Mike Barnicle
DORCHESTER AVENUE RUNS like a ribbon through one neighborhood’s history, a place of parishes and people, some of whom have never placed a toe in the water of the bay that laps a shore less than a mile away yet feel as if they haven’t missed much at all. It is a street where dreams that often began across the distance of history and oceans have been fulfilled or sometimes crushed in a city, Boston, and a country, America, continually fueled and energized by the constant flow of immigrants who work, worship, and live in a zip code built with calluses and the hard work of hope.
St. Ambrose, a red-brick Catholic church, rebuilt after fire destroyed much of the original structure in January 1984, is on Adams Street, fifty yards from the intersection of Dot Avenue. Each weekday at noon there is a Mass where the congregants gather and the service lasts about half an hour.
On the late-spring day I attended, about twenty people (median age about seventy) sat in pews the way longtime season-ticket holders sit at Fenway Park: with a constant faith and a familiar devotion rooted in belief and habit. And while they are at a Mass that has changed as much as American League baseball did with the decades-old designated hitter—it is no longer celebrated in Latin—still, rapt attention was paid to a reading of the day’s gospel:
One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him,
“Which is the first of all the commandments?”
Jesus replied, “The first is this:
Hear, O Israel!
The Lord our God is Lord alone!
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, with all your mind,
and with all your strength.
The second is this:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these.”
The scribe said to him, “Well said, teacher.
You are right in saying,
He is One and there is no other than he.
And to love him with all your heart,
with all your understanding,
with all your strength,
and to love your neighbor as yourself
is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
And when Jesus saw that he answered with understanding,
he said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”
And no one dared to ask him any more questions.
After Mass, I sat for a while in the empty church thinking about the idea of neighbors and neighborhood and a street, Dorchester Avenue, and all the places that used to be and were no more: the churches that have closed or been renamed or combined into one larger parish, economics forcing the faithful to confront the reality of a consolidated Catholicism. The neighborhood taverns shuttered and then reopened as nail salons, laundromats, or variety stores where Spanish and Vietnamese are now the common languages. Town Field, the ballpark where the sight of the young playing soccer is more familiar than a couple kids playing catch or a pickup game of hardball beneath a blistering city sun.
Dorchester is the largest of Boston’s neighborhoods, six square miles, with about 115,000 people. And the avenue, Dorchester Avenue, has always been a highway of assimilation. For decades in the early twentieth century it was where the Irish arrived, started families, began work, sent their children to public and parochial schools, and pursued the same dreams and hopes now held by newer, later arrivals from countries like the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam.
This is not the Boston of postcards, duck-boat tours, Freedom Trail walks, a burgeoning seaport district, Quincy Market, or the old ball yard in Back Bay where the Red Sox play eighty-one times a year, itself an enormous tourist attraction.
And while change has occurred in the snap of a finger—a couple decades, not long at all when measured by the slow second hand of history’s clock—the differences between then and now are amazingly similar to everything that went into building each block, each street, each home, each life that walked the avenue three quarters of a century ago.
“The parish, St. Ambrose, now numbers about three hundred Hispanics, fifteen hundred Vietnamese, and one hundred English-speaking Catholics,” Father Dan Finn, the pastor of both St. Ambrose and St. Mark’s, was saying. “At St. Mark’s we have about a thousand people in the parish. Seventy percent are Vietnamese, and they talk fondly about ‘the old country’ much the way we Irish, old and new arrivals, reminisce about the old country too. It’s interesting, the similarity, the memories we all have of the places we came from, fond or otherwise.”
Dan Finn has been a priest for forty-one years, most of them spent in Dorchester—thirteen years at St. Peter’s, until 1983, and then on to St. Mark’s, where he has been pastor since 1993.
He is a tall, thin, soft-spoken sixty-nine-year-old man with an athletic bearing, short-cropped graying hair that still has a tinge of red to it, and a pleasant, welcoming smile on an angular face that provides every indication of where he was born: County Cork, Ireland.
“I used to dream about coming to the United States,” he was saying as he sat at a table in an office at St. Mark’s rectory, a church built by immigrants in 1905. “I thought America must be great, that everyone in America wore sunglasses and drove big cars, because in Penterk, the small town I grew up in, we saw very little of either, the sun or cars.”
