school, in the poems of Longfellow, and Whittier, and Emerson, and in the stories of Thornton Burgess, grew in my own backyard.  Under the lilac bushes grew lilies of the valley; we continued to replant the tiger lilies and tulips until we became too poor to buy tulip bulbs … To the original fruit trees—a pear and a cherry—my grandmother added a peach tree and a grapevine.”

Erie Street, carved out of the lands surrounding the former Atherton Estate, was an attractive neighborhood.  Tree-lined streets and a pleasant walk to Franklin Park must have sparked his imagination, but it was Miss Fuller, his sixth-grade teacher at the Gibson School on Mount Bowdoin that “set fire to the imagination of the ordinary children who sat in lumps before her, and to do so was probably the chief reward she sought.”

However, the public school education received by the children of immigrants could prove confusing, for the poems and stories read in school could be in marked contrast to the sounds of street merchants: “[L]eading their horse-and-wagons through Erie Street, they would yodel and chant their wares.  For each peddler another chant: the fish man would sing in a special voice, ‘Lebediker fisch, weiber, Lebediker fisch;’ the secondhand-clothes merchant would chant otherwise; the Italian banana man would chorus only ‘Bananas, bananas, bananas,’ hawking a fruit previously unknown to Eastern Europeans.” 

Though Theodore White said that Jews have no place at all in the grand history of Western thought, the courage his own family showed in their movement from Russian to Dorchester proved to make so interesting a migration that his book remains a familiar and personal adventure of an immigrant group in Dorchester.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1742

The amateur ham radio fad of the early to mid 20^th century found many enthusiasts in Dorchester.  After radio operators communicated with others, they often followed up with a mailed postcard to confirm their contact.  Wikipedia has a long article about amateur radio and seems to imply that radio communication for personal use is still popular.

Postcard. Caption on front: Dorchester, Massachusetts, Boston “More Yankee Grit” 258 E. Cottage St., W1MYG Thomas Edward O’Connor. Postmarked Mar. 5, 1941.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1740

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, young women displayed their talents in needlework by creating samplers, often depicting scenes from the Bible or mythology.  Hannah Dolbeare’s sampler shows Adam and Eve.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1739

Maria S. Judge is writing a book about Jake Hanna.

Jake Hanna was a swingin’ jazz drummer who played and recorded extensively from the early 1950s through 2009 and was as well known for his comic timing as he was for his ability to keep great time. Maria’s blog is at http://jakehannablog.blogspot.com  She says: This blog is dedicated to him and to the book I am currently writing about him. “Jake Hanna: The Rhythm and Wit of a Swinging Jazz Drummer,” which will be published in 2012

And the following comes from http://www.jakehanna.com/biography.html

Jake Hanna was born April 4, 1931 in Dorchester MA and began his musical career in the St. Brendan’s Drum and Bugle Corps when he was 8 years old. His drum teacher told his mother he had a natural talent and would go far, though it’s unlikely he could have imagined just how far. He studied the drummers who appeared with the great touring bands of the day when they played Boston’s vaudeville theatres and was well aware of the many talented players in Roxbury. He listened to all the records he could, especially those featuring Jo Jones and Gene Krupa, then the most celebrated drummers in jazz.

By the age of 13, he was developing a name for himself. Most bands had vacancies due to the wartime draft, and he kept busy with local groups and played throughout his years at Dorchester High School for Boys. During the late ’40s and early ’50s he played in bands led by Tommy Reed and Ted Weems. He played in the Air Force band during his entire tour of duty and in the evenings he and his fellow military musicians went into San Antonio clubs where he heard great music and learned a lot about how to play.

After his tour of duty he played his way back to Boston where he was the house drummer at Storyville for a number of years in the 1950s and 1960s when Buck Clayton, Bud Freeman, Pee Wee Russell and Vic Dickenson were in the band, with Jimmy Rushing on vocals. He joined Toshiko Akiyoshi’s trio in Boston in 1957 after studying at the Berklee School of Music, and played summer engagements with her for four years at the Hickory House in New York before transferring to Marian McPartland’s trio at the same venue. To McPartland he was “a pleasure to watch; there is no wasted motion, yet he does everything with a flourish”.

He played with Maynard Ferguson (1958) and Woody Herman’s Orchestra (1962-64) and did extensive work as a studio musician both in and out of jazz, including ten years as the drummer for the Merv Griffin Show big band (1964-75). He recorded numerous albums for Concord Jazz, and his 1975 Grammy-nominated recording of Live at Concord, which he co-led with trombonist Carl Fontana, was the label’s biggest seller up to that point. Hanna, known for his wit as well as his music, referred to it as “Hanna and Fontana with McKenna on piana,” saluting the late Dave McKenna who had a legendary decade-long run at the Copley Plaza piano bar. He later played in Bing Crosby’s personal quartet that toured with him around the world.

Hanna was influential in getting Rosemary Clooney, Scott Hamilton and Woody Herman to record for Concord. He chose the songs and the musicians for Clooney’s first Concord album, 1977’s Everything’s Coming up Rosie, which was instrumental in her comeback of the late 1970s. Hanna played at numerous jazz festivals and parties around the world, and toured and recorded with jazz singer Roberta Gambarini from 2007 to 2010.

Although highly skilled in all aspects of his work, Hanna was one of the most self-effacing drummers in jazz, happy to urge a band along with subtlety and discrete dynamics. Any band with which he played was guaranteed to swing and to have a good time because, apart from his superb musicianship, Hanna was also a witty and gifted raconteur.

He played on more than 250 recordings, from Toshiko Akiyoshi’s 1957Toshiko and Leon Sash at Newport to Roberta Gambarini’s So in Love, nominated for a 2010 Grammy as Best Jazz Vocal Album.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1738

In the past few days we have seen a couple of then-and-now sets of photos, and it was interesting to compare the exterior appearance of buildings in earlier times with the appearance of today.  Today we have another set.

We saw the Gushee house and barn last week—the house at the dairy on Fuller Street.  Today we show the house as it appeared about 1900 and along with a photo from 2012.  The loss of shutters really changes the appearance of a building.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1737

An advertisement for rhe newly-built Ridgehaven Inn appeared in the Blue Book of Dorchester for 1913.  The 1910 atlas shows the lot at 143 Tonawanda Street as vacant, so the house was built after the map was prepared but before the 1913 Blue Book was published.  Mrs. Minnie B. Beals, who owned the land prior to the construction of the building, was the proprietor of the Inn.

The lower photo is the appearance as of March 7^th, 2012.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1736

Photograph published in Services of Dedicaton & Commemoration, Pilgrim Church … October … 1903. This building was later called the Romsey Congregational Church.  The lower photograph is from 2003, showing the building as used by the VFW post—James J. Rice Post 28 VFW.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1735

It looks as if the Dorchester Day Parade was marching from northern Dorchester to Lower Mills in 1967.  St. Ann’s of Neponset leads the parade through Fields Corner, celebrating the 337 anniversary of the settlement of Dorchester.

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org