Tag Archives: downtown Worcester

Tonight! At City Hall! Final push to SAVE NOTRE DAME! Be there! 6:15 p.m.

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CECELIA file photo: R.T.

From the Save Notre Dame! alliance:

STAY INFORMED! Please visit:

https://www.savenotredamealliance.com

https://www.facebook.com/pg/savenotredamealliance/

Dear Supporters of Save Notre Dame:

We are in the final push to SAVE NOTRE DAME des CANADIENS as Demo June comes ever so close.

We continue to look for a robust developer and/or philanthropic angels.

In the meantime, we continue to press our elected Mayor and City Councilors to clearly tell the City Manager to save this building.

WE NEED YOUR HELP! Here’s how:

Join us TONIGHT (Tuesday, May 15) at the Worcester City Council meeting at 6:15pm.

We will greet the Mayor and Councilors as they arrive. We will:

· thank them for their continued support for Notre Dame,

· ask them to support the petitions Ted Conna has submitted, and

· ask them to speak up strongly and firmly to the City Manager stating that they expect him to find a way to save the building.

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file photo: R.O.

Once the meeting gets going, as many people as wanted can speak for 2 minutes on the need to save Notre Dame.

If you are willing to speak, please do so!

Your message can be short and sweet: “Great cities save their great buildings. Please tell the City Manager to save Notre Dame.”

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Meeting will take place at:

Worcester City Hall, 3rd floor.

Out best guess is that people will need to stay at the meeting till 7:30 p.m.

Note: plan on extra time for finding a parking place. Parking BENEATH CITY HALL!

📧📧☎📱☎

Email or call our elected officials with your message:

Great cities save their great buildings. Worcester is a great city. Notre Dame is a great
building. Please tell City Manager Ed Augustus that he must find a way to save Notre Dame from the wrecking claw and that you will help him in any way you can.

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photo: R.O.

Contact info:

PettyJM@worcesterma.gov; mayor@worcesterma.gov; BergmanM@worcesterma.gov; KingK@worcesterma.gov; LukesK@worcesterma.gov; RosenG@worcesterma.gov; ToomeyK@worcesterma.gov; RoseS@worcesterma.gov; Mero-CarlsonC@worcesterma.gov; RussellG@worcesterma.gov; RiveraSA@worcesterma.gov; WallyM@worcesterma.gov; council@worcesterma.gov; Kathleen.Polanowicz@mail.house.gov; Harriette.Chandler@masenate.gov; Michael.Moore@masenate.gov; Mary.Keefe@mahouse.gov; James.O’Day@mahouse.gov; John.Mahoney@mahouse.gov; Daniel.Donahue@mahouse.gov

☎☎☎☎☎:

Worcester Mayor Joseph Petty: 508 799-1153

Worcester City Council: 508 799-1049

US Congressman Jim McGovern 508-831-7356

MA Senator Harriette Chandler 617-722-1544

MA Senator Mike Moore 617-722-1485

MA Representative Mary Keefe 617-722-2210

MA Representative Jim O’Day 617-722-2090

MA Representative John Mahoney 617-722-2460

MA Representative Dan Donahue 617-722-2304

It ain’t over till it’s over and it ain’t over yet, but the clock is certainly ticking loudly. Please do whatever you can.

Thank you!

Ted Conna and Barbara Haller

Some thoughts on “Ma,” President Trump and his (my???!) America

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Rose and George.       pics: R.T.

By Rosalie Tirella

Tonight I’m holding tight my late mom’s George Washington calendar from the 1940s (above). Like many young poor folks of the Great Depression and World War II – kids who knew they were lucky if they were eating a square meal a day –  my mom was resourceful. For example, she collected her own “art” from the free or inexpensive advertising lit all around her: With trusty scissors in hand she cut out and saved grainy black and white photos or colored illustrations (often muted – not very colorful at all!) from school and church calendars, Hollywood movie fan magazines and sheet music cover pages, church prayer cards – even Polish Christmas wafer wrapping paper  – anything  that captured her young imagination. My mother loved music and drawing. She was very good at sketching! She used to draw pictures for me and my sisters when we were little kids. We’d sit and watch Ma as she quietly created her art for us with an old number 2 pencil: a little girl with pigtails, a little kitten with ball of yarn, a cherub perched on a cloud … the cliches of her day, beautifully  rendered. I remember in our Lafayette Street flat, in a closet  – now lost forever! – the huge poster Ma drew in pencil of one of her beloved Boston Red Sox batters in mid-swing!  She was 12 – a total baseball freak! – when she drew it and it was a fine sketch! But I have none of my mom’s big sketches – usually made for a St. Mary’s School project – only lots of her “clipped art” – all in pretty ok shape for gussied up scraps of paper three quarters of a century old!

