To the Editor:
I just finished reading Bill Walczak’s article on the Dorchester poster and really enjoyed it. It definitely resonates with my own experience.
I grew up in the 1980s in West Roxbury but was also deeply connected to the Greater Boston suburbs having gone to a Jewish day school in Newton. The very little that I heard about Dorchester was incredibly racist and classist. I grew up with a sense of Dorchester being off limits to me and somewhere I should not visit.
I eventually went to Boston Latin School and Bill’s son was the first person who I really got to know who lived in Dorchester. Fast forward to 2007 when I started a community organizing career in Uphams Corner through Dorchester Bay EDC. That was when I really got to know the neighborhood and fell in love with it.
I have lived in Dorchester now for over a decade and we are raising our family here. In a wonderful, small-world way, my daughter’s first friend was Bill’s granddaughter, who used to live around the corner, and last spring, my daughter played ADSL softball on a team coached by Bill’s son-in-law.
As Bill mentions, this wonderful neighborhood has become far too expensive a place to live. Among the communities we are part of in Dorchester, my family and I have found a political home at Dot Not 4 Sale, a powerful group of local residents fighting to make sure that folks living in Dorchester can stay in the neighborhood and find affordable places to live. You may have seen us in bright yellow t-shirts at Ashmont Station, the Codman Square Farmers Market, and other Dorchester locales collecting signatures to put Rent Control on the ballot.
It has been an incredible blessing to find a sense of belonging and connection in this wonderful neighborhood, and I feel called to make sure it continues to provide this experience for everyone who wants to call Dorchester home.
Dan Gelbtuch
Dorchester
