One of my favorite columns – by me!😉- R.T.

FOURTH OF JULY, GREEN ISLAND STYLE

By Rosalie Tirella

Our childhood dog, Belle♥️, on our Green Island third-floor back porch, the setting of this story. pics: Rose T.

I’ve celebrated the Fourth on a blanket in Boston listening to the Boston Pops and guest vocalist Johnny Cash. I’ve celebrated the Fourth at East Park here in Worcester. Always a lovely time.

Last night I was thinking about my Green Island Fourth of July’s – the years when I was a kid and lived with my mother, father, sisters and grandmother in “the Island”:

I am a little kid – about 9 – and I am standing on our three decker’s back porch. Third floor. It is the afternoon and the sun is shining sweetly. I am looking at “Val,” the buxom middle-aged lady who lives across the way from our rickety three decker in her rickety six-unit building, on her third-floor porch. A big, weed-choked, empty lot lies between our buildings but that is all. The vegetation hasn’t kept Val from inserting herself into ours – everyone’s – lives.

She is wearing a negligee today – for the Fourth of July. I can see it from my back porch. She is on her back porch talking loudly. I swear I can see her bright red lips from my third floor porch! In 10 years I will have learned the word “slatternly,” and it will remind me of Val … but today I am a little kid so Val is just … Val.

Val is very drunk on this special national holiday – in a very happy, friendly way. She is talking with anyone who passes by her building, her ta ta’s damn near falling out of her negligee as she leans over her porch railing to chat up passersby who always chat back. I am standing on my porch, quiet as a mouse, not even smiling because I know Val can be scary sometimes. On a few occasions she has battled with my granny, called my granny, also feisty, a DP – Dumb Polack – during one of their shouting matches held across their back porches. DP, my mom tells me, really stands for Displaced Persons, what they sometimes called immigrants. Val is being mean when she yells DP at my granny, who doesn’t miss a beat and yells back: KISS MY ASSY! and turns her plump little dumpling shaped butt to Val – while standing on our back porch – and tap, taps her butt which is covered in those sweet all flannel nighties with little pink rose buds on them. Bapy – Polish for Granny – wore those flannel nighties year ’round – even in the summer.

Granny is not battling Val today. Granny is inside, sitting in her easy chair we have set up for her in the kitchen, at the head of the kitchen table, a place from which she candrink her cup of coffee, eat her egg sandwich and see and comment on all the household happenings. She has been sitting there my whole life! I love her with all my heart!

But I digress. Val is out on her porch today in her negligee because it is the Fourth of July, a special day – for her and America. Val has turned and gone inside her apartment, a flat that is also home to her wimpy boyfriend, gorgeous blond 18 year old daughter from another guy, and two huge attack dogs: a German Shepherd and Doberman. Both fierce. Both having chased me up a fence more than a few times. Val doesn’t believe in walking her dogs to do poop. She just lets them out, they rush down the three flights of stairs like noisy moose and shit and pee in the little front yard and rush back upstairs. Val has them trained to a tee.

Val has come out of her flat – this time she is carrying her portable record player. I am watching all this from my back porch – not saying a word, not even smiling. Just waiting … . Val puts her record player down, hooks it up to a bunch of extension cords and I see her going back in, cord in hand. Then she comes out with a record album – a big one. I am guessing it is the same one she played last year, has the songs which we – the entire Bigelow Street neighborhood – heard last Fourth of July: patriotic tunes. The kind you can – like Val – march around on your Green Island porch to. Later I would learn these songs were written by John Philip Sousa.

Val puts on her lp. Cranks it up! Da da da da da da de da da! La da da da de da da! Boy, this music is good! Very up beat! I am tapping my feet! I look across the way and see Val crack open another beer and take a sloppy swig and lie on her reclining beach chair on her porch. I can see her relaxing through the slats on her porch through the slats on my porch!

The music is great! Val is getting drunker. …

It is a few hours later and Val is singing – to the entire neighborhood! The folks in our hood are getting ramped up! People are coming out and throwing chairs and sofas and old tires into a big pile in the empty lot a few lots down from Val’s place, diagonally across the way from our three decker flat. I go in doors and crow to my mom: THEY ARE GETTING READY FOR THE BIG BONFIRE, MA! To myself: HOORAY!

