Anyone who lives on the west side of the neighborhood can’t help but notice that corporate chains have a different view of “upkeep” here than they do elsewhere – and sometimes that dramatic difference can be witnessed within the same zip code.
Corporate responsibility is almost non-existent in the neighborhoods west of Washington, and it’s high-time for the city to stop wasting breath about places like the North End – spending money and time over there to make pretty, prettier – and go on a campaign to impress corporate property responsibility in Dorchester and Mattapan.
For my money, the “new” CVS on Washington Street in Four Corners is one good example. The building was formerly a church, and before that a market, and CVS was ushered in quickly. It has been nothing but a swing and miss to me. Without proper planning on Washington Street, the chain simply renovated the one-story building and kept the sprawling, unused parking lot in place. If ever density was appropriate, this was the location. Yet, it became a suburban-style chain store with an oversized parking lot minus the upkeep or beautification you’d see elsewhere.
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Corporate irresponsibility has crept in. The inside of the store is dirty and unkempt – with chronic staffing shortages – and not as nice as older stores in other parts of Dorchester that are in the same zip code, never mind examples farther out of town.
Here, everything is locked up on the shelves, if the shelves are even stocked. Maybe you want to get toothpaste, mouthwash, and shampoo? You’ve got to ring three different bells and wait 15 minutes or so for someone to unlock and retrieve the goods for you and hold them there until you pay up. The assumption is that you’ll steal them.
Beyond that, there’s a lot of graffiti and the parking lot is often a small step above the conditions of a public toilet at the South Station Bus Terminal. Sometimes they clean it up, maybe if there’s a complaint. It’s astounding how a new store can so quickly fall into such blight.
Yet there’s no reason to just pick on the new CVS, as this sort of scene is rather common. The old Walgreen’s in Codman Square is no better. The somewhat-new Dollar Tree at the old Franklin Field Lumber on Talbot Avenue has worn the same obnoxious graffiti for months, has a trashed parking lot, and rarely has a full inventory on its shelves.
You can go up and down Blue Hill Avenue and find the same situation time and again from the corporate entities that take up space along the business districts.
These are all well-heeled corporations with millions, perhaps billions, in revenues; they aren’t ‘mom-and-pops’ struggling to make payroll. They have the money and can afford to do better, but they know they don’t have to.
Why is it that corporations come to this part of Dorchester and assume they can just do what they want with no recourse? It is, quite simply, because they can, and they always have been able to.
A chain in one part of town isn’t equal to a chain on this side of town. People power and 3-1-1 can only do so much. Neighborhood residents need the city to push the buttons on corporate responsibility, turn the screws on corporate HQ.
I suggest that the city worry a little more about that and a little less about restaurant owners in the tourist areas who mostly live and pay taxes in Wilmington and Lynnfield and probably couldn’t find Four Corners with a magnifying glass.
CONCERT T-SHIRTS COOL AGAIN?
I was in Codman Square not long ago with a group of teen-agers – some of them my own – and got a look at the newest fashion. That trend includes young, urban teens (and pre-teens now) wearing concert T-shirts from, of all things, heavy metal bands from the `80s and `90s.
I attended my share of music shows. I saw great R&B acts like Etta James, went well-beyond midnight with Willie Nelson singing church hymns at the Orpheum, chilled with jazz greats like Claude ‘Fiddler’ Williams and the organ specialist Jimmy Smith. I think I once even saw Dr. Dre and Eminem. But I also saw my share of hard rock shows – hair bands. Some I’m still proud of, like Guns n’ Roses and Metallica in the same show, as well as Smashing Pumpkins and Ozzy Osbourne, who pretended to eat a fake rat on stage. Others like AC/DC, Cinderella, Poison and so on maybe I don’t trumpet.
As I observed this new trend, with kids wearing Nirvana, AC/DC, Guns n’ Roses, and Metallica concert shirts, I felt that the styles had rotated back my way. After quite a long wait, I was so out of style that I was back in style. I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment.
I quickly announced to the carload of teens that I had all these shirts, and that I should go up to the attic, get them back out, and start wearing them around the neighborhood. They were the originals, I said, not replicas.
Dread appeared on the faces of the kids. Some even held in laughs. What had gone wrong?
My own teens took it upon themselves to break it to me. No one wears the shirts, they said, because they are cool and that anyone that went to those concerts in person is cool. In fact, the shirts had become popular because most kids felt it was funny that such music ever existed – let alone that anyone would pay to see such a thing live.
“It wouldn’t be cool if you wore it, Dad,” they said. “But we could wear them.”
Apparently, the trend is more about irony than anything else, sort of like if I’d worn a Paul Anka T-Shirt to a Metallica smash-up back in the day.
So, rather than joining in coolness with the young, urban crowd, I’ve only risen to the ranks of ironic.
Seth Daniel is the news editor of the Reporter. His column West Side Stories appears monthly in the Reporter. Follow him on Twitter here.
