CREDIT: Suzanne Besser
CAPTION:
A bit of fog and drizzle didn’t keep Chestnut Street resident Lawrence Coolidge from kicking off what just might be his 24th year of caring for the trees and shrubs on the banks of the Charles River. It’s not his main job, but nonetheless he manages to donate several hours a day twice-weekly keeping things trim and tidy. Thursday, assisted by his wife Nancy Myers Coolidge, he trimmed a 75-year-old willow near the Storrow Lagoon.

#1 A treeless Church of the Advent in the 1940s
Photo
Credit: courtesy of the Church of the Advent
#2 Tree surgeons take down a inden tree at the church Wednesday.
Photo Credit: John Bessser

The Church of the Advent took down two and pruned three messy inden trees on its property at Mount Vernon and Brimmer streets Wednesday, planning instead to plant a garden with smaller flowering trees, shrubs and flowers in the space.

Some neighbors were alarmed, believing the trees were as old as 400 years. Not so, said the church’s Parish Administrator Jim Wood, because the land was under water then. It wasn’t until sometime in the 1880s that the land was filled, and the church was built shortly afterwards in 1890. A picture taken in 1944 shows the church with out trees, and Wood thinks the lindens were planted in the 1960s, at a time when the species was very popular in Boston.

“But there has been a general decline in lindens since then,” said Arborist Lief Fixen of the Boston Parks and Recreation Department. “Perhaps too many were planted then. Now they are more diseased and don’t look good.”

The city no longer plants lindens as normal street trees, Fixen said, because they are messy and drop sap on cars and sidewalks. Problems with their messiness and invasiveness prompted their removal at the Church of the Advent, whose Garden Guild followed the advice of many tree professionals before having them removed. “We have just spent $1½ million restoring the facade of the church, and we don’t want to get it dirty again,” said Wood.

Parishioners were also concerned about safety issues. Recently, a large limb crashed down, which potentially could have injured a person or car parked along the property. Tree roots had invaded the adjacent sidewalk, although they had not yet reached the building itself.

Information provided by John Lepore, who heads the project for Mass. Highway, and by direct observation.


Traffic lights: Working at the Grove Street intersection. The old light heads are gone. Workmen were supposed to remove the mast arms on Friday, but it was too windy. All the old fixtures should be gone sometime this week.

Traffic lights at other intersections: Grove Street was the hardest intersection. There are five more traffic light locations to go. By this week Blossom Street should be finished.

Trees and other plants: There will be no planting until after April 15.

Snow in the median: Neighbors have pointed out that the snow plows dumped soil in the median. They worried about what effect that would have on the soil. Lepore said he doesn’t like it. “I made it clear to them they can’t be bumping salt and soil into the median,” said Lepore. “It will be interesting to whoever has the maintenance contract.”

CREDIT: John Besser
CAPTION: Suffolk University is in negotiation to purchase this building at 10 West Street for use as a dormitory.


The newly reconstituted Suffolk University Task Force had barely begun talks about the university’s institutional master plan when officials found a building they could easily convert into a dormitory for their students.

They didn’t expect it to happen so quickly, said Vice President John Nucci. After scrapping plans to build a dormitory on Beacon Hill and getting the word out of their interest in the downtown area, things got busy. The university spent a lot of time talking with building owners and developers. Some even came knocking on Suffolk’s door. And last week they found themselves in negotiation to buy a former office building that could house 280 students at 10 West Street in the Ladder District/Downtown Crossing.

And they are excited. If the negotiations go through, they’ll be a part of the revitalization of an area that holds much promise of becoming a place where people will want to live, shop and dine, Nucci said.

It is the same reason that the Boston Redevelopment Authority is happy with the prospect. “It’s a win for the students and a win for the city,” said Jessica Schumaker. She sees it as an economic generator, one that would attract new businesses and help retain those currently there, resulting in a livelier place for all. Shumaker said the BRA applauded Suffolk for jumping at this opportunity, since suitable buildings downtown rarely become available.

The location is one recommended by the first Task Force, which was comprised primarily of Beacon Hill residents who did not want a dormitory on Beacon Hill. Currently, 18 percent of the university’s square footage is on Beacon Hill, and there will be no future residential expansion here, said Nucci. “The direction we are headed in is pretty clear,” he said.

