So whenever somebody asks you where you’re from, they’re fishing for whatever it is you consider “your place” on this world. They might be asking where you were born but few mean it that way; more likely it’s about your current place of residence, which might not be the same thing. Most people prefer to keep their response simple and go for the same answer the post office would provide, probably not the street address but what they consider their town or city. Even people who live in the Idaho wilderness or on a farm on the prairies, places that most might describe as the middle of nowhere, can usually come up with what the post office says, and there the inquiry usually ends. Of course there are those few who have no postal service and might live a long ways from an easily designated place, or who might be among the last true nomads. Shepherds in the Andes or the Gobi Desert, for instance, might have a real problem with this simple request for information.
Some place designations are also quite specific while others are so general as to be almost useless. If you’re from a small town or suburb, your straightforward answer might be accurate and helpful, but to say one is from “Beijing” or “Mumbai” or “New York City” is to almost deliver a non-answer, and those inquirers who settle for such a response are only showing a stirring lack of curiosity or they’ve at least certainly never lived in a city. This writer will confess to knowing little about most cities in the world, but having lived in Los Angeles and Chicago and now Boston, and having some familiarity with the Big Apple to our south, he will always push a bit harder with those folks who say they live in those places. Do you mean Van Nuys or Pacific Palisades or Highland Park or Pasadena? Or Bridgeport or Hyde Park or Englewood or Near North? Or Manhattan or Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx? Back Bay or Beacon Hill or one of those places mentioned in that “Charlie on the MTA” song? In LA it can get a bit technical as there’s the city of Los Angeles and then there’s LA County, where the uninterrupted sprawl goes on forever. When I lived in the San Gabriel valley far to the east, we considered it to be all LA until one crossed county lines, into Orange or San Bernadino or whatever, which were somehow “different” places.
Neighborhoods can vary tremendously even in relatively small population centers, maybe yours as well, and the ancient expression “wrong side of the tracks”, as dated and quaint as it is, speaks volumes, even in the current world where any presence of a railroad in your town might be difficult to detect. In cities this can be even more telling, where some neighborhoods can house the rich and famous while others might be the site of drug gangs fighting for turf and homeless sleeping in doorways.
Even within neighborhoods clear distinctions can often be made, and you, my friend, might just well be an expert on how these play out in your particular location on the planet where the postal designation is merely suggestive, at best. You know where the “right” and “wrong” sides of the tracks are, even if the distinction is subtle. Real estate people are the world’s authorities on such matters, and they can provide solid numbers in the form of rents and housing valuations that can make it all quite clear. It often changes block by block, as any housing-seeker will tell you.
Our 40 years in Jamaica Plain have taught us much about this particular zip code in the Hub City, where we can list our address as Boston or Jamaica Plain and both will work, so long as the zip code is unchanged. One wonders what the USPO would do with an item addressed to Beantown 02130; one hopes that the a postal worker might smile and send it on to delivery, but this is not a sure thing.
There are manifest ways to interpret the variations that exist here in our little corner of the city, but the chosen lens in this case focuses on one of JP’s more fascinating distinctions, whereby it has been blessed by not one but two ponds of note, very different in their location and character and their nearby neighborhood’s demographics. I am speaking of the ponds Jamaica and Scarboro, one very large and notable and the other relatively unknown in comparison, though much loved by those in the know.
Jamaica Pond is a splashy, visible landmark and destination, savored by vast numbers of people in the warmer months and connoisseurs and lovers of solitude and stark beauty like myself when things get particularly frosty. The former can be seen sailing on it and walking and jogging and dog-walking and baby-strolling and roller-blading around it for much of the year, while many others sit on the many benches doing the many things that people on benches do in such places. Please note that bicycles and cyclists are not in this mix. This pond’s public presence is also greatly enhanced by the many thousands of motorists who drive around all of its borders, most of them on the Jamaicaway to the east that is a major north south corridor into and out of the city. Few of these people savor much of anything, other than focusing on negotiating the heavy traffic congestion that is usually the rule, and whatever is happening on their devices in their steel cocoons.
