Massachusetts

Too late to pick-our-own apples, nevertheless on this Columbus Day weekend we went to Big Apple Farm in Wrentham, MA. And, by the way, a Trappistine Monastery happens to be down the street and so we stopped there too.

We went to the Hingham Farmers Market in chi-chi Hingham, Mass., today again. It’s a nice market in a nice location and I know it’s still early in the season for New England, but I think the Marblehead Farmers Market still beats it so far. Marblehead’s ratio of farmers to folks peddling home-packed canned foods and homemade jewelry and the like was much higher. On the other hand, Hingham beats Marblehead on location (right on the beach on Hingham harbor), parking (tons of space), lobster vendors (two in Hingham to none in Marblehead, selling for good prices), and coffee vendor.

Oh, the coffee! It’s sold out of a street truck by Redeye Roasters, who were recently featured in The Boston Globe. This is small-batch hand-roasted coffee that is manually drip-brewed to order. I have rarely tasted coffee so good. That’s going to be one of the reasons to keep me coming back every week.

This week, there were finally some vegetables and fruit. We picked up strawberries and beets and sugar snap peas. The peas are incredible, so fresh and sweet. We were munching them all the way home, like candy. They were so good I felt like I should feel guilty for eating them.

We took a detour into Wompatuck State Park on the way home, to show it to my sister-in-law Theresa. It’s a very nice state park, very close to Boston, but with a backwoods feel. They even have a campground there. We pulled into a trailhead parking lot and let Bella run around in the woods for a while, collecting pine cones (for playing “Poohsticks” and acorns for Piglet; it’s a Winne-the-Pooh thing), while Melanie took photos of flora, fauna, and Bella. I stayed with the car mostly because Sophia fell asleep in the car, a partially munched snap pea on her chest, as you can see in that photo there.

We’re still getting used to our new neighborhood, but I’m glad we’re finding new places to make new memories, even as our old memories in our old home recede. Hopefully, we’ll come to love our new farmers market as much as the old one, even as we miss the folks we came to know there. (I do miss the cheesemakers and the Vietnamese farmers especially.)

3 Days - 3,038 Photos from Robbie on Vimeo.

This is a fun video compiled from over 3,000 photos taken in a 3 day span in and around Boston. Nothing profound, but a very cool use of technology. Since this was taken with a digital SLR, the end result is effectively High Definition video, so click through to the Vimeo site for the full effect.

Click the thumbnails to see all the photos and click on “notes” to see the captions.

We went to our first farmer’s market of the season this morning, although it’s their second week. June in New England doesn’t see a whole lot available from the fields just yet and the market reflected that. There were lots of flowering plants as well as vegetable plants and herbs. Of course, there were also lots of strawberries as well as leafy greens like Swiss chard.

One reason we love this market is because some of the vendors have become so familiar to us. The lady from Crystal Brook Farms in Sterling, Mass., which produces wonderful goat cheeses, always remembers Isabella and dotes on her. This year she cooed over Sophia too. Next to her booth is always the lady from West River Creamery of Vermont, makers of delicious English-style cow’s milk cheeses.

The market also has food vendors, local restaurateurs who bring food down to sell to the crowds. The Thai restaurant, Sticky Rice, is a perennial and the owner is a friendly and popular family man who is always surrounded by his kids. New this year was Zaika, a new Indian restaurant in Marblehead. We got a combo platter from them of chicken tikka masala, chana masala (chick peas), a samosa, rice, and nan. My goodness, they must put crack in the food, it was so good. We were fighting over the right to mop up the last of the sauce with the nan.

The patrons are an interesting melange of stodgy WASPs and crunchy hippies, which is sometimes reflected in the eclectic mix of vendors. There’s always musical entertainment. Unfortunately, this week it consisted of some hippies who happened to be singing an anti-Catholic/anti-organized religion song while we passed by. I wonder if anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic sentiments would have been tolerated in this oh-so-liberal town. I think not.

Apart from that off-note, it was nice to have the farmer’s market back again, which has quickly become a sign of summer’s return. We’re going to miss it very much when we move.

What might have been. After the Second World War, the country went on a highway-building binge, and Massachusetts was part of that craze. During that time, such major highways as Routes 128, 95, and 93, the Southeast Expressway and the Central Atery were all either expanded to major highway status or built from scratch. Yet the plans were even more ambitious than eventually realized, as transportation czars drew up plans for an extensive highway network that would have included an Inner Belt Expressway, that would have been part of I-95 and the never-built I-695.

In 1948, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works (MassDPW), led by commissioner William F. Callahan, proposed a controlled-access, multi-lane loop route to connect downtown Boston with other radial expressways. By serving crosstown traffic, the “Belt Route” was to relieve a large portion of the 15,000 through trips on Boston’s antiquated street network.

Forming a 7.3-mile-loop around the southern, western and northern edge of downtown Boston, the route of the Inner Belt Expressway was described in the Master Highway Plan for the Boston Metropolitan Area as follows:

The selected route begins at the interchange between the Southeast and Southwest expressways near Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street, and extends in a westerly direction via Roxbury Crossing to connect with Huntington Avenue, Jamaica Way and Brookline Avenue. From this point, it extends in a northerly direction to cross Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue paralleling the Cottage Farm (Boston University) Bridge across the Charles River to connect with the Western Expressway (early I-90 alignment). From this point, the Belt Route passes through Cambridge in a northeasterly direction to Somerville, making an interchange connecting with the Northwest Expressway (unbuilt US 3-MA 2) in the vicinity of Washington Street. From this interchange, it travels in an easterly direction paralleling the Boston and Maine Railroad, crossing its main yards to an elevated interchange just west of City Square, where it connects with the Northeast Expressway (US 1).

Interchanges were to be constructed at the following locations:

• Southeast Expressway (I-93) / Southwest Expressway (unbuilt I-95), Boston
• Washington Street, Boston
• Columbus Avenue, Boston
• Brookline Avenue, Boston
• Worcester Turnpike (MA 9), Brookline
• Beacon Street, Boston
• Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
• Soldiers Field Road, Boston
• Western Expressway (early I-90 alignment), Cambridge
• Massachusetts Avenue (MA 2A), Cambridge
• Northwest Expressway (unbuilt US 3-MA 2), Cambridge
• Northern Artery / Medford Boston, Somerville
• Northeast Expressway (US 1), Somerville

The Inner Belt Expressway was to continue south along the route of the elevated Central Artery, providing connections to downtown Boston and Logan Airport. Note that there was to be no direct connection to the Northern Expressway (I-93), due to its close location between the Northwest and Northeast expressways. (Engineers sought adequate spacing of access points to controlled-access routes.)

You can get a better idea of the unbuilt portions from this map:

The portions in red were never built or remained as smaller city and state roads and routes. The dotted lines represent major highways planned but never built. You can also see the ring road. Remnants of the unrealized portions of this grand plan still exist.

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This interchange at the intersection of I-95 and I-93/Rte 128 in Canton would have been just one waypoint on the way into the city until construction was halted. Now it’s half of a working clovercleaf, while the other half lies fallow, melting back into the forest from which it had been carved fifty years ago.

How would the city’s character have been different had all these roads been built? Would some neighborhoods thus cut off from the downtown have withered or thrived? How would the economy and the rise of the suburb been affected? Would more business have moved to the suburbs or would they have stayed in the city? Would we have been even more of a car culture, a la Southern California, or would the commuter train and subway system have remained? Interesting to speculate.

What’s also interesting speculation is whether the era of such major highways, at least in the densely packed Northeast, are forever part of history, with our major road projects only being envisioned to repair and rebuild what’s in place.