Ma made good use of her finds, like the sleek, smart crow who weaves bits of shiny gold ribbon into her cozy nest … She taped some of the art to her bedroom walls, used some pieces as book marks for her prayer books and sent some pictures to friends, instead of store-bought greeting cards. But mostly she saved her paper jewels – a poor girl’s dreams – in a  small, wooden brown chest in her family’s Green Island Bigelow Street tenement and later in our Lafayette Street flat. The contents became mine when Ma died.  I gave the small painted brown chest (painted by my grandfather) to one of my sisters.

The chest, I believe, was a kind of hope chest for Ma, a love song to America in which she kept all her American dreams. America was new to her family – her parents were Polish immigrants who experienced the promise –  and ugliness – of America. My grandfather worked like a slave in a textile mill in Douglas and, to relax once he got home, played the harmonica and smoked the unfiltered cigarettes he rolled for himself using his own little white square smoking papers and little cig rolling machine, a funny looking little contraption that Ma used to work in the mornings, to roll her Dad’s cigs before he went off to work. Cigs he could smoke during break … My mother’s mother, my “Bapy,” raised five kids, cooked everything from scratch, prayed every hour on the hour, went to mass EVERY day, but outside her Catholic faith and family, was lost in America. If not attending church or friends and relatives’ Polish weddings she stayed home. Praying and cooking.

Ma was the baby of the family, and the apple of Bapy’s eye. So she grew up an optimist and focused on the bright spots: special memories from her Polish immigrant church by Kelley Square, like her First Holy Communion prayer book which I have! (below), …

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A photo of Rose’s mom with her First Holy Communion children’s prayer book! (Cece got a hold of its back cover and Lilac ate it!)

… postcards, prayer booklets and stamps from her 10-year stint in Springfield as a housekeeper for the Bishop of Springield, pretty little gifts that her big brother – my Uncle Mark – brought back from Japan after he served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. I especially love the calendar cover my Uncle Mark gave Ma (from his ship – probably taped above his bunk): a sexy Miss America hanging from a huge American flag. A gorgeous but stern Lady Liberty wearing an oooh la la blue diaphonous robe that showed her perky little breasts and “mound”! My uncle was pretty good looking and a bit of a ladies’ man. Ma teased him when he came home from the war with blond hair. She believed he dyed it – he said the tropical sun bleached it. This Lady Liberty was right up his alley! – worth fighting for! I ended up with the picture and crudely framed it a few years back. Saint Lady Liberty – the patriotic pinup gal proudly wearing her Virgin Mary-blue sheer gown over shaved pussy! AMERICA = #1!!!😄

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But I digress! Back to GW! My mom was a huge George Washington fan because she was born on his birthday – February 22! And because he was America’s first President – perfect to her –  America’s God, back in the days when the ideas of America and God were entwined in complex, beautiful, dangerous ways. My mom, true to her generation, and I, like all Baby Boomers, grew up hearing the George Washington grade school lessons/myths, almost Biblical: George Washington at Valley Forge in the winter, leading his troops …they wore torn boots, their frozen feet wrapped in cloth…The young George Washington chopped down the cherry tree when he wasn’t supposed to but said: I CANNOT TELL I LIE! IT WAS I WHO CHOPPED DOWN THE CHERRY TREE!

Ma and I were getting the boiled-down-for-the-plebs American history lesson: George Washington had a TON OF INTEGRITY. What we didn’t know: When some of the colonists clamored for him to be King of America for years and years – because he was such an outstanding military leader and first President and the times were so chaotic – Washington said: No way! That’s not what this country is going to be about! There are no kings here!

At the bottom of my mom’s George Washington calendar picture, it reads: “The love of my country will be the ruling influence of my conduct.”   –  Washington

Wow.

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Can you imagine these words coming out of the mouth of our new President, Donald Trump?  Can you imagine the IDEA even blooming in that narcissistic, almost insane brain of his? (Neither can I!) He is someone who wants to buy America’s love, on his terms only. LOVE DONALD – OR ELSE!

For me, Trump’s inaugural speech was Hitler-esque. Dark, foreboding, fist-pumping, military might-extolling, self-aggrandizing, self-idolizing … maniacal. I’d never read or heard an inaugural speech where America, the land of George Washington and Mrs. Tirella!, was painted in such ugly terms – “American carnage” and “tombstones” stretching from sea to shining sea! No wonder wife Melania chooses to live in NYC – and keep her little boy safe by her side. To live with such a sick man always peering into the abyss (or is it just a pose, a con so that Trump can trash America only to lay claim that he saved her? ), a husband with such a soul-shrivelling world view, dipped in Trump gold!, is too much! I predict Mrs. Donald Trump will be a sexed-up version of the late Mrs. Harry Truman: No thanks, White House, I pass! I’ll live somewhere else. Mrs. Truman was the epitome of post-WW II frumpiness; Mrs. Trump is the epitome of 21st century foxiness. But they’re cut from the same cloth: at heart, small town girls freaked out by the prospect of living in the hub of the world’s Super Power. War. Peace. Laws of the land. It all begins with the stroke of the Presidential pen. Scary, for some people.