Jamaica Pond and the “Pondside” JP neighborhood on its eastern edge became very familiar to us in our first years as Plain People, when we rented the upper floor of a two-family just a few blocks from the water. It was a long time ago and the real estate market was just heating up in a place that had been mostly working class through Boston’s economic decline in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and much of the Victorian housing stock reflected this, places covered in vinyl siding or otherwise looking pretty worn. Our choosing JP was partly that it was closer to our workplaces, and some colleagues at my hospital job lived in JP and highly recommended it; the rest was probably serendipity and vibes and possibly the obvious allure of Jamaica Pond. Our rent was comparable to what we’d been paying in Cambridge, and all the woodwork in our apartment was stunning, much nicer than the charmingly dumpy place where we’d been living (with five roommates!). And hey! we lived a short distance from the Pond!
Which was the venue where we walked a lot and jogged a lot and took sailing lessons, where I recall starting to get the hang of tacking and jibing, then flipping a boat and kind of losing interest; trauma can be powerful. It’s a great place to sail, in fact, but pond sailing can be tricky as the wind gets funneled down the contours of the surrounding hills in irregular fashion, often constantly changing speed and direction. A great place to develop skills but don’t get too cocky or it might upend your day.
Even back then, we were fanatical bikers and tended to spend most of our pond time jogging and walking around in the winter, rather than hanging out in the summer when we were on the roads. It is exactly 1.5 miles around on the path that mostly follows the shoreline, so one can keep track of one’s workout with each lap. It’s a lovely meander, has elevation changes in places which enhance the workout and the views, which as the pictures show are a treat and of course are in constant flux in a place that accentuates the light on the water and whatever is going on in the sky throughout the day, Jamaica Pond has a wide open feel to it, usually glorious though a northwest wind on a 20º day can be truly bitter and much worse than that if it’s colder.
After that first winter of jogging, I succumbed to my biking addiction and got the brilliant idea to start riding a fixed-gear one-speed, a so-called “track bike”, around the water’s edge. A fixed gear means the wheel turns your legs if your legs try to resist turning the wheel, so it’s a great steady workout that smooths out your pedaling motion. If this sounds nonsensical, just ignore that sentence and read on, okay? Riding pond-side in other seasons seemed like a bad idea – too narrow, too crowded, too slow, kind of pointless in other words – though many commuter cyclists did it as part of their north-south route, where it was part of a longer path from Brookline to the north. As one might expect there were any number of recreational bikers doing a lap or more every summer, threading their way carefully or rudely through all the other human traffic, an activity unappealing and a bit foolish to any serious biker but these folks were not that. Ah, but in winter! Especially on days of truly brutal weather, when doing longer rides on the road was a lousy option, that pond-side path was occupied by only a few hardy joggers and walkers, and cycling seemed most inoffensive. And how fast can one go on a one-speed, where the gearing dictates a moderate but steady pace? It was a delightful experience, at least until one’s feet began to hurt from the cold.
And who’d have expected that this activity would get recorded and published, in the Boston Globe no less? Imagine my surprise one day at seeing myself in bold display on the cover of the Living section, and in a nicely composed picture, at that? This same photo showed up a few winters later, evidently having become a file-photo for those winter days when they needed to fill space. Of course, some guy with perfect cycling form riding around visually-appealing Jamaica Pond in the winter has timeless journalistic value, would’t you say? “My God that is one rugged fellow!”, wouldn’t you also say? If one turns the picture over, there is a news piece about Ronald Reagan gearing up in the Republican primaries to beat out George H W Bush for the nomination, which means it’s 1980 and that we were to live near Jamaica Pond for three more years, under the Gipper’s national leadership.
So what about all the bird pictures? Jamaica Pond happens to be 50 feet deep in places, and many winters ices over more slowly than other local waters. If you know any waterfowl, they’ll tell you that open water and food are what it’s all about in the coldest season, and as the choices narrow down, more birds will turn up where opportunity presents itself, at least the ones that don’t give up and head south. It is uncertain, though likely, that we were noticing the ducks that showed up during those winters, which might not have been too many, back when winters were longer and colder so the pond was frozen over a great deal of the time. Birding was also a much more casual activity for us at the time, and if there were some great birds back then, no memories remain.
