BY   DON SEIFFERT

Photos by Kelly MacDonald

Seven days a week, Beth Roche can be found  working on her laptop at a picnic table in the  sitting area of Veteran’s Memorial Rink (570 Somerville Ave.), sounds of slap shots and stick checks echoing through the doors.

All three of her boys – ages 7, 11 and 12 – play youth hockey on two teams each: for Somerville Youth Hockey Association (SYHA), and for a select team. That means hours of rink time every day, but Roche doesn’t mind. With three boys in the house, what else are you going to do?

“Either we’re here, or they’re home killing each other,”  she says.

Similarly, Ron Bonney helps coach both his sons’ SYHA teams, and his business – Bonney Automotive (640
Boston Ave.) – is one of SYHA’s sponsors. But his older son also plays for a select club that he has helped coach. For Bonney, involvement with both the town and select programs is simply a matter of participating in the game the family loves as much as possible. “My cousins and I all grew up in youth hockey,” he says. Hockey overload also has social appeal. Out of both programs, the Bonneys have developed close friendships and ties to their community that they would not have otherwise formed.

These Somerville families have seen the best that both town and select hockey have to offer. In the regional youth hockey community, however, the programs find themselves on opposite ends of the ice.

Across the state, more and more families are participating in so-called select hockey clubs, but unlike the Roches and the Bonneys, many are doing so at the expense town programs. Select teams have been criticized as money-makers that take good players away from town leagues, compete for valuable ice time, and encourage an overly-competitive environment at the youngest levels. Those criticisms have gotten louder in the past couple years, ever since USA Hockey lifted a ban on kids under 10 joining select leagues unless they also play for a community-based one. The change has effectively intensified an already contentious relationship.

“The select teams aren’t going away,” says Chuck Allen, the boys’ hockey coach at Somerville High School. “Do I think it’s going to affect youth hockey in the long term? Yes.”

SYHA officials say they’ve been lucky to avoid the declining participation and consolidation that’s plagued some Boston-area town programs as select programs grow. President Jill Guardia says membership hovered around 80 until recently. This year, there are 110 players.

While that’s partly the effect of the Boston Bruins winning the Stanley Cup last year – “You’ll probably find that in hockey leagues across the state,” she says – Guardia credits SYHA’s low cost and excitement for the new outdoor ice rink being built at Veteran’s Memorial as reasons for the boom. SYHA costs just $900 a year for most kids, compared to $1,200 to $1,400 or more for some surrounding towns, and $2,500 to $3,500 for select clubs.

Guardia, whose son plays for both SYHA and a private club, says there are both good and bad aspects of select leagues. She says that unlike in surrounding towns, getting sufficient rink time to practice has not been a problem because she has a good relationship with the major select club in town, the Boston Stars, and its president, Igor Gratchev.

“On paper, we’re competing for the same ice… but he runs his program, and we run ours,” she says. “He’s grown the program fast…. It’s something we have to be observant of to make sure we don’t get pushed out.”

Gratchev, a former pro hockey player from Russia who founded both the Stars and Igor Hockey, declined to comment for this article.

George Scarpelli, program developer with Somerville’s Recreation Department, agrees that allocating ice time hasn’t been a problem for the past year since the city took over control of Veteran’s Memorial. If there is a conflict between SYHA and the Stars, he says the city will usually side with the community league. Ice time issues figure to be even more rare once the new rink is completed. Both leagues pay the same price for ice time – $175 per hour, or less than half the cost of adult leagues.

Brian O’Donovan, vice president of SYHA and board member of the Greater Boston Youth Hockey League (GBL), says that the drain due to select teams has indeed hurt town programs. Even in Somerville, the number of players was low enough five years ago to spark discussions about combining with clubs in Cambridge or Charlestown, says O’Donovan. And though SYHA seems healthy today, USA Hockey’s decision to allow younger kids to play in select leagues has had an effect at the younger levels, which could hurt the program at large in the future.

“What’s happened in the past two years is now kids are leaving the Mite and Squirt programs [which are for players under 10], and it has hurt our numbers,” he says.

Bonney, however, said he thinks parents are still more likely to register their youngest players with town programs first, where they can learn the game. “[Town] programs will always survive,” he says. “It’s the best way to get introduced to the sport.” He likens a player moving to a select club to a Somerville Public Schools student leaving for a private school.

Another effect of select leagues is that town-based teams can’t always count on having its best players at every game. O’Donovan, a firefighter whose own kids play in both the town league and a select league, says that if there’s a scheduling conflict, many parents will choose the more expensive select league games, leaving town teams in limbo.

“We play a lot against South Boston and Charlestown Leagues,” he says. “We’ll beat them some weeks 7-1, and then other weeks, they’ll beat us 8-2.”

Allen, the high school coach, goes so far as to say that USA Hockey – the national organization which makes the rules – is “trying to ruin town hockey” with the most recent rule change. He says select teams have turned youth hockey into a business, taking the best players away from community-based leagues.

At least for now, SYHA seems to be holding its own. Bonney, for one, chooses to minimize the conflict. Instead, he focuses on those whom both programs primarily exist to serve: the kids. “Either way,” he says, “at a very young age kids are getting introduced to a very positive activity that keeps them healthy and active.”

