We were enjoying a beautiful summer afternoon on our back porch recently when our reverie was rudely shattered by the incredible racket of two or three or more helicopters hovering right over our house at extremely low level. There is no mechanical device more sonically abrasive than a “chopper”, as they are lovingly called (by somebody), and this kind of thing has been a regular event in our part of the big city for many years; heaven help any Vietnam vets with PTSD who might live in the neighborhood.
The whirling mix is always the same: a flying cop or two (usually Staties), and several “breaking news” seekers (usually channel five and/or seven) looking for great aerial footage of whatever disaster is happening down below. It is always about disaster: fire or traffic accident or random violence. It will end up on the four or the five or six o’clock broadcast, as viewers love that stuff. “If it bleeds, it leads” is an ancient bit of journalist wisdom that remains timeless.
Once they’re up there, they will remain for an hour or more, sometimes much more if there’s an exciting “manhunt” in the backyards and alleys, or in Franklin Park up the hill, making it impossible for anyone sleeping who works the night shift or who has a young child who needs nap time to get the job done.
Of course, along with our grousing comes the big question of “what’s it all about?” like that song goes about Alfie, or “what’s all the hubub, bub?” as Bugs would ask Elmer in the cartoons, or my favorite: “what’s all this, then?” which is what John Cleese would say as the police inspector coming upon the “crime scene” which sometimes was anything but that.
Sometimes we will find out the next day, which happened only a few weeks ago with the big flood over on Centre Street, or the time the two guys had their High-Noon-style shootout just up Washington St outside the liquor store a few years back (they both died). Too much of the time we never find out at all, making us wonder if the cops and the news people chase down some pretty trivial events just because they’ve got these expensive machines and need to keep them busy.
This time we got our answer in pretty short order and sadly it was yet another brazen daytime gun death, a few doors down from the same liquor store as before, only this time a lone assassination. Homicide is a fact of life in the American city, worse in places like Chicago or Baltimore than in Boston but in America’s shooting culture it is people in the big cities who are the big losers. Another fact of life is that it tends to be greatly concentrated in certain neighborhoods among certain populations. All too often it is gang related: for years we had the Academy Homes crew up Washington St in a decades-long beef with the boyz or dawgs or whatever they called themselves at the Bromley-Heath housing project down the hill next to our Stop and Shop, which has generated many shootings over the years.
Hearing occasional gunshots in the middle of the night during the summer has long been a fact of life on Iffley Road. It was unnerving that first time but for years it was always at a distance and always at night and usually suggestive of fireworks so you never really knew, until the rhythm would start to suggest a war movie. You’d check the papers the next day which almost always revealed nothing.
We bought our three-decker in Egleston Square partly because it was more affordable than the rest of JP (it was also one of the few properties in this part of the city offered without serious problems), and gunfire in the night is one of many things that can affect property values, no doubt. Perhaps denial was a factor in our never feeling especially threatened, but it’s also a fact that the moving mass of a Honda is a much greater danger around here to life and limb than lead from a Glock, unless you happen to be part of that culture that regularly carries a gun. The mass shootings that are national news tend to be a suburban phenomenon, and whether those affect property values in those places is a story you never hear about.
We’d been here just a few years when there was an especially violent and dramatic occurrence only two blocks from our house. Hector Morales, just 19 years old and a member of a local Puerto Rican gang, the X-men, had a shootout with the Boston police that ended in a hail of gunfire that was evidently worthy of the movies. I don’t remember any helicopters at that time – it was 30 years ago – so maybe those are a more recent development. Another especially unfortunate recent development is that gang members involved in shootings are getting younger and younger.
Did we have second thoughts about living here all those years ago? Not that I recall; we’d quickly learned that most of our neighbors had lived on Iffley Road for years and loved the street and the neighborhood. We also learned that most of Egleston Square lies in Roxbury (02119) and that having an address in Jamaica Plain (02130) gave a boost to your property value, no matter that we’re only talking the difference of a few blocks. And the street is only one block long and a one-way, so at least back then traffic was relatively minimal.
To this day the business district of Egleston Square has been in a time warp, the same mix of Latinx-oriented bodegas and restaurants and an unbelievable number of barber shops and beauty salons and money transfer storefronts. And Star Fish – two words – another mainstay where its all from the ocean and its all fried, all the time. In comparison the storefront mix elsewhere in JP – and we’re talking a lot of businesses – has been in constant flux to the point of bewilderment, since forever, except for maybe the hardware store and JP Licks ice cream over on Centre Street, a mile away.
What is interesting is that until recently Egleston Square has been home to a real mix of households of different incomes and ethnicities and faded housing stock, all of it mostly ignored by developers. The construction at 3200 and 3193 Washington – over 100 new units of pricy rentals – signifies a real jump-start in the gentrification process, and the proliferation of many-unit apartment buildings from here south to Forest Hills now borders on the ridiculous. The city planners call it “transit-oriented-development” all along the Orange Line there, and it has been on steroids for five yers, with no end in sight. Many rental and family-owned three-deckers have gone condo at ridiculous prices compared to what it all cost 40 years ago when we moved in (and prices were on the rise back then). JP was once at the forefront of “humble” neighborhoods getting really pricy but now it is a citywide phenomenon, as the Boston economy booms and everybody’s making six figures, or so it seems. Or maybe that’s just the story wherever you go in America nowadays.
Whether the recent violence has given the many newcomers to the neighborhood second thoughts is unknown. Those who opt for city living are more likely to leave when they realize the public schools and traffic congestion are bigger real-life problems. Whether you have children or not is a huge factor; that said, there are currently a lot of young families around here, many of whom tote their kids through the traffic in trailers and on cargo bikes, and God bless ’em (and protect ’em). If you are drawn to city living in the first place, this particular corner of Boston is wonderful in countless ways that have kept us happily in place for what has now become a very long time.
And one of life’s sad truths is that men (isn’t it always men?) have been killing each other on the street with their guns for a long time, now. The reasons are many, of course: anger, jealousy, business, loyalty, politics, money. Legal or not, a gun is always available if you want one and have reason to use it. The bigger tragedy is when the victim is an innocent bystander who is not part of that world, which is why daytime shootings on busy city streets are the scariest of all, and will always draw the helicopters.
