Horse-drawn wagon on Centre St in Jamaica Plain

2010 Historic Walking Tours
All tours are free and open to the public and are offered on Saturdays at 11:00 a.m. sharp. Tours last approximately one hour except for the Jamaica Pond tour which lasts 90 minutes due to the longer distance covered. Tours are canceled in case of rain. No reservations are required. Please join us and bring along a friend!

I was on a tour today through Cambridge, Somerville and Jamaica Plain. About midway we had a look at a condo on Elm Street near Inman Square. This home was across the street. It captivated me. It’s right next to the well known restaurant Oleana, but from that side it’s not quite as dramatic. However if you swing around to the Elm Street side you’ll see it’s real character.

The original structure is clearly mid 1800s but a garage of sorts with a greenhouse has been added to the top. It has an amazing door on the garage, but also a sort or Hobbit door under the front porch that must access the basement.

I’d give my left leg to see the inside. I’ll do some more research and let you know what I find out. If anyone has a historic tidbit they’d like to share about this house or others -chime in…

Powder Tower #1, Staré Město, Prague, Czech Republic, 2006

more info: thehallwayjp.com

In my photographs of different cities and countries, I convey a sense of place through architectural and other distinctive regional details – indoors and outdoors. The pictures I make document surfaces long-exposed to time and use, and place importance on ordinary things, usually overlooked or ignored. I search for random events of light and shadow to bring out these details. Many of my photographs transform small fragments of built structures into abstractions, and so they are also formal examinations – of color, texture, light, shadow, shape, and space.

It’s like they’re mocking us. “How you like me now?” the client lives in NH so it’s just a favor to go check out the place for him. (That’s just the kind of operation we run here.) Anyway, I enjoyed my walk across town. It was beautiful and people were coming out to walk their dogs and shovel. I reminded everyone I passed that was shoveling to remember to bend their knees. They all seeded truly appreciative. The snow was frenzied and occasionally defied Mother Nature herself to reverse direction and hang out inside my hood.

The walk brought to my mind the longstanding Boston feud. Oh, yes. We have one too. I thought I was leaving all that behind when I left the Ozarks. Nay, Beantown has it’s own version of The Hatfields & The McKoys. Back home it was The Yokums & The Gideons. Who knows why these people were really feuding but the rumor has it it was about land. Specifically a piece of land with a silver mine. I’m not sure it ever produced more than they required for the fillings in their teeth but nonetheless, that’s the story. Oh yes, and how can we forget the Sneetchs or even better, the Zax?

Yes Boston is no exception. Ours is a battle over real estate as well. It has divided friends, neighbors, even lovers. I’m curious what you think? If you shovel out after a snow storm – do you have right to the spot indefinitely? Do you prefer everyone respects the public way? Here’s a couple of differing points of view. Leave yours in the comments…

“The King of parking space savers”

Elvis space saver

By Globe Staff

Elvis Presley may be gone, but a bust of the King lives on — as a parking space saver.

Reader Jon Titone took this photo on P Street in South Boston, in response to a recent Globe story about the proliferation of space savers that violate the city’s 48-hour rule.

Without adequate enforcement, the space savers remain. That means law-abiding drivers must find another place to park or move the savers — which are often much less creative than Elvis — and live with the fear that their car could be keyed or their tires slashed.

According to the City of Boston’s website, space savers are only allowed after the declaration of a snow emergency, which hasn’t occurred since Dec. 18. Most drivers, however, use space savers after digging out from any plowable snow.

The enforcement of the 48-hour rule resides with city sanitation workers on regular rounds. Trash pickup occurs once a week, which means that at best space savers will be tossed once every seven days. Garbage pickup in some neighborhoods, however, occurs prior to 9 a.m., with sanitation trucks making the rounds well before drivers have left their parking spots.

That means some step stools and buckets can remain virtually undisturbed, saving a parking space from now until Opening Day on April 6.

Dot Joyce, a spokeswoman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino, said earlier this week that any parking space savers that remain on the street should have been removed long ago. The city, however, has not received enough complaints about space savers from a specific neighborhood to necessitate the dispatch of a special public works crew to collect the cones, chairs, and shovel-and-box combos, Joyce said.

The mayor’s office urged people to report illicit place savers by calling the 24-hour constituent services hot line at 617-635-4500.

Have an stubborn space saver on your block? E-mail a picture here with a precise description of the location.

After Wednesday’s snowstorm, the 48-hour rule was reset. By Friday or Saturday, the Globe will be looking for additional illicit parking space savers.