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On Nov. 2, 2006, the 4-month-old Somerville Life Sciences Collaborative (SLSC) hosted a morning gala titled “Meet the Stem Cell Experts.” SLSC, consisting of members of Mayor Joe Curtatone’s administration, representatives of Tufts University, and Bedford Stem Cell Research (17 Herbert St.) director Ann Kiessling, saw the event as an opportunity to tout the city as an ideal growth spot for the thriving biotech industry.

Two internationally-known stem cell scientists addressed a buzzing crowd. Kiessling took advantage of the opportunity to tell both Somerville residents and industry aficionados about the work her small nonprofit was exploring in Davis Square. Curtatone pitched Somerville as perfectly dynamic, close enough to Boston and Cambridge to benefit from their life science and research bases yet independent enough to offer a unique urban character to any biotech company looking to call the city home. And Somerville, he said, wanted them to call it just that.

“We’re trying to capture and really evolve the potential of a life sciences industry here in Somerville,” he said.

At the time, in addition to Bedford, the city’s biotech base included Thermedical Inc. (35 Medford St.), which develops systems to assist in the treatment of cancer and heart disease, and Plectix Biosystems, which was not a biotech company itself but sold software to biotechs across the country. Cambridge’s Biogen Idec. also had some office space in the city limits. Today, little has changed in the landscape except that Plectix went out of business with the recession.

SLSC has gone in a similar direction. Kiessling says she and Curtatone haven’t spoken in “two or three years.” She was surprised to hear of Thermedical, as she’s repeatedly asked the city for a list of life science companies within the city limits, to no response. Though Bedford, whose lease was set to expire in March, has agreed to stay in Somerville for another three years, Kiessling doesn’t know if she’ll make the same decision in 2015.

Biotechs need other biotechs nearby in order to thrive, be it through shared research, shared equipment, or by simply attracting others of their kind. Cities, meanwhile, benefit from the increased property values – and thereby increased tax revenues – research and development space yields. Further, those high-end commercial taxes could be the key to relieving residents of their share of the tax levy burden, which increased 38 cents in Somerville this year to $13.09 per thousand dollars in assessed value.

Kiessling has been pushing for an expanded biotech industry in Somerville since those first SLSC meetings and, dismayed, she still doesn’t see it happening. “I can’t do this on my own,” she says.

Organic growth?

One floating theory is that the biotech industry will come to Somerville when it’s good and ready. State Rep. Denise Provost thinks that there’s only so much room for biotech in Cambridge, and if Somerville clears the space for those businesses, it stands to reason that they’ll eventually cross the city limits.

“There’s under-utilized land in the Brickbottom and Boynton Yards areas of the city that are going to be opened up,” she says. “They may not be right on the doorstep of MIT, but they are a strong continuation of an existing biotech area. It’s a logical expansion of East Cambridge.” The Inner Belt and Brickbottom neighborhoods have been identified by the Curtatone administration as spots for high-end development.

The City’s decision to terminate Waste Management’s (10 Poplar St.) lease, effective this coming October, is meant to stimulate commercial development in the area ahead of the Green Line extension stop planned for Washington Street.

The increased transit opportunities that the Green Line represents will also play a role. Chris Pirie recently earned his doctorate from MIT and his start-up clean chemistry company will move into lab space in Cambridge this year. Pirie says he never considered Somerville as an option, primarily because it did not offer easy public transit access. Similarly, Thermedical founder and president Michael Curley says the lack of train access is his only major complaint regarding his Somerville location, and Kiessling says one of Bedford’s advantages in Davis is the Red Line stop.

Assembly Row’s development figures to further factor into Somerville’s biotech development, at least in theory. Wig Zamore, a founding member of both Mystic View Task Force and Somerville Transportation Equity Parnership, can rattle off the reasons Assembly is well-suited to the research and development field. First, the Orange Line station will put Assembly within an easy commute of all seven major research institutions around Boston, as well as all of its hospitals. The waterfront and potential green space the area offers are also very attractive to these companies. But as Assembly Square’s big box stores and a movie theater set the early tone for the empty space, time will tell whether Assembly developers Federal Realty Investment Trust (FRIT) are suited for and committed to the high-end projects – office and lab space – biotech companies require.

“The foundational pieces are there,” says Zamore. “We need to continue to focus on the features of those high-employment buildings.”

Zamore speaks strongly of the opportunities Assembly represents for Somerville, but cautions that attracting high-tech companies is not as simple as build-it-and-they-will-come. “There are probably 50 cities in the United States positioned to compete like Somerville is,” he says. “But it’s not just there for the taking…You have to compete for it.”

City, state, developer

Representatives of the administration and FRIT say they have worked to lure biotechs to Somerville. The state’s capacity for influence appears fairly minimal.

“You have to be proactive,” says Curtatone. “You can’t just wait it out.” The mayor says he is open to any number of ways to lure biotechs to Somerville, from tax breaks for high-tech start-ups to zoning adjustments to campaigning for Green Line ground breaking. “We’ll do anything to make us more competitive,” he says.