My mom, careworn, grimaces. She doesn’t say a word, never voices her disapproval of Val. But I know she is not thrilled with the situation. Sometimes she is the one who will call the Worcester Fire department when the flames of the big bonfire grow too huge and lap up the July night air and orange sparks fill our Green Island night. The fire has never spread cuz the neighborhood kids and adults have kept it in check with big poles that they use to poke at it. But the flames still worried my mom …

Rose’s mom, CECELIA♥️♥️, a few years before marriage to “Daddy” and Green Island life: at her favorite sister’s house in Woo’s Webster Square area for the Fourth, here seated with fave nephew and neice.

But the eve has just begun! I so want to be a part of the celebration and throw some of Bapy’s rags onto the bonfire! She has so many that she wraps her arms in for her arthritis. Old country ways/cures die hard in Green Island. … Bapy never really changes her clothes. Just gives herself sporadic sponge baths and peels off old rags and puts on new ones. She always smells fecund. I love her odor! I still miss her Bapy smell!! If only we could re-smell all the people we have loved through the years. The men I have been with, my late mom who held me to her heavy Heaven Scented perfumed breasts as a child and a teen, my Bapy’s immigrant odor, my long-gone dog Bailey’s gamey scent … .

Anyways, the bonfire was being readied for the big night, but my mom would never let me join in the mayhem. It was all a little too wild for us. We were the good kids. My mom the perfect mom who worked so hard at the dry cleaners and went to church with her three girls every Sunday. My mom knew everyone in the hood and was always polite and talked with folks, etc – she was not a snob. But, she liked to tell her girls, she would never sit and have a cigarette with the ladies, like half the women in our hood did – visiting each other in each other’s tenements, gossiping about folks, bitching about cheating husbands and boyfriends. My mother was busy raising her girls as perfectly as she could, making sure they went to school every day and did all their homework and got all As and went to bed early and ate well. She had no time to wallow in her poverty – or her husband’s wild ways. She – we – transcended the shit.

So, there I was, stuck on our third-floor porch. An observer. My sisters would be home from Crompton Park soon. They would love this spectacle, too! Not as much as I did. But they would hang out on the porch, eating Freeze Pops, their lips ice blue from the sugared ice treat – and watch.

My father would disappear for the day. Celebrate in his own fashion, I guess. He was as crooked as some of the guys in the hood, but he played out his crookedness in other parts of Worcester. I suspect the East Side of town. What my mom and us kids didn’t know wouldn’t hurt us.

… It was dark out now and Val was singing up a storm and marching around her porch. La di da di da!!! Bang bang! Someone had lit the bonfire and everyone was gathered around it! Except for me and my kid sisters. We were on our back porch eating Freeze Pops, mesmerized by the flames – they must have been two stories high! The folks in the hood out did themselves this year! It was like something you would see in an old Western movie – the Indians roasting an elk on a spit they had set up over the flames. People’s faces orange from the glow of the flames. Very primitive and real.
“Come out here, Ma!” I yelled to my mother. “Ya should see how big the bonfire is this year!!”

My mother was indoors getting our clothes ready for the Fourth of July cook out we would be having at our Uncle Mark and Aunt Mary’s the next day. They lived in a a cute pink ranch house in the Burncoat area – a nicer part of town. My mom liked this part of the Fourth best of all. A day off she could celebrate with her favorite sister in her sister’s big back yard, my Uncle Mark grilling hamburgers and hot dogs on the big three legged grill he had stoked with those black brickettes he always doused with lighter fluid. Yum, yum, yum ! We were all pre-vegetarian in those days – ate meat, Nissaan white rolls and buns, potato chips, soda, Cheez-Its … the typical American BBQ 1960s fare. Heaven!

Ma would have none of it. She was busy making sandwiches for the cook out at Uncle Mark’s. She wanted us in bed early for tomorrow. We kids would have none of it. The flames were roaring! So was Val! Some jerk threw too many old tires on the bon fire, so now the air smelled awful! It was thick with gray smoke. We kids started coughing. Ma came out and took a look. Her mouth fell open. She looked at her three silly girls and frowned. I knew … She was calling 911.

In a matter of minutes the Worcester Fire Department had come and the fireman were hosing down the bon fire with their big hoses. The flames were doused out! Smoke was everywhere.

BOO! BOO! BOO! shouted all the kids and adults at the firemen. You could hear their laughs, too.

“Boo, Boo! Boo!!!” my sisters and I yelled from our back porch, laughing. “BOO! BOO!”