His family brought him to Lowell, Massachusetts. He went to public school, worked at various construction jobs in Boston, took Latin classes at Somerville High, and then decided to enter the seminary, embarking on his life as a priest who is now as familiar a figure on the sidewalks and in the three-deckers of Dorchester as is the mayor, Tom Menino.
“The changes that have occurred across the last four decades here in Dorchester, along the avenue, in the neighborhoods have been both challenging and enriching. It is a very warming and rewarding experience to sit and hear the stories of people who have come here just as I did, just as my family did, to hear what they went through to get here, to witness their resilience and their commitment to this country, to their church, to their families.”
Down the avenue from St. Marks’s, past Field’s Corner, now filled daily with a crush of people shopping, working, the street filled with traffic and commerce on any weekday, there are indications everywhere of the fact that immigration, the tide of history, can continually breathe new life and fresh optimism into a city’s heart. It has happened in several areas of the town—South Boston, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Brighton—yet it is arguably most visible, most apparent, along Dorchester Avenue.
There is the Blarney Stone—newly refurbished by the owner, Ben Johnson, himself from Ireland—where young mix with old and the menu as well as the tap can compete with anything in the larger city around it. Then, three more blocks along the boulevard, directly across the street from the Pho Hoa Restaurant, filled with customers at lunchtime, there is a two-story, tan, cinder-block building with a flat roof, next to the Dorchester House Multi-Service Center. On the second floor of the cinder-block building, which also houses a chiropractor and a travel agency, a young man sits alone behind a desk, working intently, papers stacked to one side, two chairs alongside the desk, both empty, his office door open to capture a breeze on a humid afternoon.
His name is Dan Tran. He is thirty-six years old, married, with two children. He is wearing a white shirt open at the collar, no tie, and has a pen in one hand while he types with the other on a keyboard set in front of a desktop computer. He is a lawyer, and his story represents much of the best that this country, this city of Boston, still offers to those who know that America, despite all the cynicism and polarization that plague our culture and our politics, remains the ultimate reward for anyone willing to work hard to chase the same vision that lured so many here so long ago.
Tran’s family fled South Vietnam after the war ended in 1975. His father served with the South Vietnamese Army, making him a marked man when Saigon fell during that long-gone spring when the communists took control.
Tran graduated from Brockton High School and then went to the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School of Business. He got a job at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey and then worked for a few years at Wells Fargo Bank in southern California before coming back to Boston, where he enrolled nights at Suffolk Law School.
“I realized that this is where I wanted to be,” Dan Tran said. “And this is what I wanted to do, help people with their lives through the law. And I’m glad I made that decision.”
Outside, a school bus coughed through the early-afternoon traffic. It was stop-and-go for several blocks, as cars, trucks, and buses pushed through the day’s heat. At the intersection of Dorchester Avenue and Mayfield Street, the bus stopped and a whole gaggle of young people spilled onto the sidewalk a few yards from the James A. Murphy & Son Funeral Home, a landmark business for decades.
And here it was: a demographic portrait of one neighborhood in a city where, when you were young and Irish, you could get off the trolley at Park Street Under, look around at the faces of older people milling through the turnstiles, and see exactly what you’d look like thirty years from that moment in time. But the face of Boston has changed and is constantly changing still. The faces here now were of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Morocco, Bangladesh, Cape Verde, and China. The average age on the corner, perhaps fifteen.
However, power changes hands slowly and often reluctantly in our politics and our culture. And the change comes at a cost, as resentment and parochialism push back against the inevitable. Over the last sixty-six years, Boston has been governed by only five men, and only one, Tom Menino, was not Irish Catholic.
The instruments of true power in the town used to be in the hands of a few downtown men of wealth and pedigree, always referred to as “the Vault.” These were somewhat well-intentioned suburban Wasps whose hard, silent voices controlled the banks, the real estate, and the growing skyline of a city seemingly forever locked into a 1950s mindset. That roadblock to progress began to break apart when Kevin White, unafraid of talent and arrogant enough to talk back as well as to lead, took the city through the trauma of busing and pushed as well as coerced urban development that forever altered the psyche as well as the look and feel of huge parts of Boston. And over the past two decades, Tom Menino has continued that journey, pulling the city into the twenty-first century.
Today, if you want to imagine what the city will look like in another two decades, all you have to do is eyeball the classroom of any public school.