City spokesman Tom Champion says the optimism the city and Bedford shared in 2006 is still alive on the administration’s end with the Green Line apparently inching closer to breaking ground and Assembly nearing further development. By Curtatone and Champion’s estimate, the city has positioned itself

to attract high-tech businesses like biotechs with the work it’s done since SLSC founded and subsequently folded. The legwork, they say, has been done. Soon it may be time to see results. FRIT’s Boston president Don Briggs, meanwhile, says Assembly could “absolutely” be a spot for biotechs. It won’t, however, be a spot for start-ups. Briggs does not foresee Assembly offering the kind of incubator space that could propel start-ups into real life science players, something Kiessling claims she had spoken with FRIT and Curtatone about in 2006.

Instead, FRIT hopes Assembly eventually attracts companies that have outgrown their start-up space in the urban core, be it Somerville or elsewhere, but do not want to move to the biotech friendly MetroWest. They are actively trying to court companies that have already made it big, Briggs says. Last summer, pharmaceutical giant Vertex strongly considered setting up in Assembly before deciding on the South Boston waterfront. That Vertex even considered a not-yet developed Assembly may be a good sign for its development as a biotech hotspot.

FRIT, however, has always focused on residential and retail space, and has little experience building for research and development. Briggs says FRIT is willing to form partnerships to develop this sort of space, or that it could learn to develop it on its own. However, he says, Assembly’s first phase will see further investment in residential and retail properties. Whether the base this provides will ultimately prove attractive to life science firms will remain to be seen. Briggs says he is betting that it will.

At the state level, Provost says, there’s not too much that can be done. Government-funded bodies like the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, which give grants to life science players across the state, rarely give to start-ups or even big business, but instead channel their resources into higher education.

Even if the legislature wanted to change the way these organizations operate, it couldn’t; they are considered quasi-autonomous from the government, protecting them from the political will. Provost says that continuing to work towards implementing the Green Line extension is the most tangible way the state can assist Somerville in developing its economic base, biotech or otherwise.

Somerville’s benefits

Indeed, Somerville seems to have plenty to offer the biotech industry. Thermedical’s Curley says he set up shop in the city because rent was more affordable than in other urban spots, but he’s found other benefits. Being located near MIT, Harvard and Tufts has helped Curley attract workers right out of school. He also says the city’s atmosphere is workplace friendly. “Somerville is very nice,” he says. “There are a lot of good places to eat or from which to cater lunches, which helps the work environment.”

Kiessling agrees; Davis’s restaurants and shops present a stark contrast, she says, to Kendall Square, which offers little in the way of social options for its legions of scientists.

That sentiment is shared by city hall. Curtatone even suggested that efforts to market Kendall as a spot to “live, work, eat, shop and play” may be directly deriven from his oft-recited refrain of Somerville as a “great place to live, work and play.” “They’re copying a great city,” he says. “Just as we’ve looked to Kendall to see how to create great industry. They’re finally looking to Somerville to see how to create exceptional neighborhoods.”

The difference, of course, is that Kendall is already packed with acres of high-value research and development property that bring Cambridge jobs and tax revenue. For Somerville to benefit in the same ways, it will need to play host to similar developments.

Ahead of the curve?

In April of 2007, Kiessling and city hall split the costs of a table at the BIO International Convention in Boston, hoping to lure companies to its pastures. They came back empty-handed, and Kiessling came back a bit empty in spirit as well. “Around that time,” she says, “people on the Board started asking me just what I was getting out of [the partnership].”

The mayor says the early partnership has helped position the city moving forward, but Bedford isn’t getting any younger. At worst, Bedford chose a poor home if it wanted to be in a biotech-rich community. At best, it’s ahead of the curve.

“We’re just happy they chose Somerville as a home,” Curtatone says. “There’s so many stories about companies like Bedford Stem Cell that started in Somerville and couldn’t stay here…We want to set the environment not to just get companies started in Somerville, but to grow them here.”

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Lou Cohen and Lou Bunk

By Eli Jace

An artist can hook an idea from anywhere in the sea of creative thought and turn it into something grand, or something shy and minimal. When Lou Bunk bought a new refrigerator he found an intense joy – not in the new slick shelving units, or extra fruit and vegetable bins – but in the tall binding logs of Styrofoam that outlined the refrigerator inside its box. “I felt like I passed through some door in my life,” he says. Bunk made instruments from the Styrofoam, wrapping six or seven rubber bands around each block.

Bunk, 40, and Lou Cohen, 74, are co-directors of Union Square’s reliable monthly concert series, Opensound. The two have been heavily involved in the experimental music community in and around Somerville for years. Sometimes they play together as 2lous, with Bunk on Styrofoam and Cohen twisting nun-chuck Wiimotes to shape warbling tones.

Opensound instills a freedom in the performers. The sounds heard are impulsive and nonlinear, falling anywhere between free-form noise, electro-acoustic instrumentation, percussive patterns, free-jazz, and even an exploration of the silence between all that. In short, anything goes. “One thing Opensound does is provide a venue for people who want to try out something new,” Bunk says. “In that sense it’s truly experimental.”

The roots of the series came up at the hands of  Tim Feeney, a new classical music percussionist who noticed a void in the music scene around town. “Tim saw something that wasn’t there and wanted to create it,” Bunk remembers. After scattering a few concerts around the Boston area in 2005-06, Feeney took a job at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He decided to pass the torch on to the two Lous, leaving only one condition. “Tim said, ‘You’ve got to have it in Somerville,’” says Bunk, “which I was happy with.”