Funny, but here on Ward Street these past couple of days, it felt like the kind of America Donald Trump painted in his inaugural speech. Very different from the Ward Street my mom walked down as a young girl with her Polish mother as they made their way to their Polish church, Our Lady of Czetchowa, a church that still stands and which I can see from my kitchen window …

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These days Ward Street is Heroin/drug Central of Worcester. Last year I wrote about the big drug bust next door (complete with confiscated cash –  40K! – and weapons – machine gun!!!) But we’ve got the low-level drug runners, too, here in our ‘hood: Kids (usually boys) 15 and 16 years old who hop on to their beat up bikes to pedal to our inner-city backyards to do drug deals. In like 5 seconds! These kids don’t live in our houses, just use our backyards as office space! – out of the way, hidden places to sell packets of heroin. A quick sale. Money exchanged for smack. Then they put their ear buds back into their ears and  hop on to their bikes and pedal away wicked fast! The deal goes down in seconds!

A few days ago I saw such a speedy transaction occur in the yard adjacent to ours. The kids, both boys, about 16 or 17 years old, were there during school hours. They had come on their bikes and I had come upon them! They looked and acted hard and business-like in a way many of our neighborhood kids don’t look and act. Lots of kids in my neighborhood are sweet, skinny, sad, fun loving. They’ll smile at you and tell you about their little adventures or pets. But these two kids? Uh uh. It was so easy to see.

One of the kids looked surprised and miffed to notice me at the periphery of his deal. The other kid, scrawny and tall, looked frightening in his hardness. When he saw me, he unzipped the front of his thin jacket and his hand went to a shirt pocket. I thought: He’s going to shoot me now.

So I chatted him up. Played the un-hip, oblivious middle-aged lady. The box that society puts you in.

“Don’t be afraid of my dogs! They’re friendly!” I said, smiling.

With a cold, dead-already face, making perfect eye contact with me, he said, direct and serious: “I’m not afraid.”

Chilling.

A day later I saw the  same kid, his pale ghoulish face smiling as he rode away lickety split on his bike, being chased by a police cruiser in the middle of our downtown. The cruiser’s siren was off because it was the middle of the afternoon, but all its lights were pulsating.

The kid was in the middle of a gang of kids – 20 or more youths – all on bicycles! Three or four of them wore Halloween masks, pale, scowling ghost masks that covered their entire faces. Lurid and other worldy… Four or five of them wore cotton bandanas over their faces – right up to their eyes – so you couldn’t see their features. They looked like they had rolled straight out of some sci-fi Western! But they weren’t galloping through Dodge on horses – instead they were riding, herd-like and hard, on our Main Street, yards away from Worcester City Hall, on ramshackle bikes! Laughing! Free! Most likely – at least a few of them – armed!

I was mesmerized by this dystopian image coming straight at me (I was in my car driving by the Hanover Theatre), straight out of the Donald Trump playbook. I pulled over and the group of kids – they filled the entire street – rode past me. They were laughing and talking easily among themselves, as the police cruiser chased them. I saw and heard my ghoulish kid barking out something to the other youths. He was smiling. High on an adrenalin high. He felt safe – and cocky – in the herd.

Had they just robbed somebody? Mixed it up with another bandana-, mask-wearing group of kids? Or were the cops just pursuing one kid? – a definite challenge when he’s in a large pack of kids, all on bicycles. Bikes are the perfect getaway vehicle – they  can easily go up and down one-way streets, go off and on sidewalks, sail through back yards and city parks, be carried up flights of stairs and stashed in apartments …

As I watched this wild little spectacle, I saw how these kids showed ZERO fear. They acted like outlaws! And like their Wild West counterparts, they  were indeed misfits – unhealthy outsiders, bedraggled and maybe unloved – still riding to their next adventure. With a few firearms thrown in for good measure.

The herd sailed right by me, then the police cruiser.

I found myself rooting for the kids. Their nihilism was so honest! They were America … America’s underbelly. Her lack of love for her poor, especially her poor children. One in five kids go hungry in America! That means Worcester, too. … The Worcester factory jobs are gone for their un-skilled parents – men and women who read at the third or fourth grade level. Minimum wage jobs don’t begin to pay all the bills. Parents feel trapped, go MIA. Our public schools sometimes become holding pens for these kids, a safe place to eat govt funded, free breakfast and lunch and, sometimes, a place to rest or sleep, if there’s violence/drugs in the family.

Trump’s America! The one he says he wants to save! Here in Worcester! Here on our Ward Street and Main Street!

His solution to a deep, generation-spanning societal ill, often sealed with depression, PTSD or other mental illnesses? More police. Good paying jobs.

I don’t think two –  or even three – Worcester police cruisers chasing the masked kids through our downtown would have changed the narrative. Saved the kids.

Maybe good paying, WPA type infrastructure jobs would help. Young people or their parents working on rebuilding our bridges and highways a la Franklin D. Roosevelt for good pay … Yes, that may make things better. So that our families, instead of developers or investors, can buy and live in the three deckers in our  old blue collar neighborhoods. Like it used to be on Ward Street, Perry Ave, Endicott and Sterling streets – all over lower Veron Hill and Green Island! Homeownership 101. The rhythm in all our Gateway Cities for most of the 20th century. The American Dream!

