#eglestonsquare

Saturday took us to Egleston Square, or, as Egleston Square Main Street would have it, “that great neighborhood where JP and Roxbury shake hands.” Exactly where the unusual name “Egleston” comes from seems to be lost to the sands of time.

Travel notes: The Egleston Square library is about 3 miles from home. We took the #22 bus there (quick and easy) and the orange line and red line back (not so quick and easy, but we decided to stop downtown for lunch).

Teresa’s rating: Earnest. A smallish space, with a smallish collection, but with lots of thoughtful touches. The collections were focused (graphic novels, cooking, health/medicine, Spanish-language). I liked the book bundles being sold by the friends of the library ($5), the poetry project on the big front windows, and the African cooking class series going on while we were there.

Reese’s rating: 12/10. Dinosaur puzzle, RAOR!! The baby areas were large, though sparsely furnished, and there was lots of other DANGER (picture books to pull off shelves, radiators to climb on, glass picture windows to knock on, crayons to eat).

Teresa’s book: Power Vegetables! We like Lucky Peach’s 101 Easy Asian Recipes quite a bit, and also have been watching David Chang and Peter Meehan’s Netflix show, Ugly Delicious, recently.

Reese’s book: The Egleston Square board book collection is about half Spanish/bilingual. (You may be edified to know that in the Spanish version of Boynton classic Blue Hat, Green Hat, the turkey says “ay, caramba!” instead of “oops.”) In honor of Friday’s nor’easter (which dropped a branch on our fence and another through a neighbor’s deck), however, we got Rain! by Linda Ashman.

For the kickoff of Cuentos visibles y cenas escondidas | Signs and Wonders and Hidden Dinners, we (with some unexpected help from the Executive Director of YMCA Achievers) transformed a fluorescent-lighted classroom in the Egleston Square YMCA Achievers building into your favorite tía’s lamp-lit, gauze-curtained living room. 

Luis Cotto and I had sat down a couple of weeks earlier and made a short list of people to invite who had history with the neighborhood. The idea was to share with them plans for the Bodega Signs + Wonders project and invite people to share stories and ideas. I made invitations and visited each person to talk to them a bit about the project and invite them to dinner.

Many of them were busy with their families and small businesses and the holiday season. About half of those we invited came and stayed despite the rain and the weeknight and the undercooked rice. Names aren’t included here for now, just for privacy and permission’s sake, but in attendance was a neighbor who grew up in Egleston and caters healthy versions of Dominican food; a neighbor who works as a membership coordinator for the YMCA and lives upstairs from a corner bodega, where her husband works; her teenaged daughter; the owner of of Egleston’s Latino Beauty Salon; and a seriously longtime Egleston Square resident and former organizer of Boston’s Puerto Rican festival.

I fumbled the memory timeline activity I’d planned—a consequence of 3 hours of slightly panicky cooking and a towed car just before the event. Still, people shared generously and spontaneously, personal stories about work and life and loss and what JP was like in the 70s. One person talked about what it was like to reinvent herself after getting laid off from her job a month after September 11—8 months pregnant. A neighbor she’d just met, now retired, encouraged her to accept job promotions she was offered, remembering struggles from his own career.

We ate and talked some more. Frank Baez introduced himself to the group via recorded video from Peru, where he was part of a literary festival. We shared plans and ideas for the project and people asked a lot of questions. One neighbor was enthusiastic about an idea to have an Egleston Square/JP Memory Party Bus, insisting we needed a double-decker tour bus instead.

BODEGA SIGNS + WONDERS

Cuentos visibles y cenas escondidas | Signs and Wonders and Hidden Dinners

Just over a year ago my little family and I moved to Boston, MA, where we were fortunate to make our home in Egleston Square, an area that spans the neighborhoods of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury. The happy news is that this has led to an exciting new project happening this year with generous support from NEFA’s Creative City Grant program. 

Community writing workshops through the Free School for Writing and dinner conversations with neighbors in Egleston Square, Egleston Square Main Streets and the Egleston Square Branch of the Boston Public Library will generate community stories, song lyrics, and neighborhood history. Dominican poet Frank Baez and I will write/assemble them as poems and very short stories in English and Spanish. These will be made into a series of text-based public art works in the aesthetics and vernacular of bodega signs, produced by a Boston sign maker and installed throughout the Washington and Columbus Avenue commercial district. The project celebrates and makes visible the neighborhood’s social and cultural heritage. Baez’s spoken word band El Hombrecito will visit from Dominican Republic in Spring/Summer 2016 for a workshop and mini-residency.