It is also likely that in those days we paid little attention to any parts of Jamaica Plain beyond Pondside, which more or less described the area from the pond eastward to the train tracks of the “southwest corridor.” We utilized the business district along Centre Street that offered whatever we needed, including the #39 trolley line down its middle, with its tracks that were sheer treachery when riding awheel. It is likely we visited the Arnold Arboretum, and forayed eastward to Washington Street to drink at another JP landmark of the day, Doyle’s Cafe, but otherwise did not venture into the racially diverse neighborhoods that were not Pondside. There was no reason for us to go there, or so we told ourselves.
All this changed when we decided Jamaica Plain was so congenial it was the obvious place to look to buy a house, in partnership with another couple. It was 1984 and the economy was picking up and JP was getting “discovered” as a Boston neighborhood with its green space and charming old housing stock and of course Jamaica Pond. Our pool of first-time homeowner money seemed substantial to us but we soon discovered Pondside appealed to a more prosperous market. One of us was an architect who’d explain to us all the problems with the “affordable” places we found in the Centre Street area, some of them structural or serious in other ways. These were old wooden buildings and many had not been well maintained. We spread our search eastward, and eventually settled on a street in JP’s extreme northeast corner, one block south of where JP became Roxbury and one west of Franklin Park, which was in Dorchester. We were a mile from Jamaica Pond and Centre Street, not all that far but literally and figuratively on “the wrong side of the tracks”, the Boston & Maine lines that bisected the neighborhood into the more prosperous and less prosperous. But the three-decker property we finally bought had good bones and sat on a somewhat quiet one-way street and hey! Franklin Park was at the top of the hill! They didn’t call it “Parkside” in those days but it was that nonetheless. And most important of all, as with all real estate transactions, the price was indeed right, even at a 13% interest rate. Those were the days.
There is a lot more story here but right now it’s about places and ponds and such and this unknown neighborhood in Jamaica Plain that had become ours. The elevated Orange Line rumbled by at the bottom of the street and the local businesses were sparse for our basic needs, so we’d still go to Centre St for those, a circumstance that has changed little in 40 years. But Franklin Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted over 100 years ago as people here will endlessly tell you, was ours for the exploring and discovering, and so we did. The place hadn’t aged too well, even though it was where one found the city’s zoo. Half of it had become a golf course and the woodsy parts (labeled by FLO as “the Wilderness”, so quaint) were full of broken trees and picnic tables, and the state had placed a very large hospital in one corner – the Shattuck – with some of the most characterless buildings found anywhere, which were very tall and visible as well.
Unlike the Jamaica Pond and Arnold Arboretum, Franklin Park, except for the zoo which was struggling but surviving, was much underutilized except on summer weekends when Black families would come to barbecue. There was also a yearly Kite Festival and huge crowds would come for the weekends of the Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Caribbean festivals. The surrounding neighborhoods had experienced white flight in the ‘60s, of which we were only vaguely aware when we moved there. In a way, our arrival made us earlier gentrifiers, though this has been a very slow process in Parkside that only recently has notably intensified. In contrast, Pondside gentrification was already well under way in the ‘80s and is one likely reason why we had already been priced out of any chance to buy a decent home there. All we know is that we often had the park nearly to ourselves much of the time except for the golfers, and cross country skiing there in winter one could experience real solitude. Then there was Scarboro Pond.
The “other” pond in Jamaica Plain is a place in sharp contrast to its counterpart. It is much smaller, for one thing. It is not ringed by busy road traffic, but by woods, making it relatively quiet, though this is still the city. There is a path around its edge which appeals to walkers, but joggers tend to use the larger network of wide carriageways that are closed to traffic, unlike the carriageway that became the Jamaicaway with its unholy hordes of motorists. Franklin Park has one automobile road, Circuit Drive, a busy commuting route that bisects it right down the middle that is itself somewhat of a nightmare to this writer’s eyes, but nothing like what goes on alongside Jamaica Pond. And best of all, Circuit Drive runs alongside the golf course and zoo, leaving the rest of the park in peace, more or less, though one might feel bad for the zebras and lions and such. And best of all, there are finally plans to close the road to cars altogether, as more folks realize that so much menacing kinetic presence is an insult to Frederick Law Olmsted and his original vision for a “people’s park”. The mixed blessing of infinite personal mobility, the genie America and Henry Ford released from the bottle over a hundred years ago, is finally getting questioned at least here and there, and it is a marvelous thing. FLO is kind of a sacred figure here in Boston, which is trying to tout its “green-ness” more than ever nowadays, so Circuit Drive might really get turned over to people once again. You never know.
