North Station Forest Hills Dudley Station vintage Boston transportation postcards

Filene's Restaurant

When I was a little girl I remember getting dressed up in my best dresses to go "Downtown" with my great aunt. I wasn't really a dresses and frills kind of girl but by great aunt was and in hindsight now, I think she was trying to provide for me the things that she never had growing up as desperately poor as she did. My great aunt (and her sister, my grandmother who passed away before I was born) were raised under what, at the time, would seem shockingly tragic circumstances. Their parents were Irish born and moved to the US and the Boston area sometime right about the turn of the century. (I have the exact dates somewhere but they are not necessary for this particular story) At some point their father (a trolley driver) deserted the family, moved back to Ireland and started a whole new family. I think that is the reason that although my great aunt was very proud to be Irish, she never would discuss with any detail or clarity and details regarding her heritage. But I digress... Auntie Kay surely was living out her own childhood fantasies of proper young ladies raised in Boston when she dressed me up and took me to nice restaurants all over town. We had lunch at the Ritz, and we also dined at the very pleasant Filene's restaurant located int he flagship original Boston store. Decades later I worked for Filene's as a sales clerk and later a department manager. In various jobs at various times I was all over that building and saw many wonderful old relics of it's past life. There was a great black and white checked floor on the mezzanine left over from that floor's days as a hair dressing salon and a lovely wrought iron spiral stair case leading down from the Godiva candy stockroom, I have no idea where the stair case originally led to and from but it sure was a neat relic and one that I regret most not photographing when I had the opportunity to do so. Oh but I am rambling on again... I have memories of the Filene's Restaurant as being decorated in green and white in the mid 1970's and I also recall it being sun lit although I don't recall looking out any windows. I have heard from different sources that the restaurant was located on the 4th and or the 8th floor of the store at 500 Washington Street and it may well have been located on different floors at different time periods. The store was over 100 years old by the time I started working there... Close inspection of this card appears to me to be the 8th floor of the building. I remember the columns that dotted the large room and the bright high windows that was the employee cafeteria and restaurant when I was there. Employees could purchase inexpensive meals like burgers and fries or grilled cheese on their breaks while working. It was quite convenient if not quite as glamorous as it was when it was a restaurant open to the public. Anyhoo... I ran across this old postcard online recently and it reminded me of those lunches with Auntie Kay. I would have loved to have been able to tell her about conversations I had with employees that used to work in the restaurant during their long and very storied careers at Filene's but I have the feeling that even if I could have told her about these women, she might only have been disappointed (and not delighted like I was) to find her niece making friends with waitresses instead of executive Secretaries. When it comes down to it, whether we had overly polished manners or not (in my case, certainly not) we all apparently enjoyed our meals in the same place at different times...

Vintage Post Cards Nantasket and Revere Beach

It's awfully cold out there tonight, a good evening for hunkering down with some hot cocoa and thoughts of summer...

Vintage Boston Post Card

Stay safe Harvard Community, Stay Safe Boston...

I saw my father pretty often on weekends and school vacations but it was very rare for him to show up anywhere in the comings and goings of my day to day life. With the possible exception of when I got in trouble for something really bad, that was kind of how I knew I was really in trouble, if it was something so bad that my mother got over her aversion for speaking to my father and actually called him, then I knew I was really in trouble. So it was a bit of a surprise to see him on the sidewalk outside Pierce School one afternoon in Brookline when the grammar school was vacated for what seemed to be a routine fire drill. The drill in and of itself was a little odd as were usually informed on days when there would be a drill and this one appeared to come as a surprise to the teachers as well as the pupils. I didn’t think too much about that at the time, I was just happy to be outside and out of class. The school could have burnt to the ground and I would have been thrilled at the time but that’s another story. I was pleasantly surprised to see my Dad and his presence was not completely out of place (he was dating a school employee at the time) but I was a bit perplexed as I had never seen him at the school before and a fire drill really didn’t seem to be an important enough reason to stop by. I had assumed he was just in the neighborhood and saw me out on the sidewalk but that was not the case. Standing on the sidewalk he very seriously and very quietly told me it wasn’t a real fire drill, someone had called in a bomb threat to the school. (later determined to be a hoax) I’m not sure how old I was at the time of that incident but I was most likely somewhere between the 6th and 8th grades, maybe somewhere between 11 and 13 years old. At the time it would have probably seemed improper to share such potentially frightening information with a young kid but these days kids even younger than I was at the time are quite familiar with active shooter drills in their schools. Bomb drills are probably just as common place as fire drills were back in my day. Whenever one of these scary incidents show up happening real time on my news feeds I can’t help but wonder, is this rash of threats really new or is it our age of lightning fast information sharing that makes it seem like there are more threatening incidents at educational facilities now more than ever before? Were the threats always there and we just didn’t know or talk about them (certainly not with children) or are we really actually living in more violent times? As we all wait minute by minute today to hear the latest about today’s reports of violence at Harvard University, I can’t help but wonder…