Trump is right: The global economy has left behind thousands and thousands of neighborhoods like mine. Millions of working-age adults who live in them! I don’t believe in all the Moral Majority crap: poor families are Godless and gone to pot – that’s why their neighborhoods are “bad.” Most parents in my neighborhood try to love their kids – I see their love displayed daily, despite the harsh circumstances! – but the pressures keep mounting on them –  from all sides… . Families implode.

Good paying jobs for our people will help. Tremendously, to use a Trumpian word!

Maybe the Donald is onto something. If only he’d drop all his nefarious baggage…

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A rejuvenated downtown Worcester – always in style!

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The holidays are upon us!!!!     pics: R.T.

TOMORROW!

FRIDAY – Dec 2!

5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

ON THE WORCESTER COMMON – BEHIND WORCESTER CITY HALL!

❄❄❄❄FREE ICE SKATING ON THE ICE OVAL!!!!!!!

🎄🎄🎄🎄CHRISTMAS TREE-LIGHTING FUN!!!!!!!!

🎵🎵 MUSIC!!!!!!!!

💝💝💝💝WORCESTER PUBLIC SCHOOLS CHORUS!!!!

🎅🎅🎅🎅HOLIDAY SING-A-LONGS WITH SANTA!!!!!

☕☕☕☕HOT COCOA!!!!!!!

😃😘😄😊☺FUN!!!!!!!!

FREE TO ALL! Yipee!!!!

Be there!

The Woo Holiday Festival – 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

On the Worcester Common, behind City Hall, 455 Main St.

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Rose and Christmas balls

Just when you think Worcester is cutting-edge, brilliant, city leaders disappoint

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Bank of America parking lot mural. pic:R.T.

By Rosalie Tirella

Have you seen our downtown murals? They’re GLORIOUS! Global, edgy, multi-voiced…They’re all over the place! Their politics … their young-ness … their yearning … LOVELY! They depict a complex, often challenging world; people of many races, especially the young (cuz the ARTISTS ARE GIFTED and YOUNG!); they show me the Worcester, the global community of TODAY! WOW! So atypical for my city – a city that typically contemplates the hair in its ear canals. “This is what you’d see in San Fran,” I think to myself as I drive around, soaking in all our new, fab public art. “Never in Worcester! Not in four score and seven centuries!”

Of course, my instincts are on point. After only four days of the art event’s final celebration: The same old depressing Wusta crap: Tuesday, tomorrow, night City Councilor Konnie Lukes – one of Worcester’s preeminent slumlords – is gonna rain all over our mural parade. At the City Council meeting she’ll basically call them ugo. A la Trump, she will give voice to all the racist, xenophobic, close-minded fatheads who’ve whined (to her?) about the murals’ themes while manifesting her own personal, foggy, out-of-touch, whack-doodley world view. She will grill the city manager, whose office spearheaded the art-scapade! Who, she’ll demand, decided what was going up?, who was vetted and how?, why all the outsider artists?, how long are these danged murals gonna stay up?, are they bummers? and do we have to up-keep them? Plus: THIS HAPPENED SO FAST, WITHOUT ME KNOWING A THING ABOUT IT! IT’S A LEFTY … CONSPIRACY!!!!!

Pathetic.

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YWCA mural…pic:R.T.

Then this…

Our very cool public health head honcho, Mattie Castiel, a physician, medical school professor, public policy pro, COMPASSIONATE community leader with years of experience making life better, HEALTHIER, for thousands of Worcester folks – especially those at society’s fringe – suggests a city-sanctioned homeless camp with toilets, outreach workers, even a police presence. So that the city can better serve its homeless folks. Grapple with a serious public health issue.

She says a camp is a more efficient, BETTER WAY to CARE FOR our city’s homeless, rather than have them living in 80+ makeshift encampments across the city – woods, parks etc. These hidden, often lonely corners of our community are where our homeless neighbors, many struggling with mental illness, sleep/live/suffer. Matilde asks: Why not have a central place for them to get the help they need? Especially with winter coming on?

Well, from the press release Worcester City Manager Ed Augustus fired off, FREAKING OUT BIG TIME over her suggestion, you’d think Matilde, the city’s relatively new (and naive to the Woo political bs?) Commissioner of Health and Human Services, was a crack pot! A cuckoo! From Ed: “To be clear, the city of Worcester does not plan to establish any kind of homeless camp. We are not considering it, and I would not be in support of it. … My administration remains committed to taking a common sense approach to addressing the issue of homelessness.”

Like having 20+ beds for the chronically homeless in a city of 180,000+?

Thank you Ebeneezer Scrooge!: Better they die and decrease the surplus population!

What does Dr. Mattie Castiel know?