Several task force members from Downtown Crossing had a good reaction to the university’s plan. One new members is Tim Obert, general manager of the Hyatt Regency Boston, which is located on Avenue de Lafayette just around the corner from 10 West Street. While he is keeping an open mind about the whole process, Obert believes in general that any growth in the residential population of Downtown Crossing would be a positive thing and promote the synergy of the neighborhood. “It’s an exciting time to be in Downtown Crossing,” he said.

There is a second reason Nucci is excited about 10 West Street. The building, which was formerly used for office space, is already being developed into condos. If the purchase goes through, Suffolk could step in and complete the renovations quickly, possibly in time for 280 students to occupy it this fall. This would help them meet the mayor’s mandate that universities provide housing for their students.

The university still must go through a lot of processes, said Schumaker. They must finish the Institutional Master Planning process, get the building approved for dorm use and go through the Article 80 process.

But that hasn’t put a damper on the university’s enthusiasm for the new site. Nucci said the task force would be a part of the process.

The war against rats has officially begun.

On one front are armies of rats, whose ranks have increased significantly this year because their troops were able to survive during the mildest winter on record by burrowing in tree pits and back yards.

On the other front are Beacon Hill residents, armed with ammunition provided by the city, who are planning tactics and strategies to push back the enemy from their basement walls and hidden gardens.

In command of the defense is the popular Pedro Torres, health inspector with the city’s Inspectional Services Department Environmental Services who most people call “the city’s rat guy.” He is a career officer, having enlisted with ISD when he was fresh out of junior college 27 years ago. “They sent me to [rat] training, and I decided to stay here,” Torres said. “It’s the only job I have ever had, and I do it with a lot of pride. There is nothing like responding to a call from a hysterical person who has a problem. My reward is to see them calm and smiling again.”

This month he is getting so many calls that he is booking five appointments an hour with residents and plans to ask ISD for an assistant. Because rats are nocturnal, Torres starts his day at 4:00 a.m., usually at the Boston Common and Public Garden where he monitors and treats rodent activity. He then patrols city streets, places rodenticides in manholes and catch basins, looks for infestations and activity near buildings and homes, and identify food sources.

Last week he found large populations of rats nesting four feet below ground in back yards on West Cedar, Chestnut, Brimmer and Mount Vernon streets. He distributed brochures in residents’ homes urging them to contact him for a full inspection and advice on how to manage the problem. He dumped the rat poison in manholes and came back three times to find it all consumed. He saw evidence of rats chewing through trash bags that had been left on the street the night before and carrying bits of food to their nearby burrows.

Some think the increase in rats this year in that section of Beacon Hill is due not only to the mild winter but also to extensive sewer work done on Charles Street. John Meaney, ISD’s principal health inspector, said this may have contributed to the problem. According to a city ordinance, building permits must be issued until the applicant shows evidence that the area has been inspected and treated for rodents, but Meaney thinks Boston Water and Sewer Commission’s rodent control efforts did not start early enough last year.

BWSC Deputy Director Tom Bagley said inspectors on that job did find significant rat activity, not only due to the sewer line work but also to other violations nearby, such as improperly stored trash in restaurant dumpsters. The commission has already met with city health inspectors and begun rodent control measures for its upcoming project to replace a section of sanitary sewer and install a new storm drain on Charles Street near Revere Street.

One more tactic the defense is employing against the army of rats is hand-to-hand combat on the flat of the Hill. Beverly Dammin, a resident of Mount Vernon Street, plans what she calls a simple, low-key frontal attack by a new “Clean Team,” modeled after one instituted in Nantucket by former Beacon Hiller Grant Sanders. Dammin’s team of 10 to 12 residents, garbed in matching t-shirts and protective gloves, will begin a weekly early morning half-hour cleaning of streets and sidewalks on their blocks, picking up litter and removing rodent food sources.

It’s an idea Beacon Hill Civic Association’s Clean Beacon Hill Committee has advocated and implemented for years, and Chair Peter Begley is encouraged to see neighbors take the initiative. “It is amazing what half-an-hour of collecting trash and sweeping can accomplish,” he said. “If we want a clean neighborhood, we all need to make the effort.”

He’s hoping the three-pronged attack — by residents, city and contractors like the BW& SC — will force the rats into surrender.