It had been, as usual, a fab Fourth of July!

🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶:

Listening to two American masterpieces today. Perfect for our Independence Day holiday! Try a listen…

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Grooved with this prophetic lp three consecutive times … # 4 coming up!

28 Million YouTube views!

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Makes me shed a few tears:

But first …

Cece in our new home🏠♥️. pics: Rose T.

🌇🌇🌇🌇♥️

🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱

from PETA, recipes and environmental news:

By Lindsay Pollard-Post

It’s being called a miracle: All 143 humans on board a military-chartered plane that crash-landed, skidding off the runway and into the St. Johns River in Florida, survived. That is miraculous, indeed, but not everyone on the flight made it off alive.

While passengers stood on the wing of the airplane, awaiting rescue, two cats and a dog were left in the cargo hold, which was filling up with water. Locked in travel crates, they probably panicked and paddled frantically to try to keep their heads above water, until their last remaining air pocket was engulfed and they drowned.

It’s a terrifying way to die. And it’s one more reason why no animal should ever be flown in a cargo hold. A fourth animal on this flight did make it out alive — a cat who had traveled in the cabin.

Plane crashes are relatively rare, but even on an uneventful flight, cargo holds pose a deadly danger to animals. And if there is an emergency and your animal companions are locked away with the luggage, your chances of saving them are close to zero.

Every year, cats, dogs, rabbits and other animals die in cargo holds because these areas are designed for luggage — not living beings. They typically aren’t ventilated or climate-controlled, which puts animals at risk of exposure to deadly temperature extremes. Delays are especially perilous: Much as a parked car can quickly turn into an oven, even on a mildly warm day, so, too, can a plane that’s parked on a tarmac. Cold temperatures are also a threat, both on the ground and in the air.

And it’s no surprise that when animals are flown with the luggage, they are often treated accordingly — as if they were nothing more than a tattered old suitcase. Anything that’s sent down a conveyor belt is subject to being bumped around, handled roughly and even damaged or lost — including animals.

A dog named Roast Beast, who was recently supposed to be flying from San Francisco to Raleigh, North Carolina, never arrived at his destination, leaving his guardian frantic with worry. “I’m miserable, I’m crying, I’m freaking out,” she said. “It’s horrible … I am upset because you’ve lost my dog and you’re treating [him] like lost baggage.” Airline employees apparently spent hours calling other airports before finally discovering that Roast Beast had accidentally been sent to Philadelphia.

Other animals have gotten out of their carriers during handling and become lost inside hangars or bolted across runways. Some are never seen again.

So how can travelers protect their animals? First, consider whether taking them along at all is a good idea. As much as you may want your animal companions with you all the time, try to look at it from their perspective: Will they enjoy the trip, or will they be stressed by flying and have to spend most of their time alone in an unfamiliar hotel room, while you’re out sightseeing? For many animals, staying in their own homes, with a trusted caretaker, is the safest and least stressful option.

If you have to fly with animals, check the airline’s policies and ensure that they can fly in the cabin with you. Use sturdy, well-ventilated carriers that will fit under the seat but are large enough for the animals to stand up and turn around in comfortably. If your animals are too large to fit under the seat, driving them to your destination (or going by boat if moving overseas) is safer than flying them in cargo.

As every seasoned traveler knows, checked baggage is no place for anything important, fragile or irreplaceable. Our animal companions are all of that—and much more.

🥞Cruelty-free, vegan yum yums🥞:

Cruelty-free AND better for your arteries than regular donuts🍩!:

🐕🐕🐕🐕🐕🐕🐩🐈

FYI:

Due to the Memorial Day holiday, the monthly WORCESTER NAACP MEETING will be held on Thursday, May 30

– Edward G. Robinson

For more information visit:
www.worcesternaacp.org

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Note, WPS superintendent and teaching staff:

Go, Mayor Pete!🇺🇸💙:

USA take note!!!!!!!!:

🎶🎵🎧🎼🎧🎧🎧🎵:

What’s for breakfast?!

text+pics: Rose T.

Rose’s kitchen cupboards!