Both Bunk and Cohen had worked separately with Feeney on various projects before, so the union was natural. At the time, Bunk was on the board for the Somerville Arts Council and with the aid of a few Local Cultural Council grants, he and Cohen were able to keep the series stable. They found a perfect backdrop in Third Life Studio (33 Union Sq.) and have since consistently put on a monthly show, except for an annual summer break in July and August.

Cohen, a student of legendary avant-garde composer John Cage, handles publicity, Bunk watches the finances, and both curate the shows. They band together groups of noise-making sorcerers, feedback conjurers and vocal manipulators. “We’re always having powwows” to figure who should play the next show, Bunk says. A majority of the performers are from Somerville, but their reach has extended up to Maine and down to New York, as well as into Boston’s other surrounding cities.

Bunk, with a grinning Cohen looking on, demonstrates how the Styrofoam instrument works, slicing a viola bow across the corners of the packing material. When played slowly and tenderly it sounds like a menacing twister off in the distance; when played with force it sounds like those hungry velociraptors searching the kitchen in Jurassic Park. “It’s out of tune right now,” jokes Cohen.

“I discovered I could use this very simple material because it has resonant properties in it,” Bunk explains, gazing through thick wide lenses. The bow angles over back and forth bringing on a rushing tide of cringe-noise.  “There’s a nail-on-the-chalkboard thing going on, but there’s also a lot of expressive possibility.”

Born generations apart, the two Lous have taken different paths to end up in the same spot. Bunk, who grew up in Connecticut, started playing guitar in rock bands and quickly began improvising with structure. After tooling around in the years after high school, he decided to study music at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) where he found avant-garde classical music. “It just opened my mind,” he says. “I was blown away that there were people who had done this one hundred years ago and I was trying to do this on my guitar.”

He immersed himself in the genre. After finishing up at CCSU in 1996, he left for St. Louis. Enrolled at Washington University for two years, he scooped up a master’s in music composition before returning home. In 1999, he moved to Somerville and took the commuter rail to Brandeis University where he went on to receive his PhD in music  composition and theory. Bunk has called Somerville home ever since and currently commutes from the city to Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, where he teaches music. His collection of homemade instruments includes such novelties as the Scratch-O-Lin and the Tower of Electro-Acoustic Flim-Flammery. He played his Styrofoam with Flandrew Fleisenberg for Opensound’s February edition.

For Cohen, born in New York City, the path to Opensound was not as direct. By age 11 he was interested in classical music. In high school his math skills shined through, but his love was embedded in composing. Upon graduation, he arrived at an important decision: math or music.  “I ended up at MIT,” he says quickly, “and the crisis only got bigger for me.” He took a six-month leave of absence from school in 1958 and returned to New York where he studied composition under Cage at The New School.

“I was really enthusiastic about what he was doing,” Cohen says. “He made noise legitimate.” Cage went far beyond the constructs of song, shedding layers to the barest of elements, relying on atmosphere rather than melody, the prospect of chance rather than rhythm, and sometimes finding nothingness. His most famous and controversial piece, 4’33, literally makes music from the air. “Cage, in a lot of ways,” adds Bunk, “is the Grandfather of all this.”

Before his time with his mentor ended, Cohen asked for a little advice. “’You’re a very talented composer,’” Cohen recalls Cage telling him, “’but you need to know, I cannot make a red cent as a composer.’”

Those words led Cohen to complete his Bachelor’s in Math from MIT in 1959, which steered him toward software. He worked at Digital Equipment Corporation as a software engineer, then as a development consultant until the company went under in 2002. In retirement, he put a few concerts together in Boston with fellow Cage student Christian Wolff, but mostly wrote music in isolation.

An avid astronomer, Cohen built an observatory in his Cambridge backyard only to dismantle it a few years later. “I decided I was getting too old to screw around anymore,” he says. “I had to do music full time.” As the accessibility of personal computers and synthesizers became widespread, he saw his chance and took it. Using open-source program Csound, Cohen writes lines of code to get a desired sound; he then alters it with the whip and whirl of a Wiimote.

“The way I produce music now is completely dependent on writing software,” he clarifies. “To understand how to work with sound, my knowledge of math is the absolute basis of it.” He plays Opensound March 10 under his alias, any Bee, with Steve Norton, Matt Sampolis and Walter Wright. It will be their first performance together. The final show of this season, June 9, features Variations III by Cage, performed by the Emerging Voices, in celebration of the artist’s centennial. (He died in 1992.)

With the nearly weightless Styrofoam block cradled in his arm, Bunk drags the bow across for an encore. It sputters and hops down the edge, then slides. “I found what seems like a limitless amount of sounds I could make with this,” he explains. He plucks a rubber band a few times that bounces muttering staccato notes into the room, and then returns to sawing. “Because it’s a bow you can articulate, you can make rhythms, you can stretch things out.” He pauses, before getting too lost in his work. He admits, “Of course, having the artistic sensibility to want  to do something like that helps, too.”