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The following tongue-in-cheek editorial ran in The Beacon Hill Times just before the invasion on March 18, 2003. It attracted more letters and phone calls than any editorial ever published in this newspaper. About 90 percent of them said, “thank you for saying what I’ve been thinking.” The other 10 percent called the Times staff socialists and worse.

Several people have asked us to reprint this editorial. We re-ran it last year during the anniversary week. Now we have decided to re-run it every year until America’s young men and women are home and safe.

The suspicions we had in 2003 turned out to be correct. But being right brings no satisfaction. Instead, along with most of our readers, we feel a keen sense of loss — for our dead soldiers, for America’s moral leadership, for our undermined Bill of Rights, and, most of all, for our confidence in America’s leaders, whom, even in our darkest hours, we would never have imagined would be so deceptive and inept.

So here it is again. Our hearts go out to the Iraqi people, who have endured so much due to our country’s failures.


Now, tell me again, why is it we’re going to war?

By the time you read this, our country may be at war. Let’s see if we understand this:

We’re declaring war on Iraq because they have “weapons of mass destruction” that they are going to use on us. But then we have learned that their missiles have a problem: their range is considerably less than halfway around the world. How can they deliver these “weapons of mass destruction” if their missiles can’t reach us? And isn’t it that other country, North Korea, the one that is ready to make a bomb and has a long-range missile? Since the U.S. is not bothering them instead, we must have our facts wrong.

Let’s try another tack: we’re declaring war on Iraq because that country harbors Al Qaeda terrorists. That’s another piece of info we must be getting wrong. We recently caught a very bad terrorist sleeping in a suburb in Pakistan. And isn’t it in Pakistan where the CIA thinks bin Laden sometimes hides? We wonder why we’re not going after Pakistan if that’s where the terrorists seem to be. Have we actually found any Al Qaeda operative in Iraq or any connection, other than being glad, that Saddam might have had with September 11? We also are a little concerned that we’ve forgotten the job we have to finish in Afghanistan. But what do we know? We’re just running a little neighborhood newspaper. We don’t know the big picture.

Another possibility is that we’re declaring war on Iraq because Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. There’s no disagreement there. But there are a lot of bad guys in the world — Robert Mugabe comes to mind — who hurt their neighbors and their own people. They are all over Asia and Africa and there are a few in South America. But maybe Saddam is the mother of all evil dictators and his methods are so worse than leaders in the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Rwanda, etc., etc., that we must take him out first.

Perhaps this isn’t about bad leaders, terrorist bands or unthinkable weapons. This might be this administration’s idea about how to best invigorate the economy. The former titans of industry now running our country surely know about economies. They know how to make a buck, and they’d like it if pesky people like us weren’t always trying to get them to share their wealth with our fellow Americans who didn’t get the benefits of birth, education and health that they received. But they’ve owned baseball teams and run oil companies, so they must know what they are doing. If everyone worked as hard as they have done and with as much insight into how to run a good business, we’d have a good economy. Besides, didn’t war boost our economy in 1942?

Our leaders’ economic theory must show that war will bring more buyers into the antique stores on Charles Street, that war will cause women to buy more shoes at Moxie. They probably have a theory that in wartime, moms and grandmoms will hustle right into Red Wagon to outfit their progeny in clothing appropriate to our warlike times. There must be a formula they use that calculates that if we go to war, five more people will eat dinner at 75 Chestnut or ten 25-year-olds will get take-out pizza at Harvard Gardens.

War used to be bad because it killed people and wrecked what we now call the environment. But it no longer seems to kill Americans. We managed the Gulf War and the one in Afghanistan with few American casualties. Now our young men and women in combat fatigues seem happy, even jaunty, as they board the planes to go off to war as the television cameras roll. We’re pretty sure almost all of them are coming back. As a civilization, we’re past the times when body counts — at least American body counts — are in the thousands.

Since we have a hard time understanding exactly why all this is going on, we hope somebody does. Colin Powell, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld must know more than we do. Since our understanding is incomplete, we have to trust that they know what is best for us. We remember another group of aging men who knew more than we did and what was best for us. They were led by a capable, former industrial titan named Robert McNamara. He’s the guy who did so well for us in Viet Nam.