***

Then check out this great thread on the Yelp forum. Very entertaining stuff. The “no spot saving” crowd is definitely outspoken here.

Saving parking spots in Southie is wrong.

Another fun article is on Universal Hub called:

To protect my parking spot, I use:

Whatever you believe is the best plan of action is your business. All I have to say is that on my street there’s no space saving. We all dig out immediately and deal with the cards we’re dealt just like every other day. Sometimes we help shovel each other out and have a few laughs while we’re doing it. If you put out a lawn chair on my street – it’s toast. Bring it on.

‘RIDERS on the TRAIN’ is an interdisciplinary art exhibition exploring new relationships between artist, audience, site, and context. Drawn from an international call for submissions, these artists and writers explore ‘the private within the public’ experience of mass-transit in Sweden, Australia, South Africa, India, Switzerland, NYC, London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, LA, DC, Portland, and Boston. The poetics of acceleration, compression, fragmentation and sensory immersion are explored as the artists record, collaborate, and devise small scale tactical interventions – juxtaposing high with low technology. ‘Riding Artists’ sample their ‘ride’ and generate an aggregate description of the mass-transit experience through a diversity of lenses and media including video, sound art, photography, web-based interactivity, performance, installation and writing.

Click on the image to go to the website.

I look forward to your comments.

by KARL STEVENS

JP cartoon

Jack's Store is now JP Green House

I signed up for their newsletters and I think you should too. Here’s a snippet from their project page:

The JP Green House is a zero carbon* demonstration project, sustainable urban model and hub for 350.org climate action founded by Andrée Zaleska and Ken Ward. We are rehabbing an abandoned, 100 year old, former neighborhood store located on the line between Jamaica Plain and Roslindale in Boston, Massachusetts. Our aim is to achieve passivhaus standards, win substantial independence from grid supplies of water and electricity, and supply a large portion of our food on a modest income. We are retrofitting the former “Jack’s store” as space for workshops and trainings, neighborhood events and gatherings like our JP Family SongFest.

The JP Green House is located at 133 Bourne Street, Roslindale. We welcome visitors & volunteers and have a schedule of activities and events. You can contact us at:

greenhousejp[at[gmail.com 617.512.8350

The entire yard from edge to edge was paved with thick, stinky asphalt. Not a blade of grass was visible. As I have tendency to do everything 110%, I began renovating the inside of the dwelling as well as recycling ALL of the asphalt and sifting the top twelve inches of soil on the entire property.

We are basically right on top of the culvert that contains the Stony Brook, and although we’ve never had any significant water in our basement, I wanted to take steps to keep it the foundation as dry as possible. I dug a big ditch under the patio to the right and hooked it around in an “L” shape all the way to where the driveway meets the sidewalk. There I dug a 9′x4′x3′ ditch and dropped into it.

I lined the bottom of the ditch with gravel and then a layer of landscaping cloth and then laid the drainage tub (oddly named “drain tile”) inside, poured gravel on top and wrapped up a big drainage burrito. This was a really inexpensive way to deliver the access water away from my foundation quickly.

Around this time we had traveled to San Diego’s Balboa Park and a couple other places that had Japanese Gardens including Portland and Seattle. I fell in love. I was also studying Japanese construction techniques and the space saving, ingenious ideas that they often employ.

My daughter Vitoria in a beautiful stand of Black Bamboo

My favorite is drawers in each stair step of a staircase. How cool is that? Anyway, I was determined to have a Japanese garden right here in JP. I met with a landscape architect who talked things through with me. Basically, some of the criteria and parameters I had to work around didn’t combine well with the style. For instance I think Boston is a zone 6 (garden speak for the climate we have here) and the hard winters are rough on bamboo and many of the plants native to Japan. Over time, I’ve learned that by combining more hearty Japanese species in the design with some very basic ground covers – I could fake it. In addition, we wanted a garden that would absorb a great deal of water, never need to be cut or need very much attention. It has taken a lot of trial and error, as well as the very skilled advice, tutelage, and hard work by my friend Rich Gargiulo at Treeworks (617-983-0813) but we now have a passable Japanese garden. I am very proud of my hard work – which is rewarded every time someone walks by and compliments us. Now if I could just keep people from letting their dogs pee pn my bushes I’d have it made!

Japanese styled gardens in front of my home.

I’d love if some of our readers could offer up any anecdotal information about their gardens, resources they might find helpful in the area, etc. I’d love to hear any tips and advice you have for surviving the winter, etc. Also, in the near future – I will have too much ground cover, and I’d be willing to trade plugs of creeper for other small plants that might fit in to my scheme. Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to come by and see my tiny garden!