For the most part audiences are ready to embrace the strange proceedings at Opensound. “They know that you don’t get to hear this stuff in a lot of places,” says Cohen. “Typically the musicians start and the place gets dead silent.”

“Of course, there are people who come to see their son or their husband play,” Bunk says. “Sometimes those people are the ones most surprised because maybe they don’t know what little Johnny’s been up to since he moved to Boston.”

Bunk’s laughter then rolls out into the air colliding with Cohen’s admonished cackle as my own polite wheezing fills any leftover space and right there, on the spot, our own spontaneous symphony takes off, then finishes in silence, like it never was, without a trace.

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Walking past the shuttered Veterans of Foreign Wars Dilboy Post (371 Summer St.) one evening, neighbors of  Summer Street resident Tom Bok spotted his name on a sign hanging from the parking lot fence. It called for Bok to spend time in the brig, and listed his home address.

Bok has become the reluctant de facto spokesperson for neighbors who have fought for three years to stop a project that would give the veterans a new post and bail out a developer who has struggled for a decade to construct a condo building that would overshadow the neighborhood.

The Post was ordered closed last November. The condo project  was approved a month later. In February, the Dilboy was struggling with yet another ordered closure as the plans for their new post sit in legal limbo.

Bok said the sign bearing his name marked a low point in what  has become viewed as a conflict between veterans and residents. “It’s threatening to have your name and address posted on someone’s house who’s pissed off at you,” he said.

Where patriotism meets condos

Bok is one of several neighbors who have stood against the prospective developer, Roberto Arista. Since the initial condo proposal in 2001, residents have maintained the scope of the plans have been too large for a neighborhood characterized by single- and two-family homes.

Three lawsuits, from residents and Arista, followed. In 2009, Arista  altered course. He offered to build the Dilboy a new home if the Post would lease its land to provide space for a combination Post-condo development. This would bring the project away from its original footprint in the neighborhood, which had been re-zoned by the Board of  Aldermen in an attempt to block the development.

“This [Post] has become antiquated for their needs and would  need serious refurbishing,” Arista’s attorney Richard DiGirolamo said during the first meeting with neighbors and Post members at the Dilboy. Pointing at a brightly colored artist’s rendering, he added, “This  would be their new home.”

Wrapping the condo project in with a VFW Post only added to  neighbors’ concerns. From that point on, VFW members and neighbors were put at odds.

While none of the neighbors has ever publicly said they were  against a new Dilboy Post – many said they supported one in theory – their opposition to plans of a 29-unit, three-story condo also meant opposition to the new VFW Post by default.

Three years ago, the neighbors didn’t know Zoning Board chairman Herbert Foster’s father had survived Pearl Harbor and joined the  Dilboy upon arriving home from the war. Nor did they know city officials would let several required environmental reports and payments for zoning applications slide, or that the state would eventually define  the Dilboy as a firetrap.

The more the neighbors learned, the worse things became for  the Dilboy. And the worse things got for the Dilboy, the more likely it seemed the condo project would be approved.

What counts

In the wake of the Post-condo deal, neighbors began researching Arista’s history inside and outside of Somerville. What they found did not  bode well. Arista had built five developments in Somerville, using a variety of subcontractors. Two developments wound up in litigation stemming from alleged construction flaws. A project he started in Rhode  Island was completed under bank ownership after city inspectors refused for years to give needed sign-offs on the work. (Arista blames the  bankruptcy on the recession.) And, residents found, necessary environmental reports pertinent to the condo project were not submitted to  the city.

Somerville Planning Director George Proakis said he understands  why neighbors would be concerned. But the Zoning Board isn’t a historical commission, and he said it would be unfair and illegal to judge developers on past work.

“Zoning doesn’t consider (those issues),” he said. “At the end of the  day, what counts is the quality of the plans in front of us. It’s up to the city to make sure what gets built meets these plans and building codes.”

At a June ZBA hearing, Post Commander Bob Hardy responded  to the back and forth by laying out the stakes. “[The Post] cannot exist in our current state,” he said. “Without this current project, there is no future for the George Dilboy Post. The Post will close.”

Blowing the whistle, and blowing back

As Arista’s past and the City’s attitude toward the developer faced  more scrutiny from neighbors, even more questions arose. Certain  activities, such as allegedly renting out parking without reporting the  income and hosting events without an entertainment license, raised questions about their ability to even enter into a real estate agreement  with Arista in the first place.mum

In September, the acrimony that had been brewing between the Post members and neighbors boiled over. Calls were made to federal and state officials asking whether they knew the Post wasn’t up to fire code. In the aftermath of a 2003 nightclub fire in Rhode Island that killed 100 people, Massachusetts began requiring clubs of a certain  capacity to install sprinkler systems. Instead of forcing the Dilboy to comply, the city allowed it to skirt the law for seven years, until state officials began dropping by.

The veterans pushed back. Retired attorney Ed Brady spoke out  against the neighbors’ opposition at a ZBA hearing, later sending cease and desist letters to the most vocal neighbors. Residents also accused Brady of taking down license plate numbers around the neighborhood.

In an email, Brady said residents’ whistle-blowing constituted abuse.  “Public participation does not condone these nefarious activities,” he said. “Any alleged code non-conformities were not crimes.”