Here’s her resume:

Commissioner of Health & Human Services
City of Worcester
September 2015 – Present (1 year 1 month)

UMass Medical School
Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, Psychiatry, & Family Medicine
UMass Medical School
2009 – Present (7 years)

Latin American Health Alliance
Executive Director
Latin American Health Alliance
2004 – Present (12 years)

UMass Memorial Medical Center
Internal Medicine Physician
UMass Memorial Medical Center
2001 – Present (15 years)

Education:

University of California, San Francisco – School of Medicine

Doctor of Medicine (M.D.), Medicine
1977 – 1981

California State University-Northridge

California State University-Northridge
Bachelors Cellular & Molecular Biology, Cell/Cellular and Molecular Biology
1972 – 1976

The know-nothings on the Worcester City Council will ride this pony hard (see the blood-encrusted lash?), for easy, cheap publicity (the homeless have zero clout).

When will our “leaders” realize: Events are in the saddle, and once again they are riding the Worcester City Council!

A Worcester Public Library card – always in style!

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A Library Card is the Coolest Card! See the “cool cats” across the street from our library when you get your library card! pics:R.T.

The YWCA, right next door, has more public art that will WOW! you! CHECK OUT THE AMAZINGLY LOVELY MURALS!

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Near the library’s front entrance, the City of Worcester is puttin’ in benches, trees, flowers! Pow! Wow!

September is Library Card Sign-Up Month!

The Worcester Public Library celebrates Library Card Sign-Up Month during the month of September! Stop by and get your free library card and see all the things it can do for you!

For one month only, the library will also be giving out replacement library cards. If you have misplaced your library card and would like a new one just visit any branch during the month of September, and we will replace it free of charge.

Today’s libraries are about more than books. They are creative educational spaces for learners from birth to high school and beyond. This annual observance occurs at the start of the school year.

During this Library Card Sign-up Month, the Worcester Public Library joins with the American Library Association and public libraries nationwide to make sure that every student has the most important school supply of all – a free library card.

Librarians provide important resources to families whose children are at the earliest stages of development, by teaching parents and caregivers the components of early literacy, which help children develop the basic tools for school readiness. In 2015, the One City, One Library Branches held 1,760 class visits through its partnership with the Worcester Public Schools. These visits helped students access the library and the educational materials available right in their own schools.

Older students can access high-speed Internet, digital tools, and the opportunity to work with trained professionals on how to use them.

Librarians provide guided training in digital media and help to grow digital literacy skills. Libraries also provide equity of access to digital tools and media, which has become increasingly important in high-poverty areas where students are less likely to have a computer or internet access in the home.

Libraries are also a training ground for students of all ages to expand their knowledge and explore creative pursuits. Resources at the Worcester Public Library are available to anyone who has a library card. Students can turn to the library for materials, programs and knowledgeable library staff that support academic achievement, including book clubs, STEM related programs, and summer reading activities.

“Our library provides access and programs for students of all ages,” said Geoffrey Dickinson, Head Librarian. “For preschool age children we offer early literacy and storytimes to encourage school readiness, for older children and teens we supplement education with hands-on programs and fun activities, and for nontraditional students we offer language and citizenship resources, resume help, and so much more. There’s really something for everyone, and it’s all free with a library card.”

Throughout this month, the library will host a number of activities, including:

Maker Mondays with the Learning Hub

Cooking classes

A volunteer fair

Cultural performances

… and much more!

For more information on how to sign up for a library card, visit the Worcester Public Library in person or visit the library online at mywpl.org.

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P.S. Spotted yesterday afternoon at the Peace Park Piano Playground in Piedmont!:

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pic: R.T.

This Saturday! Fete the murals!!! Pow! Wow! Worcester Music Festival and Block Party!!

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On the side of Mechanics Hall. pics: Rose T.

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Beauty at the bank!!!!

This Saturday! September 3!!

FREE FOR ALL AGES!!

Pow! Wow! Worcester mural extravaganza…

Music Festival/Block Party!!!

On the Worcester Common (behind City Hall)

3 p.m. – 7 p.m.

Food Trucks!

Beer Garden!

Giveaways!

FREE LIVE MUSIC!!!

The bands:

3 pm – Gold Chain Baby

4 pm- Rodney Hazard

5 pm – Oxymorrons

6 pm – Blue Light Bandit

Be there!!!!

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Across from the library!

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The Peace Park piano in Piedmont will not be downtown, but check out her sis outside City Hall!

Today! Join 15,000 people on the Worcester Common for the Latin American Fest! MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC! FREE!!!

But first, in the a.m., … head to the REC FARMERS MARKET at Crystal Park!

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Farmers Market 1-1-2

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Then from noon to 9 p.m.

on the Worcester Common, behind City Hall

(Main Street, DOWNTOWN WORCESTER)

Bands, singers, dancers, visual artists, kids activities …

food trucks, vendors, flags, fun …

It’s Centro’s LATIN AMERICAN FEST!

MUSIC, MUSIC, MUSIC!

Folks come from all over New England for Centro’s annual summer musical celebration/extravaganza! Why not join ’em, coyote? – Rose T.

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pic:R.T.

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Downtown! Tomorrow! On the Worcester Common! Gear up for the Latin Festival!

