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By Richard K. |
Last Updated: October 15, 2003
Storrow Drive inbound to Boston was clear even though Game 4 was scheduled to start in an hour. I didn’t know it had been postponed due to the rain yet, so I wondered how this fast journey into was possible. I know we were supposed to use the T, but frankly I’m sick of using it because I use it every day. Besides, it was dark, rainy, and I wasn’t going to the friendliest and safest of neighborhoods. Upon taking the off ramp to Kenmore Square, we marveled at the large imposing figure of the Prudential building, and the rally cry Go Sox imprinted in its many-windowed face. My friend Eric was the pilot on this little adventure and our first stop was the Northeastern campus to drop off our friend Ashley. NEU is technically in Roxbury, but they don’t tell you that when you get your housing. The address of the dorms is left at “Boston”. I’m going into Roxbury for my sighting. I took out my pen and notebook when we were between the Northeastern and Wentworth campuses. Roxbury is the often maligned neighborhood in Boston that middle class white kids like Eric and I dread: poor neighborhoods, teeming with minorities we presume to hate us and want to bust a cap in our asses. NEU doesn’t look anything like this, but I quickly realize it is thanks to the increased police presence, and as soon as you set foot off the campus, you’re in the jungle. A friend of mine from home got stabbed in Mission Hill last year, a very sketchy neighborhood just outside the sanctuary of the NEU campus. Huntington Ave reminds me of our own Comm. Ave with the Green Line trolley tracks acting as a median between the two flows of traffic. We tell Ashley goodbye as we unload her groceries, and she tells us not to get shot in the ghetto. Funny.
We start off going down Mass Ave, as our surroundings start to take on the feared shapes of our stereotypical nightmares. People of our complexion become less and less visible, as colorful murals filled with scenes of African American people increase in number, and the colorful graffiti stands as a testament to the bored youth. Welcome to Roxbury. I felt like a war correspondent in a deserted town of a combat zone. Not a soul was outside in the light drizzle, and every storefront was locked down with heavy metal shutters. We did not see a single pedestrian and I can’t do justice to how disconcerting that was. We blared the radio station 94.5 FM in a pathetic attempt to conform to stereotypes hardwired in our minds, and cursed our fate that Eric’s front windows weren’t tinted. The darkness and absence of street lights was made all the more ominous by the occasional flash of red and blue police sirens. Thankfully, we wandered into Dudley Station which was a little more alive, being an important transit point on the T. We headed out on Washington St, which I think is the same Washington St that feeds into Brighton Center. I wanted to follow it back to familiar surroundings, but I only had 3 bullets of notes. We then spotted a very well lit street, lined on one side with project low income housing, and on the other with basketball and tennis courts. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd had a sense of a community, but to be honest most of Roxbury we saw did. It seemed that the more adverse the conditions were, the more people stuck together. The two words that we repeatedly saw were “Community” and “Project”, which gave the impression of a community in progress. Another interesting site was the amount of political posters packed with the names of city councilors seeking election. I got the feeling that city government here was taken much more seriously than in my middle class suburb. We got back on Washington St. in an attempt to head towards Brighton so we could get home, but instead went in the wrong direction.
As the surroundings got less and less familiar, we started to feel a bit uneasy. We had been driving for about 15 minutes, and this didn’t look like Brighton. The game was supposed to start in 30 minutes, and we were getting antsy to wrap this up and head home. Finally, a storefront adorned with a familiar name: Jamaican Plain. How the hell did we end up in JP I asked myself, and came to the obvious conclusion we went the wrong way down Washington St. At this point, I felt like I had just had a Eureka moment. I had worked in Jamaica Plain over the summer, and knew how to get home. What I had stumbled on during this excursion was a complimentary route that formed a circle if you joined the two routes I now knew together. I was very pleased with myself. We hopped back on Storrow Drive, grabbed some Burger King in Fresh Pond to celebrate, and headed back to A-town.
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