As for the accusation of stalking neighbors, he said the sighting was  misconstrued. He said he walked down Hawthorne Street taking notes. Among those notes was the number of American flags on display. Brady counted 10, which he said showed “the opponents to the new proposed Dilboy Post complex did not speak for all the abutters and neighbors.”

Bok said he didn’t understand that logic. “I don’t really see any  connection between flying an American flag and taking sides on this particular issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s as simple as saying people who are flying American flag are standing with the Dilboy.”

In November, the Post had attempted to reduce its occupancy by putting up a wall between the basement and function hall. One message scrawled on the cinderblock read, “Go Dilboy Forever Will Never Die.”

Days later, the Post was ordered closed.

‘Vote for us’

Dec. 7, 2011 was the final ZBA hearing before bringing the project to a  vote. It was also the 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Just before the meeting began, DiGirolamo handed over a check to pay for Arista’s most recent applications, which City officials admitted they had allowed him to not pay. Residents considered this added ammunition to their testimony that the project was too large and that the City had slanted the process in the developer’s favor.

Several people expressed support for the project. They spoke to the debt they owed the Post for nearly a century serving the city. Following a presentation of a proposed cast-metal veterans memorial that would be built alongside the new Dilboy, supporters cited patriotism as reason to approve the project with one simply pleading, “Vote for us.”

Testimony either way seemed even. But absent from all but a few testifying in favor was support for the 29-unit condo development, a fact noted by board member Danielle Evans, who broke down when explaining her vote against the project.

“This whole process has been the most depressing thing ever,” Evans said. “I’ve seen the neighborhood torn apart and I hate it.”

Just before the 4-1 vote in favor of the proposal, Ward 6 Alderman Rebekah Gewirtz asked the board to slow down. “It’s time to ask the hard questions,” she said. “This is only going to tear the neighborhood further apart.”

Foster, though, didn’t conceal his frustration as he explained his father’s history with the Dilboy and the effects of the shutdown. “I’m proud to vote for the veterans,” he said.

“Their post is closed now because someone felt the need to call the fire marshal,” Foster added. “This is the only way they’re going to get a new post.”

A new appeal

A few weeks later, residents who had previously fought the development in court filed two separate appeals to the ruling. Both appeals are based largely on two concerns of the neighbors:  what they consider an erroneous interpretation of the zoning regulations that allow for the combined use, what they say is apparent favoritism shown to the VFW by the City.

“The Zoning Board has turned into a veterans commission,” neighbor George O’Shea said after the vote. “They’re just looking at how to  serve the Post. The zoning was not a part of the decision, and the only people who brought zoning into the argument were the people who voted against it.”

Meanwhile, the Dilboy continues to struggle with state regulators. In January, the state suspended the Post’s liquor license. How the Post will navigate the liquor license situation and fire code issues remains as unclear as the future of the condo project.

One recent morning, Dilboy Post member Ron Patalano cracked  open the door of the closed club. He deflected questions, saying that no one is sure when the Post will reopen. On Hawthorne Street, the same street Brady studied a few months earlier, only one house was flying an American flag.

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PHOTOS BY IAN MACLELLAN

The Somerville Youth Development and Boxing Club (SYDBC) will take some major steps forward later this month, and not just in the ring.

Sure, the club’s top young fighters are heading to the Golden Gloves competition in Lowell, their title aspirations evident in their six-day-a-week training. Then there’s club member Rashida Ellis, who will travel to Colorado Springs to fight for a national title in her age group after a November victory in Portland, ME earned the 16-year-old a New England title.

But January is also when the club plans to implement the youth-development goals it formed in October when it partnered with the city in the basement of the Edgerly Education Center (11 Otis St). Community service projects, tutoring services, job placement assistance, and substance abuse education will all commence this month, according to Somerville Youth and Volunteer Services Coordinator Nancy Bacci.

“We thought for the fall, we wanted to get the club up and running and build relationships with the kids,” she says. “We’re eyeing the turn of the year to get these [programs] running.”

The Somerville Boxing Club has existed in some capacity since 1977, but has struggled to make rent and had been without a home for two years prior to its reopening. City-owned property at Edgerly meant the opportunity for a partnership: The club gets free rent and the city gets a like-minded partner to keep kids off the streets and push youth initiatives – hence the addition of “Youth Development” to the club’s name.

A year ago, the Edgerly basement served as city storage; the removal of a defunct street cleaner proved one of the more difficult tasks in transitioning the space into a gym. Today, it is still in upstart mode; the club just got all of its fitness equipment running at the end of November and its boxing equipment, all donated, is pre-used.

Still, the club currently has more users than it ever has, says Norman “Stoney” Stone, one of its original founding fathers and the manager of former World Boxing Association Heavyweight Champion John Ruiz (a product of the club). Of its 130 members, 120 are considered youth.

It’s not hard to figure out why more are coming: With no rent to worry about, the club has been able to offer free access — in exchange for a small community service commitment — to Somerville’s prospective boxers under age 21. “It’s a dream come true,” Stone says. “[The city] gave us a home back in Somerville.”