Tomorrow! Thursday!

11 AM to 2 PM

Free music! Grupo Fantasia!!!

REC Farmers Market!

Vendors!

Food trucks!

Artisans selling their art/crafts!

CELEBRATE WORCESTER’S DIVERSE CITIZENRY!! ENJOY A FREE CONCERT!!

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Out to Lunch Summer Concert!

On the historic Worcester Common Oval! (behind Worcester City Hall)

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Creative, local and fun – all in the heart of downtown!

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Thursday’s band: Grupo Fantasia

Grupo Fantasia:

Originally from the Dominican Republic, Angel Wagner began his career playing with a cheese grater and fork!

At age eleven, Angel went on professional tour with a Merengue band, later performing in Miami and at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Angel has performed with such groups as Aramis Camilo, Orchestra Cafe, Luis Ovalles and Manguito.

Angel Wagner provides traditional island entertainment for all people and much of the music is performed on original, handmade indigenous instruments.

The extensive repertoire includes original and cover songs from the Caribbean and Latin America. Also represented are various Cuban, Dominican Merengue, Puerto Rican Bomba and Plena, Colombian Cumbia, Mexican Mariachi, Calypso, Reggae and Salsa music.

A teaser!

Here’s to a VIBRANT downtown Worcester!

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From the City of Worcester website/R.T.;pics R.T.

Shopping – Green Island style!

By Rosalie Tirella

When I was a little girl growing up in Green Island we were too poor to shop for kids clothing at Kiddy Castle/the Deb Shop, the upscale, beautiful kids/teens clothing shop right next door to the dry cleaners where my mom worked on Millbury Street. Though hidden in Green Island the store drew comfortably middle class families from Worcester’s West Side, not the immediate neighborhood. My mom – a single working mom – worked at the dry cleaners for minimum wage and didn’t have the money to buy the shop’s beautiful, well made children’s clothing and outerwear for her three little girls. The best we could do was enjoy the wonderful window displays that Sam, the owner of the Kiddy Castle (that’s what everyone called his shop), put up every winter, fall, spring and summer. For Christmas: Big, lifelike reindeers with sleigh bell-decorated belts on their backs and plastic flakes for snow sprinkled on their noses. And Santa’s elves (life-sized, too) standing next to them, about to load gaily wrapped Christmas gifts onto a wooden sleigh. Sometimes the elves twisted at the waist or raised an arm to say hello to you! In autumn: Big vinyl orange and red autumn leaves were pressed onto the big display windows. For spring: Pink and yellow plastic flowers bloomed among the pink and yellow Easter dresses the store maniquens wore – slim plexiglass girls painted a soothing beige and about the same height as me and my sisters. The store was a huge cottage with a sign that read DEB SHOP written in cursive on the top half (the Deb Shop was upstairs) and the KIDDY CASTLE sign, written in blocky, primary-colored letters, on the first level (the Castle was on the first floor). A sight to behold! A tease to the neighborhood’s poor kids and parents who walked, ran and trudged by it in all kinds of weather – but never entered, unless they were selling raffle tickets for a school field trip.

After a while the desire to enter this magical place faded for me and I was content to enjoy the creative window displays – just another cool facet of my densely packed, urban neighborhood that I treated like my own personal carnival ride because there were so many adults, kids, small businesses, institutions, dogs, cats, small biz owners, eateries, ideologies and feelings to experience!

Back to shopping! We Green Island families – the families who lived on Lafayette Street, Ellsworth Street, Sigel Street, Lodi Street, Grosvenor Street and Bigelow Street (we lived on Lafayette) – tuned out the Kiddy Castle and set our sights and change purses on the always bustling Mart, a kind of blue collar general store on Worcester’s Main Street, the gateway to the then-dicey Main South neighborhood. My mom shopped at the Mart for all our undies, play clothes and school clothes. For herself she bought: canvas tennis shoes, cotton aprons, bobby pins to curl her hair, cans of aerosol hair spray to hold her curled hair, pots, pans, cans of Ajax, dish towels and big white cotton panties that, when out of their package, looked as if they could hold two 5-pound bags of flour. My mother – about 43 at the time – wasn’t big – today I’d maybe even call her petite – but she wore big underwear. This puzzled me when I was a little girl: little lady, huge bloomers! Today I think Ma did this out of sadness and utilitarianism: Her husband, our father, was MIA AGAIN and we didn’t know when he’d come home again. Forget the sex – and a second paycheck! So Mom’s undies were the opposite of fun and seductive – they were no-nonsense, durable, easy to wear and care for – made of 100% cotton, a material which “breathes” as Ma reminded us, perfect for … working 60 hours a week at the dry cleaners (20 under the table), raising three little girls, cooking dinner, cleaning house and caring for her elderly, feisty, opinionated Polish immigrant mother – our grandmother, “Bapy,” who lived with us. You could’t live my mom’s life in thongs or even colorful bikini bottoms, the fashion back then.

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Bapy, at the head of the kitchen table, holding baby Rosalie!