Imperial Bedroom
Elvis Costello

Such a literate, musical break-up/divorce album! I’ve owned this lp (and many of his early albums) ever since college, after my ol’ Burncoat High gal pal turned me on to Elvis Costello. During my early 20s he was pretty much the only guy I listened to. My gal was Joni Mitchell, also courtesy of my Burncoat buddy. Together, we saw Elvis in concert at “the Centrum” in Woo and stalked him at the old Marriott hotel nearby – where we met him! IN PERSON! Up close and personal!! Elvis Costello was not nerdy looking that night! He looked very sexy with his dyed dark black-blue hair in a high pompadour. He was my height. He was so lovely to us. His date was some tall, lithe, gorgeous model – she was holding a green drink. I’ll never forget. Elvis gave my friend his autograph. I was too busy going ape shit – pogoing up and down and SCREAMING: OH MY GOD!!!!! – to screw up the courage to ask him to autograph my concert ticket.

No regrets.😉

Text and photos by Rosalie Tirella

Hanging with the mutts …

… on this cold winter day, drinking the God-awful coffee I bought yesterday (on sale, of course). This makes the day feel all the colder.

Thinking how downtown Worcester is changing … fancy food, college kids/Millennials, entertainment districts … Not a retail store in sight – something the old Worcester downtown had in spades. Lived/loved it!!

Above is the side of downtown’s Shacks building. It’s getting a do-over for the new businesses that will replace the building’s iconic, now shuttered, Shacks Men’s Store. So sad to see its retro yellow-gold gravel store-front torn down, along with that fabulous, jazzy “SHACKS” sign!

And then there was the shop – everyone just called it “Shacks” – a strictly men’s clothing and accessories store, a centerpiece of the 1950s/1960s male-centric, white Worcester downtown – a bygone era when ties, dress shirts and suit coats were worn by all our city guys who didn’t hammer, pull or push metal, wire or textile at our myriad factories. Woo teachers, lawyers, shop keepers and managers often bought their best duds at Shacks where shirts were custom-made to fit all male frames – with that Shacks panache! The Shacks male sales clerks, all nattily dressed in Shacks suits, were in absolute command! They flicked their measuring tapes down to the floor, lightly pressing them against their customers’ fat, short, skinny or stubby legs, now donning Shacks slacks. Should the trousers be shortened? Lengthened? Their waists let out for men whose physiques often resembled leading (and sexy!) actor Spencer Tracy’s body! Whatever it took to make the guys look perfect!

The men in my old Green Island/Vernon Hill Union Hill neighborhood didn’t wear suits to work – they wore grease-, motor oil- and dye-stained overalls – a testament to their doin’ time at our factories for (thanks to the unions) good wages, security, health insurance and pensions. Sure, they were sweat shops, but they enabled the men, often immigrants or the sons of immigrants, to buy Upsala and Providence street’s grand three deckers and even Victorians – and live an American Dream … and look forward to easy, “professional” jobs for their kids.

Same, on a much smaller scale, for Spencer, a Worcester County town whose people have yet to recover from the closing of all their mills/factories doors:

In blue-collar Spencer some of their old mills/factories still stand, with big X’s over their doors, windows: CONDEMNED. Big toxic cesspools owned by once prominent Spencer guys: the Saads, for instance. Many of the smaller neighborhood stores and schools that once served the long-gone workers still stand, condemned. Nothing but waste and despair now – tattoo shops, chop shops, liquor stores galore!

The people of Spencer’s Chestnut/Maple street area are so downtrodden it hurts! All government mental- and physical-disability-check-receiving folks … sad, scary … sick …

Outside you see crippled men walking haltingly, stoicly, with their shopping wagons filled with food, or grown men wearing floppy Bozo shoes – their soles coming off! They are slipping and sliding in the January slush.

This same pattern, but “citified,” as in faster, sharper, leaner, runs in Worcester’s older factory neighborhoods, which haven’t kept up with the other side of Park Ave or the burgeoning Canal District and Downtown neighborhoods: their once wonderful three deckers are now cut-up and owned by Section 8-desiring, money-grubbing absentee landlords and their Section 8 tenants. The scene: guns found in building entry ways, or right outside buildings; open heroin use – shooting up outdoors, in the early morning … and a growing homeless population. A population Worcester CM Ed Augustus and city leaders still can’t quite wrap their brains around. On the fringes of the gentrifying Canal District:

Why are people in these city/rural neighborhoods brought down so low, when all this government assistance is supposed to bring them up?

Why is the system so broken/fucked up?! Why are our people so broken/fucked up?!

Besides EDUCATION, how can we make it better for ALL poor people RIGHT NOW? Guys dressed in rags, men dying! – not “living”! – in poverty?