Bacci has reached out to Tufts, UMass Amherst and Harvard’s community service programs to enroll their students as tutors in all subjects. She is especially excited to bring in Tufts student athletes, since they are required by Tufts to fulfill community service commitments. In this sense, as she believes they’ll serve as strong role models to Somerville’s youth.

“So many of our members have grown up with Tufts in town and dream of going there some day,” she says.

SYDBC members will be required to fulfill two hours per month in community service projects. Bacci is in the process of organizing the projects, but says they will be large in scale and involve the entire club, as opposed to individual efforts; she expects neighborhood cleanups to figure into the workload. This not only ensures that all members are participating, but also establishes a communal atmosphere for the members.

The club will also offer substance abuse and job placement classes. They will be led, respectively, by Cory Mashburn, the city’s Director of Prevention Services, and Bacci. The substance abuse programs will be offered both to members and their parents. The job placement programs will be designed to help young members find summer employment, build resumes and prepare for interviews. Bacci and Stone think these programs all mesh well with the boxing element. “It’s a holistic approach,” says Bacci. “Its everything that goes into raising well-rounded youth in Somerville. We want them to be strong in all areas and be strong members of the community.”

Some members are already benefiting from the club, even without the new programs in place. East Somerville resident Willy Samayoa, 16, credits his improved anger-management to his training. “I control it now,” he says. “I had to. You can’t stay like that.” Samayoa also says his grades have gotten better since he began using the club. That’s the sort of story Alderman-at-Large Bruce Desmond hoped to hear when he got involved with the project in early 2011. After the club approached Desmond, the great grandson of the owner of Lowell’s first boxing gym, he worked to gain the Mayor’s support and secure the Edgerly basement. “A lot of kids need discipline,” he says.

“Boxing provides it. They need to know it’s important not to act on certain urges. We teach them that here.”

This month, with its new youth development programs set to begin the club will teach its young members even more.

Club membership is free to Somerville residents under 21-yearsold, $20 per month for youth from other cities and towns, and $30 for participants over 21. The overwhelming majority of the members fall into the Somerville-based, under-21 group. The Golden Gloves competition will be held Jan. 13 and 17 in Lowell.

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On a bright morning in September, a man in a green shirt and sunglasses crossed Broadway. A quarter-mile away, at police headquarters (220 Washington St), Deputy Chief Paul Upton watched the man dart between two cars.

“We obviously don’t usually do this,” says Upton. He shifts to another screen showing an SUV cross through Davis Square. “We don’t have people downstairs all day long just using the cameras.”

During the past three years, Somerville police have relied on a network of nine surveillance cameras. Upton calls them “a second set of eyes,” used for emergencies rather than Big Brother-like monitoring.

But the man in the green shirt likely has no idea that police headquarters has the ability to watch him jaywalk. And with the department looking to expand the camera network soon, few seem to know the cameras were here in the first place.

Pan-tilt-zoom

Installed with a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Mayor Joe Curtatone’s approval in 2008, no announcement ever came from the city about where the cameras were, or why they were here. Around that time, a city spokesman told the Somerville Journal only that cameras where placed where there was “a history of vandalism and graffiti and other crimes.”

The cameras, equipped with five viewing angles and capable of panning, tilting and zooming are constantly recording, but their data is wiped clean every 14 days unless it’s needed for a case. A dozen people have the password needed to use the zoom function – and those without the password can easily override it if they catch an incident as it’s happening. Upton stressed that no inappropriate usage of the zooming has ever been found during the department’s monthly usage audits.

After stories appeared in local newspapers about the $4.6 million grant for the cameras — shared among nine cities and towns in the area — including Brookline, Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Quincy, Revere and Winthrop — Somerville’s Board of Aldermen expressed anger at not being consulted. Cambridge and Brookline responded by temporarily switching them off or establishing a trial period. The closest Somerville came to a reaction was a Board of Aldermen hearing in March 2009, about six months after the cameras had begun operating.

At the meeting, a dozen residents and State Rep. Denise Provost decried the city’s secrecy as a civil liberties issue. Some noted that since other cities’ police their installation showed “disrespect” for the public. “It’s going to be a got harder to put the genie back in the bottle now that the cameras have been installed,” he said.

One other thing came out of that meeting: In a transparency move, the city announced that anyone could make arrangements to enter police headquarters, see what the cameras are recording, and get DVDs for a fee. While that policy answers questions about what the cameras are seeing, it also begs a crucial, and potentially frightening, question: Who, exactly, is watching what’s happening on Somerville’s streets?

Results

More than two years later, the police department’s explanation of why the cameras are necessary focuses more on traffic than on crime. In fact, Upton downplayed the earlier assertion that the placements were strategically chosen for monitoring crime; instead, he says, the locations are based on vehicle traffic and evacuation routes. “It’s one more tool in the toolbox,” he says. “Our focus is on keeping the city from getting in gridlock, and if it does, we are going to be able to get emergency personnel to where they need to be.”

A lot depends, too, on where the cameras are located. Pointing to the cameras on top of La Quinta Hotel (23 Cummings St), the site of several drug and prostitution busts and a murder in 2009, Upton noted that the cameras were used for their views of both I-93 and Liquid Natural Gas tankers that dock in Everett, which he said are watched as possible terrorism targets.

