Q. What do you get when you put together a boy from a French dairy farm and a girl from the Midwest?
A. Vivian and Elisa Girard.
I first ran into Vivian as he was coming out of the Viet Aid building after voting in 2008. I was handing out campaign literature and, typical of him, he wanted to know who I was and why I was doing it. We exchanged contact information and I began a campaign to involve him in the Ward 15 Democratic Party Committee (an unsuccessful campaign to date, but I haven’t given up hope).
Shortly afterward, my husband and I accepted a dinner invitation and we met Elisa, a baker extraordinaire. Getting to know this couple has kept me gobsmacked for years.
At that first dinner I learned that Vivian and a partner had purchased the six-apartment building in which we were dining – on the corner of Ditson and Leroy streets, about two blocks from Viet Aid. They each renovated three apartments and sold them as condos, which not only provided work and income but also took the building off the BPD’s “property of concern” listing.
At the same time, Vivian and Elisa had taken supervision over all the vacant lots in their neighborhood, removing trash and planting flowers and earning my admiration and designation as “pirate gardeners.” They got me involved in planting flowers at the Charles Street entrance to the Fields Corner T station and at the former Cleveland Middle School. Their infectious gardening drew in folks on neighboring streets and community gardens started popping up. Then came the beehives over their backyard garage that provided pollinators to the neighborhood.
Have you ever eaten in the Home.Stead Café at the corner of Adams Street and Dot Ave? Partnering with a friend, our dynamic duo took over this vacant store. Vivian renovated the space into a café, and Elisa produced the mouthwatering pastries, sandwiches, salads ,and drinks on the menu.
Soon there were weekly poetry slams and live music performances in the evenings. When the Covid lockdown hit and closed the café, Elisa sold loaves of bread to help support the employees.
As rental prices skyrocketed, Vivian designed a mini- apartment and proposed an apartment building constructed to accommodate these affordable apartments. They bought a lot at the corner of Westville Street and Geneva Ave. and Vivian built a model apartment to demonstrate the concept. They received funding and city approval and began to build a 14-apartment building on the site. The concept was to offer affordable apartments ($650/mo.) a couple of blocks from public transportation at Fields Corner, with a basement room for bicycle storage and repair. No cars needed. Genius.
Vivian and Elisa have been doing the physical construction all winter to ensure that the rental costs will remain in the affordable range. I suggested that Vivian patent his mini-apartment model, but he declined with the hope that others would use the idea.
It’s true that I have not yet succeeded in recruiting Vivian to the Ward 15 Dems Committee, but that does not mean that he is averse to civic organizations. When the chair of the Fields Corner Civic Association became vacant, Vivian stepped in to take over until a new chair could be found. He was ready to help when no one else was available.
He is a frequenter of the Greater Bowdoin/Geneva Neighborhood Association meetings, is known to the C-11 community officers, and he and Elisa are the soul of neighborhood bicycling.
I just read an email from Vivian announcing his campaign to cover local graffiti with grey paint (“50 covered in 3 hours”). The neighborhood’s “graffiti killer” is determined to keep that up into the fall.
Baking bread for the unemployed, leading bike tours, planting flowers, building gardens, hosting July 4 picnics in Ronan Park, building affordable housing, covering graffiti, crime-watching, keeping bees. Vivian and Elisa are local, unsung heroes who see a need, pick up their tools and go to work, without a fuss, without being asked, just because it needs to be done and no one else was doing it.
When I pitched this column to the Reporter it was selfless, quiet heroes like Vivian and Elisa Girard that I had in mind. Like most of Dorchester, the neighborhood around Longfellow Street is full of neighbors accomplishing great things.