*****

Edna

This makes me think of Edna, a Lafayette Street lady who seemed to transcend it all. A profile in courage. She worked with my mother at the Millbury Street dry cleaners, when I was a little girl growing up in Green Island.

Rose, in 5th grade at Lamartinr Street School, jumping rope in the backyard of the Lafayette Street three decker where she lived with her Ma, Bapy, Jaju, kid sisters and peripatetic “Daddy.”

Edna was a composite of pretty much all of the conditions described above: crippled, she walked with a severe limp; she had difficulty speaking: you listened to her slow, vowel-swallowing voice carefully to understand her sentences; poor: she lived in half of a boarded-up store front on Lafayette Street, a five-minute walk away from our house.

And yet Edna was one of the loveliest people I have ever known! I can still picture her: strawberry-blond-dyed hair permed tight, with so many little round curls and ringlets framing her angular face; bright blue eyes; the small, see-through galoshes she wore over her shoes when she walked to work, often in the gutter because Lafayette Street was smoother than our cracked and crooked sidewalks. She used a cane.

Edna always wore big, sparkly costume jewelry clip-on earrings. She wore make up, too, sometimes applied a tad too heavily. And she always wore, over her work clothes, in fall and spring, a mid-calf brushing, perfectly clean, light grey raincoat. A-line to make it easier for her to walk.

Edna was always smiling! She loved my mother, who loved her, and she loved Ma’s “three little girls,” who ran to her in the dry cleaners to scream: HI, EDNA! WE’RE HERE!!! when we came to visit Ma after school to check in and for a few dollars to buy an after school snack at the kid-filled Pete’s Dairy Bar right down the street. A kids’ paradise filled with chocolate shakes, hamburgers, Cokes and french fries – and a wall of pinball machines! Half of St. Mary’s school hung out at Pete’s after classes, pop music wafting through the place!

HI, GIRLS! Edna said back at us, grinning from ear to ear, stepping away from her ironing board, her thick-corded industrial iron and big metal “pressers” – huge upright machines that you put shirts on to steam smooth. They exuded steam, radiated warmth. Edna worked in that, winter and summer. Edna would stop working for a few minutes when we kids visited her as if to drink in all that girly giddiness. Then she went straight back to work.

Edna was one of the dry cleaner’s “shirt pressers” way in back of the shop. She was one of the best “pressers” in Worcester – the dress shirts she ironed for customers, later covered in long, plastic bags by my mom, tied with a red twist, looked PERFECT after she had ironed and labored over them. Edna was fast, hobbling from machine to machine, and focused. She seldom sat down for breaks, even though her bony legs looked like they could snap at any moment. There was a metal folding chair set up for her a few feet away from her work station by the bosses, but she seldom used it. In summer time, even with the huge industrial metal fans in the dry cleaner’s windows working overtime and the big floor fans on the main floor humming, Edna worked hard, tomato-faced, a film of sweat dislodging her make-up. No matter. Edna was oblivious, on a mission. She hovered over her iron, her shirts …she worked her machines expertly. The shop’s Armenian owners were all about money, cheapskates, but they brought a familial flair to their small biz. Middle Eastern snacks were always handed out, jokes were shared, workers’ kids welcome. The owners always gave Edna a plate of hummous with Syrian bread cut into quarters during her stints. Water or juice, too. They knew a good thing when they had one. When it snowed or rained, the boss – or a worker – drove Edna home. She had her own radio by her side at work. At company Christmas parties at the old El Morrocco on Wall Street she sat with the owners who brought her her food and drink. She clapped her hands to the music as my mom and colleagues danced away on the dance floor. Edna ate heartily and sipped her wine. She was driven home like a queen. Her jaw contorted as she struggled to say a joke, get her words out, but you held her fine-boned hand and listened.

At some point during my childhood I got it into my head that Edna was an angel – golden, curly-haired, twinklin’ rhinestone earrings and that A-line, almost white coat of hers, just like the angel ornaments wore on our Christmas tree. I felt Christmasy when I saw Edna! Happy! Blessed! Walking up Lafayette Street, I’d slow down as I passed her ramshackle digs, hoping to catch a glimpse of her outside on her little wooden porch. But I never did.