My Irish Wife

I found this on The Library of Congress web site and I find it amusing that so many years later "the queen of France" (or at least a recent prime Minister's wife, Carla Bruni) is known to be a beauty of international reknown). Looking up around downtown Boston one can see many markers listing company names imbedded in the stone at about the second story on a lot of buildings. I am endlessly surprised at how many of those companies that built those buildings were music publishers.

   This was a company I hadn't seen on a building or heard of before so I thought it worth sharing. At some point I'll travel down Hanover Street and see if the original building is still there...

It was 20 years ago today...

I was sick and quite suffering this night but determined to go see Joe Satriani at this event, I got dressed up as cute as I could with a red runny nose and wandered over to the Garden with my friend Rebecca.

   It turned out to be one of those nights that I should have known better and just hunkered down with some extra blankets and stayed home.

   The bad vibe that began with my cold continued as some guy got up on stage and proposed to his girlfriend who declined his offer and shortly after the great fan fare with which she was brought up on stage the two of them were quickly hustled off and never heard from again.
  I'd be inclined to think, "Poor Dude!" but c'mon, who does that without being 100% sure the girl is going to say yes. Poor girl being thrust into that uncomfortable position, sheesh...

   We saw Mr. Satriani perform about 4 songs and then it was someone else's turn and with my feeling just awful and the main event over, Rebecca and I started to leave.

  Then I slipped in someone Else's spilled beer and went crashing down into the same wet puddle but not before trying to catch my fall. I missed the railing with my hand and caught my full body weight using just my little pinky finger. I bent it back so far that I could still feel some soreness years later and to this day I still cringe if that finger is bent back even a little.

But at least the worst of the night is over right?

 No such luck...

   We found ourselves slightly turned around on our way back to Jamaica Plain from the Garden and  wound up coming out of a one way street in the middle of the old combat zone. The neighborhood was on it's way to being cleaned up but not quite there yet when at approx midnight as I inched my car forward to see around parked cars, a cab going WAY TOO FAST clipped the front end of my car and dragged up a good block or so before depositing my car in the middle of an intersection.

   My mother's voice cropped up in my head at this time,

 "If you are in an accident, don't move the car until the police get there and take pictures!"

    Good advice I guess but my Mother never imagined that I would be in an accident in the middle of the combat zone at midnight on a friday night. A million (that's an estimate but I think it's about right) cars trying from all 4 angles to get past my car diagonalll in the middle of the intersection, people yelling, a not unmad best friend who had just been given quite a scare, and a cacophony of mayhem surrounded us.          

     I moved the car.

Which probably saved it from A.) being hit again or B.) myself being throttled by a crowd of angry strangers. Mother's advice not with standing still, I did the right thing.

    In the end, the cops did come and help me and the cab driver share insurance info which was nice as I was ranting like a loon and probably looked far less than a fine upstanding citizen with my rage, red eyes, runny nose and askew formerly cute club dress.

Far from looking like a damsel in distress, I am quite sure in hindsight that I looked all for the world like I belonged there smack dab in the middle of the old combat zone...

   All ended well enough I guess as my car had only a chunk of cosmetic damage to the side where as the cab had to be towed away. People over the years have frequently spoken to me about the benefits of heavy ALL AMERICAN cars and how they are so much "safer" than any of the light weight little foreign cars I have had over the years but all I can think about is that night and how we were perfectly safe and just kind of bounced along and then off of the heavy car that clipped us. If we had been in a heavier car the damage would have undoubtedly been far worse. As is was, we were completely unscathed, except for our state of mind of course, and got back home without further fanfare to a well deserved (and probably should have had right from the start) good night sleep.

  Then the next day I had to confess to my Mother what had happened and had to endure the lecture on how I should not have moved the car...

    A couple of months later my friends and I were parked at a fast food joint somewhere in Brighton I think and we spotted a cab with some side damage in the parking lot.

   "Wouldn't it be funny if that was the same cab?" someone said.

Just for giggles we pulled the info from my glove box and sure enough, it was the same cab. No longer as amusing as the coincidence first seemed in theory, we skeedaddled out of there as fast as we could without getting into another accident...

     A lot of  adventure for only a couple of songs which I probably didn't enjoy as much as I could have had I been well but even if it was only briefly, I got to see Joe Satriani play.

   All's well that ends well....