Bapy alone would have sent most women to bloomersville: she lived with us and was another full-time job for Ma. Bapy had to be bathed, her long, gray hair combed out each morning and braided and wrapped in a bun at the back of her head, held in place with bobby pins. She needed her cups of Sanka decaf coffee warmed up in pans of hot water we boiled for her on the stove every few hours. She needed to sit at the head of the kitchen table – the hub of our big three decker tenenent – and pontificate in Polish, with a few choice Polish swear words to underscore a point – my father’s uselessness being the main one. She had opinions on everything and never kept them to herself. She expounded on God, grapes, our aunties, our plumbing, the kitchen table, the beef stew on the kitchen table, the downstairs neighbors, the Gomer Pyle USMC tv show, geraniums, birthday cake, gold fish and my dolls, which she’d dress in her old, smelly knee socks.

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Rosalie has owned this doll since she was 1! Bapy used to dress this doll up!

She’d take one of my dolls, often the one I was holding, take one of her socks, cut off the toe end with a pair of small old scissors and make a little crew hat, which she put on my doll’s head. Then she’d slip the doll’s plastic body into the rest of the old sock to make a long tube dress for the doll. Bapy made all my dolls look like mummies! I always watched her work, flattered she took an interest in me, annoyed that my dolls looked dead.

Sometimes Bapy would take one of her long socks and just make a cap for one of my dolls and put the rest of the sock – the tube end – on her arm, from her wrist to her elbow. That was to warm her arthritic bones. Often she layered the arm socks for extra relief. She’d walk around the tenement with both her arms covered in old socks of many hues – browns, navy blue, white, black. Bapy looked like a walking quilt with her decorated arms, flowered flannel night gown, flowered apron over the flowered night gown, three pairs of knit booties on her old feet … She smelled … fecund.

Bapy baby-sat us when our mother was working at the dry cleaners we’d tell everyone, but actually it was the other way around, with we kids heating her coffee on the stove and getting her the hardboiled egg sandwiches that she munched on from dawn to dusk.

In short, my mother’s life (and ours) was more Army Surplus than Victoria’s Secret, and Ma dressed appropriately for her tasks.

We never owned a car when I was growing up, so we walked pretty much everywhere – my mother, two kid sisters and I. We walked to the Mart often – a fun excursion for us that we’d cap off with a stop at Woolworth’s on Front Street – specifically the luncheonette section – hamburgers, french fries and Cokes for us kids, a cheese Western omelette and regular cup of coffee for Ma. While at the Mart, my mom would buy her wretched panties, my kids sisters and I would run off to the toy section where I always picked up the little package of REAL SEA MONKEYS to give to my mother so she could buy them for me. On the package there was an illustration of a happy cute Sea Monkey family sitting on their sofa watching TV. My mom would take one look at the package, frown and wave me off with: “They’re slimey!”

My favorite part of the walk to the Mart – just before you reached its front doors was the entrance to the Aurora Hotel, a flop house where various and sundry alcoholics and Worcester chatacters lived. The glossy granite entranceway always seemed so elegant to me! There, etched onto one of the smooth granite pillars that framed the entranceway to the flophouse, in exquisite deatail, floated “the mermaid lady” – a slender, lovely lady with long tresses and dressed in a long flowing toga. She was as tall as me and seemed to come straight out of my school book on Greek gods and goddesses. I never called her Aurora, after the hotel, or even tried to name her despite my family’s frequent walk-bys. The mermaid lady seemed too cold and distant for naming, her face turned to one side, in profile, as if always looking away from the gritty, gray, working class downtown she found herself floating in.

My mother bought our “slacks,” as she called them, socks, undies, shirts and short sets at the Mart. She never bought their kids shoes. She believed in good, quality sturdy leather kids shoes for her girls so we would not walk “pigeon toed” and our “arches didn’t drop.” This was all mysterious science to my kid sisters and me – ages 7 and 8 1/2 years old – but Ma must have done something right cuz I’ve logged thousands of miles on my footsies and to this day I have high arches that look ballerina-dancer cool when pointed!

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Rosalie’s foot – 4/9/2016

So it was off to Lisbon’s Shoe Store on Millbury Street – just 10 or so stores down from the dry cleaners where my mom worked – to see Mr. Lisbon. Like many of the small business that lined Millbury Street years ago the owners usually “waited on” their customers. They were at their shops, very hands on. You got to know them and their families in a peripheral way. If you went to White’s Five and Ten down the street Mr. White was running the store and ringing out customers on their big beige cash register. Mrs. White, tall and elegant in her knock off Channel suits and high, sculpted jet-black bouffant and black high heels – her natural tallness and accessorizing made her about 6 feet tall! – neatened up the housecoat and cotton vests section. If you went to Commercial Fruit, a few stores down, the owners and later their kids, were the ones who bagged your produce and weighed it on their big porcelain scales. The tailor’s shop, also on Millbury Street, a few stores down from the drycleaners, was always home to the tailor and his 25 canaries who kept him company in a big cage that he kept on a stand by his sewing machine. They were in complete, stifling darkness except for the little goose neck lamp that shone on the clothes the little tailor was mending. When my mom and I visited I ran straight to his yellow and orange canaries, my heart swelling with love. I always hoped the little tailor would give me a bird to take home and keep near our sunny kitchen window. He never did.