I hoped to make her part of the old peoples club that I had put together for myself in my neighborhood: Old lady “Roxie” who wore highly polished black men’s lace shoes and white ankle socks. She’d had a stroke, so the left side of her mouth sagged. Still, Roxie smoked like a chimney and had the raspy voice of a gangster. Bitching about our neighborhood, with her cigarette dangling sideways out of her crooked mouth Roxie could have been a barkeep in an old Jimmy Cagney movie! I loved her! … Or this cute old couple on Endicott Street who sat on their front porch with their tiny beige and white chihuahua nesting in the old woman’s ample lap – the pup who always wore a pink rhinestone collar – and bitten a bunch of people. Or the other old couple whose building faced ours. The lady knit and sewed all sorts of pretty things. At the beginning of every season she sewed me and my sisters little cloth folk dolls with bonnets, aprons and soft faces. A doll for each season!

I adored all my old people …their faces, clothes, rants about our ‘hood, their perspectives – and walked over to their porches after school or on a Saturday morning to chat with each of them for about 10 minutes. Then I’d walk home happy!

Edna was never part of my seniors club. I did see her, just a few times, lugging her shopping wagon on Lafayette Street, going home, after grocery shopping. Her cart was half-filled with the groceries she had bought at Millbury Street’s Supreme Market. Her ungainly gait make me fear for her safety. But Edna never fell; I never even saw her stumble.

Edna probably – and should have – collected a disability check, yet she worked part-time (“under the table”) at the dry cleaners, at a hot, often physically demanding job. Why? Well … she liked her bosses, loved her co-workers, got to dress up for work – was the cutest dressed lady in the sprawling shop. She got out of her tiny apartment and … CONTRIBUTED.

She had friendships, fellowship. She saw life out of the tiniest lens but so did Emily Dickenson. Edna saw the feisty little brown sparrows in her little tree outside her place, the sun setting over I 290, where the back of the dry cleaners ended, her co-worker’s little kids, all silly and full of fun. She snacked on stuffed grape leaves and babaganouch! She took a job most people would scorn and turned it into an artform.

And yet now, when I drive by Edna’s old house (still standing!), half expecting to catch a glimpse of her in her light raincoat … why do I wipe away the tears under my big sunglasses?

Text + pics by Rosalie Tirella

Yesterday, driving through Main South, we spied this lounger lounging in the street:

… and then this shell of a house, looking torched as hell:

Just as crappy, Maple Street, Spencer, right on the cusp of Main Street/downtown Spencer:

Its rickety fire escape looks especially treacherous against the bleak winter sky!

So it’s great to drive into what some people call Worcester’s Real Downtown, the Canal District, and see Allen Fletcher’s new building going up. Wicked fast, but sturdy looking – no corner-cutting for Fletcher.

Normally, the pic of his building would go here:

But I don’t have one, so Cece is pinch-hitting for us. I do not have a photo of Allen’s building – even though I drive up Green Street every day to check on the progress/spy/snoop! Hmmmm, I wondered…Why don’t I have a picture of Allen’s construction project? And that is the problem/story: I take my photos driving my jalopy thru urban, rural spaces, and Fletcher’s market place cum small-biz-apartment building is JUST TOO BIG for me to take a good quick pic of as I drive by in my car. It just won’t “fit” into the lens! I’d just “shoot” a piece of it, as I zip by. So I don’t take the photo!

The feeling I get from his building, then, is: it’s TOO DAMN BIG FOR THE NEIGHBORHOOD. … OVERWHELMING. The building is high quality, it will have decorative flags flapping in the wind, look attractive, with sun roof and all … but still … the adjacent buildings – even the Crompton builing, once a factory employing hundreds! – are DWARFED BY IT! All the old, original buildings of the neighborhood that surround Allen’s – even the old Crompton factory – seem appropriately sized, modest the way my old neighbohood once was. Even though they are very different – bars, three deckers, garages, eateries – all the buildings on Green Street “fit” beautifully together. Those old buildings feel part of a pattern that keeps Green, Water and Harding streets sunny, airy and people friendly.

Yes, the rounded part of Allen’s new building that juts into Kelley Square is cool and will probably be where the window goes to the new “diner” he is also putting into this multi-faceted project. (Wow! Look up close and personal at Kelley Square crazy traffic!) But the beautiful, tres cool, HUGE Crompton mural is pretty much blocked from view, gets no sunlight due to being in the shadow of Allen’s building. And his building, future home to almost 50 market-rate apartments, throws shade on everything, it seems!

Why such an in-your-face edifice for the Waspy, understated, low-talker Fletcher?