As for Scarboro Pond’s birds, the Canada geese are the dominant species year-round (they also rule the golf course and watch where you step!), though the occasional shoveler or grebe might show up on a good day. Orioles build nests in the surrounding trees in the spring, and their loud liquid notes resound in the quiet. The nearby woods offer some of the best JP birding during spring migration, many warblers and woodpeckers and a well known (to birders) screech owl hole. There is a sometimes-aggressive turkey population on nearby Schoolmaster Hill, and red-tailed hawks nest near the golf course.
Of course, you’ve likely noticed all the waterfowl pictures from Jamaica Pond by now, and it’s a fact that of all the ponds in Boston it remains one of the good ones for ducks, come winter. We’re only a mile away so regular visits there in the winter are a must and one never knows what one will find. The likely suspects vary from year to year. For a long time there were many buffleheads but not for several years now. Some years there’d be mostly ruddy ducks and a few different mergansers, other years many coots. The past two years it’s been almost all hooded mergansers all the time, who show up as soon as the cold weather hits. Last week I counted 100, which right now is my personal best observation. They are a spectacular duck with a prominent crest that takes on endless curious shapes, the boys’ white and the girls’ a kind of russet. To see a flock displaying all the different shapes at once is a birder’s treat, indeed. As the open water gradually disappears, at some point there are left only swans and the ubiquitous mallards waiting for a handout in the narrow puddles that persist along the shoreline. Somebody always obliges them eventually. They’re no dummies, those birds, and their numbers reflect this.
Visiting Jamaica Pond last week demonstrated that the usual diminished winter crowd of people was as sparse as it ever was. What has changed is that bicycles are no longer allowed on the pond-side path. When this happened I gave my previous well-publicized winter activity some credit for bringing it on; more likely it was all those ill-behaved cyclists in the summer. It’s a no-brainer that when the path’s crowded, such a rule makes sense, but I was stopped some time after its enactment by park rangers on a bitter winter’s day, when I was no threat whatsoever to the sparse collection of people braving the weather. No matter; park rangers enforce the letter of the law and not its spirit, which is all about safety, and they are not interested in debates on this topic. Make what you will of the fact that last week I was at the pond on a bicycle anyway, ready for another confrontation that never took place. Duck hunting on a bicycle is advantageous, as one gets a better look at the ducks the quicker one can get close. Their habit is to drift steadily away as one approaches them on foot; wary are they, and for good reason.
What’s cool is that the scene at Jamaica Pond has a timeless quality; how it looks in winter and summer seems to have changed little through the years. Scarboro is another matter. Franklin Park has seen steadily more use year by year, outgrowing its reputation as a “dangerous” place. There are many more white faces than previously (many with dogs) as there has been a near-epidemic of large new apartment buildings along Washington Street and a gradual change in neighborhood demographics. More gratifying has been much greater use by a diversity of people from all sides of the park, as community support for the park has been steady and vocal for decades now, a great thing. We feel blessed for having both these ponds play a prominent part in our lives, and I suspect a great many familiar with one pond know little or nothing about the other. It’s their loss, but the opportunity to correct this is always there: neither pond is all that far away. Just watch out for errant golf shots when you’re at Scarboro, and as for Jamaica Pond, be damn careful when you cross the street as it’s a jungle out there.
(there are many more images of Egleston Square, our local neighborhood, plus a few pithy thoughts, at an earlier posting, “Message in the Sky” if you’re interested, plus more J Pond bird pics etc at “Icy Swans of Winter” that are totally chilling)