In the spring of 2013, out of forty-four high school valedictorians, twenty-five of those young, accomplished graduates, all heading to college, either were born beyond our shores or were born here, the children of parents chasing the same dream that filled the imagination of Father Dan Finn growing up in Ireland: the freedom to breathe and grow.
“I remember right after I got here and went into the high school, I had a meeting with the guidance counselor,” Father Finn recalled. “I had no idea what a guidance counselor was. I’d only been here a few months and he asked me what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be, and I was astonished at the question. Nobody had ever asked me that before in Ireland and I had never given it a thought. What did I want to be? That was an amazing question to me. That question represented in my mind what this country is all about and still is. What do you want to be?”
Nobody ever asked Ha Le to pay a single cent for the right to dream. He arrived in Dorchester from Vietnam, after stops in a refugee camp in Indonesia and then work as a dishwasher in Utah and Georgia. He is today behind the counter of his daughter’s store on Dorchester Avenue, Trang’s Flower Shop, located alongside Ha Le’s own variety store.
“This is place where it is easy to smile,” Ha Le says in halting English. “Place where you can have many, many jobs. Work hard.”
His daughter, Trang Nguyen, graduated from the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science. She opened her small shop a year ago, and on this one day she was busy delivering orders in the middle of the morning as her father worked the counter. The shop is across the street from the Truong Thinh Market, which was packed with customers, one of them a slight, middle-aged Vietnamese mother, who with great embarrassment took out an EBT card (Electronic Benefits Card—food stamps) to pay for grocery items—three boxes of rice, noodles, canned goods, milk, and apples.
“I am ashamed,” she said, “but I lose my jobs and need to use the program to get food for my family. I have four children.”
“Your jobs?” she was asked. “How many jobs did you lose?”
“Two,” she reported. “I was working at two jobs, same time. Both jobs go when business get bad and go away.”
One of the jobs was in the kitchen of a downtown restaurant that saw its business slide when the whole economy ruptured in 2008 and has yet to fully recover for people like Ly Tran and many, many others. The second was folding wash in a laundromat five nights a week, a chore that paid cash but disappeared when the owner closed the shop.
Still, she looks for work every day in stores along the avenue. Still, she makes sure her children—the oldest twenty and about to enlist in the United States Army, the youngest nine and in school—are fed and clothed, a timeless tradition that families everywhere, from every place, have followed forever.
So, here on Dorchester Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts, we have the eternal circle of life: immigrants arriving in a country and a city where the degree of freedom—the stocked shelves of grocery stores, the availability of so much both good and bad, the access to education and, difficult as it is at the moment, employment, and the ladder to a better life—is both shocking and exhilarating.
I realize this is a small portrait of a single slice of a larger city and a bigger universe, one avenue and the neighborhood that surrounds it. I know most of us are consumed by quick, fleeting items and headlines that emerge from the paralyzed politics of Washington or the all too ugly and familiar tales of crime and greed and false celebrity that claim enormous portions of the media as well as the national conversation.
But the street here, Dorchester Avenue, is real and it is us and it is the way it has always been, a place where Twitter and blogs and Facebook and a rapidly expanding culture of no eye contact and cemented opinions shaped more by cable TV shows than actual experience surely does exist, but does not dominate.
Here we have a mini time capsule, a daily urban drama where many of the characters, the residents, the shopkeepers, the tavern owners, the store clerks, the priests, and the pupils, may not wear the familiar faces from decades past, yet they behave similarly to those who once were here and have either died or moved on. They have their friends, their favorite places to eat, to play, to take their children, to feel safe. They have their parish, their store, their coffee shop, and they think and hope and dream and sometimes actually believe it will last forever.
And of course it doesn’t.
But the vibrancy of life does. It defeats the small felonies and the larger outrages that afflict all of us at different moments in time. It means that each day begins with some promise and perhaps more potential, because a child will do well in class, a baby will be born, a marvelous voice will sing a song on a street corner, a young person will discover her own talent, a parent will beam with pride, the Red Sox will win a big game, an e-mail from a relative in a distant land—the old country—will show up in the in box of a smartphone, and with it will come the realization that here along Dorchester Avenue, in the city of Boston, shattered by a bombing on marathon day, it is still more than possible, more than anywhere on earth, to succeed or even thrive. It is that singular American dream that remains constant across the ages, especially to those who work so hard to get here.