I think Allen thinks what we all think: No matter how trendy or yummy, many of the businesses in the Canal District are just hanging on by a thread. There are just not enough upper-income people living nearby, in the surrounding ‘hoods, to really support the businesses there. The locals aren’t gonna – can’t! – spring for $5 lil’ tarts or $10 slices of toast. So by Allen importing a bunch of rich$$-people, stuffing them into his new apartments, many of the Canal District’s chi chi shops and restaurants may get more customers – captive customers, so to speak. The CD stores, eateries and bars won’t be hanging on by a thread any longer, on life support until the opening home game of the Woo Sox – stadium to be built practically across the street from Allen’s new digs!

Many small businesses in the Canal District open to great fanfare, then close up a year or two later. Sometimes bitterly.

Will Allen’s game-plan work? Turn his urban dream into a bustling, thriving city NEIGHBORHOOD for years and years to come? Allen is 70+ years old and I’m sure he wants his adopted ‘hood to be part of his Woo legacy. But it won’t be around forever, if its stores and bars, etc are always closing.

So…INJECT 200 OR 300 NEW RESIDENTS into the area! In one big Allen building! That’s the ticket!! THE NEW RESIDENTS WILL HAVE TO PATRONIZE THE BUSINESSES AROUND THEM! They are, after all, right next door, or 2, 3, 4 doors down! Right below them, even!

… Not so fast, Fletch! First: Your rich tenants are going to have wheels. Unlike me, my late mom and all the poor folks who once shopped the shops of a very different Water, Green and Millbury streets, THEY ARE GONNA HAVE CARS. Most likely one per person. And they will have MONEY. All this = CHOICES. Options that Ma, my grandmother, me and all the poor Green Island/Kelley Square slobs NEVER had! Do you like the $ten dollar toast next door? No? Well, let’s hop into our Volvo and drive to that cool breakfast nook on the other side of the city. What? You think the shabby chic used furniture next door is too expensive for what it is? Then let’s drive to the used furniture emporium across Park Ave!

Also: We Polish, Eastern European immigrant Green Islanders had our religions, strong religious traditions, families and even neighborhood schools (Lamartine, Millbury) that rooted us to our three or four main streets. Millbury, Green, Water and Harding streets formed the hub of our wheel of life. Our churches, synagogues, clubs, delis, FAMILIES were all here. Lovely! Horrible!

Not so for Allen Fletcher’s Canal District – more gentrified than the gentleman my Jaju, my beloved grandfather from Poland, was!! More surface than depth. More white than multi-ethnic.

Yeah, my ol’ Water Street and Green Street were part of a ghetto, but look at the area today: Pot shops, pot medicine shops, pot smoking lounges, hookah bars, hookah equipment-selling stores so you can inhale at home instead of at hookah bars. Desserts for the upper-middle class, the homely cupcake gone with the homilies of my old Polish priests! A hookah bar where my once beloved White’s Five and Ten Store was located, with the regal Mrs. White and her two-foot-high, jet-black-dyed bee-hive hair-do greeting you so professionally and politely at the door – even though you were poor and only came in to chat with her! Visit a friend!

All gone.

Now it’s all mary jane and “on-trend” food – supersized because people are fat-salt-sugar-addicted, clothing, crap! See and be seen! Post your boob-flaunting tunic on Instagram or post a million photos of your … gross-looking, super-sized MEAL!! … the one you just overpaid for in the restaurant next door, your boob-flaunting shirt in the background.

Insane!

This is why Donald Trump is PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!!

Could a Harry Truman run for President – and win – today? Be adored by the country the way Truman was when America was more like my old Green Street? Adored, Truman was, for being the opposite of the Canal District!: modest, unfashionable, high-school educated, totally comfortable being an “average” guy … BUT RISING TO GREATNESS because he was AMERICA’S President! Because of what was in his brave, unbreakable heart! Trump has shrunk the presidency, like the gentrifiers have shrunk my old Green Street and Green Island.

We hope Allen’s plan works. We hope he brings in the critical number of people the Canal District needs to survive for decades. But we also hope he creates something different from what is there now. We hope for a Fletcher urban space that is truly DIVERSE, MULTI-ETHNIC, OPEN-TO-ALL – ESPECIALLY TO THE POOR and minimum wage folks. The BEST part of my old neighborhood!

Green Island family gathering: Rose’s Jaju, Bapy, mom, cousins and aunties