Mr. Lisbon, the shoe store owner, was always so nice to my mom and my two kid sisters and me. He always made me and my sisters stand up and put our stockinged feet on his foot measuring machine and then he’d slide the measuring stick to get your exact perfect shoe size. He would put your shoes on, lace them up and have you walk around the store to get the feel of them, all the while explaining things to our mother, who listened carefully and nodded her head. She’d buy our no-nonsense shoes and make us put them on to walk home in.

We’d walk down Millbury Street, tired but content – we loved each other, we were together. At the corner of Millbury and Lafayette streets stood McGovern’s Package store. We kids knew before we took that right onto Lafayette Street Ma would go into McGoverns and buy each of us a little bag of salted cashews – a treat! I’d want to eat my little bag of cashews during the walk home but Ma always insisted that I wait until we got home. She was always right: It was more fun eating my cashews with my kid sisters and telling Bapy in broken Polish all about our shopping trip to Millbury Street!

Meet me on the WRTA bus!

By Ron O’Clair
 
I had to take a taxi-cab recently because my antique Volkswagen Golf developed a mechanical problem, and I had an appointment to see my doc up at 95 Vernon St. When I got dropped off, there was a Catholic Priest waiting at the door to the Medical Clinic. Upon talking with the Father I learned that he was none other than Father Ralph D’Orio, the Catholic Faith Healer who is world famous in those circles for the many healing services that he provides for the faithful that believe in the power of Jesus Christ to heal their afflictions through Father D’Orio’s hands.
  
As I was finishing up with my appointment and seeing as how it was a fairly nice day outside, I decided to see about catching a WRTA bus to take me downtown where I had to conduct some business at City Hall anyway. I had to get an abatement on my excise tax bill for the Subaru that I no longer own.

I saw the bus stop on Vernon Street at Suffield Street on my way in to the doctor’s office and the idea seemed like a good way to get back home. It was $6.50 for the cab ride up to the doctor’s office from my house with $1.50 tip for $8, and I know the bus only costs $1.50 now, so there was the added incentive of saving some money as well.
  
I boarded bus #11 with a Mexican American citizen named Victor whom I struck up a conversation with while we both waited for the bus to arrive at the scheduled time. We had a wonderful conversation in Spanish, as Victor who is 36 and works in a Restaurant in Shrewsbury did not speak very much English. With my flair for languages, this was no challenge for me.  He has been here for 17 years, and I chided him a little for not knowing more English.
  
The bus itself had perhaps a dozen other riders on it; I sat near the front on the driver’s side and struck up conversations with the people that were near me.

There was a Greek woman to my right, whom I exchanged the rudimentary Greek that I learned right here in Worcester from our Greek immigrant community of whom I know several families that live and work in Worcester.

There was a bi-lingual 19 year old male of Hispanic origin directly across from me, and a slightly older African origin male to the right of him, both of whom I regaled with my stories of having traveled so many places around the world in the shoes I was wearing that I showed all on the bus, that I had gotten when I was stationed at Lackland Air Force base in November of 1979, that were actually made in 1959 two years before I was even born.

Many people can’t believe that my vintage shoes are 56 years old and still in serviceable condition! That just goes to show that if you take care of something that was made well, it tends to last a long time. The bus took us to the Hub station by Union Station where I boarded the Loop (shuttle) bus for free to take me to City Hall so I could conduct my business.
  
After concluding the business at City Hall, I ran into one of the “Novak Twins” – Eddie, who was sitting on the sidewalk on the Franklin Street side of City Hall. After that I had to go to the Court House on Main Street, so I got back on the Loop bus again for free and rode to the Martin Luther King Boulevard side of the Court House.

The Loop bus was one of the WRTA’s Electric Buses that produce no emissions, and I was delighted to have had an opportunity to ride with the driver Vincent who answered all my questions about these new efficient and clean-burning technology buses.
  
The WRTA buses they have now are pretty impressive, the last time I rode the WRTA, a paper transfer cost a quarter, and they no longer have those, so it has been a number of years.  
  
After concluding my business with the Central District Court, I decided to take a stroll up Main Street, something I have also not done in many years. I walked along and took some photographs of the interesting things that one misses when driving an automobile.

For instance, there are two plaques on either side of the Commerce Building at 340 Main St. that are of historical significance I had never noticed before:
The one to the right of the main entrance says that Brinley Hall was the site of the first National Women’s Rights Convention on October 23-24, 1850. The one on the left says that Massachusetts Teachers Association was founded on November 26, 1844 by 85 educators who gathered there at Brinley Hall which was located at 340 Main St. at that time.

I most likely never would have seen the plaques or met the diverse group of Worcester folks, had I not gotten on the WRTA bus that day.