Upton doesn’t deny, however, that the cameras are also a crimefighting tool. Cameras in Davis and Union Square have helped to both solve crimes and monitor them — or parts of them. Upton noted that after a robbery in Davis last July the cameras missed the actual incident, “but we got the bad guys running. It corroborated a part of the victim’s story.” Another instance was a report of a man with a gun in the Dunkin’ Donuts across from the SCATV building (90 Union Sq), where a camera is perched. Police were able to zoom in and monitor the situation before units arrived.

While the cameras are readily visible to anyone looking for them, some are more obvious than others, to the point of possibly deterring crime. Upton said crime data shows the camera near the bike path in Davis has had that effect. “We’ve had very little crime down there,” he said. “Bad guys aren’t stupid.”

Other anecdotes Upton shared, however, seem telling in their ambiguity. While not able to give details, he said footage was being used in a grand jury case to prove a witness had lied. He also said the westward facing camera on top of 25 Highland Ave has proven useful for watching high school students. “We’ll get word there’s going to be a problem after school, and we’ll be there (monitoring the cameras),” he said. “It’s another set of eyes. We can see a problem before it gets out of hand.”

A public conversation

Standing outside of Somerville High School (SHS, 81 Highland Ave) during a recent craft sale, 2011 graduate and current Bucknell University freshman Siobhan Murray says that while cameras inside the school were a fact of life, she never knew about the police camera nearby. “I know there are cameras in the high school, and we were OK with that,” she said. “I don’t really care personally, but if [the police cameras] were in my neighborhood, I probably would. I’d keep that in mind when I go out.”

At least one group tuned in with police issues in Somerville was also surprised. Patricia Montes, executive director of immigrant rights group Centro Presente (17 Innerbelt Rd), had never heard of the camera network. “It makes me worry,” she says. “I really would like to have a public conversation with the police to talk a little bit more about this – about why they’ve been using these cameras and why they want more.”

Ward 6 Alderman Rebekah Gewirtz, who initiated the Board of Aldermen’s public hearing on the cameras, wants aldermen involved in the process before more cameras are installed. Her concern about civil liberties violations has been “tempered,” she says. Gewirtz has not yet seen data showing the decrease in crime around Davis Square, her ward, but said, “If that’s the case, that could be a compelling argument.”

Montes would like for the police and city government to allow the public to have input on the network, adding, “This is information that should have been made public in order to have a more democratic government, that includes us in the decision-making processes of this city.”

In the meantime, the monitor station at police headquarters remains open to the public. So far, the few people passing through had only been looking for footage of traffic accidents they’ve been involved in – without any luck.

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Photo by IAN MACLELLAN

By Eli Jace

Sea monkeys, x-ray spectacles and dirt from Dracula’s castle are a few of the things Michael J. Epstein and Sophia Cacciola have thought about – and written about, and tried to collect – since starting their fourth band, Darling Pet Munkee, last spring. “We write songs about items sold in comic books,” Epstein says of the subject matter on their new CD, Glows in the Dark! They play Radio (379-381 Somerville Ave) Jan. 14 for the CD release.

Epstein, 34, and Cacciola, 27, not only share a house in Porter Square, but three other active bands. “We each have our primary band,” Epstein explains. His being, ahem, The Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library (MJEML) and hers being, wait for it, Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling (DNFMOMD). Then there are their side projects – “fun outlets,” as Cacciola calls them, the latest of which is Darling Pet Munkee: their most serendipitous and weirdest venture yet.

DNFMOMD at the Regent Theatre. Photo by Eli Jace.

The project came into view last spring when a friend in Lowell needed a band to record in a pinch. Cacciola and Epstein, with Catherine Capozzi from the band Axemunkee, jumped in the car to help the friend out. During the drive, the scheme of writing about comic book ads was conceived; within 15 minutes their first song was born. The experience working with Capozzi prompted them to schedule a second recording session that would create the songs on Glows.

Cacciola and Epstein each moved here from the far reaches of New York – Cacciola from the Finger Lakes region and Epstein from Long Island. “Where I grew up is all shopping malls and highways and underdeveloped,” Epstein says. “It was not for me.” While attending grad school at Northeastern, Epstein followed a friend into Davis Square regularly. “I eventually found myself having no choice but to move here,” he says; by 2005 he was a full-time resident. Cacciola arrived in 2001 and found work at the now-defunct CD Spins stores in Harvard and Davis Square. “That was my musical education in a lot of ways,” she remembers.

The two met in 2001 at an open mic session at Club Passim in Cambridge. They each tried songs-in-progress for an unknown audience. “It’s where we got our stage-legs,” Epstein says. “We did that for years to hone our craft.” The immediacy of the open mic was challenging but ultimately rewarding. “It was a good workshop tool,” Cacciola says. “I would write a song that morning, play it at night and see what happens. It was good for developing.” One day, Epstein offered to record Cacciola’s acoustic songs. Since then, they’ve been musical mates, bound by song. They moved in together in 2005 and married a year later. Their large kitchen acts as a practice space and recording studio.

They share a love for deep, remorseless songwriters. Their Mount Rushmore of inspiration would have the carved faces of Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen. “We really like clever lyrics and repetitive songs,” Cacciola says.

MJEML played their first show at Radio in early December, donning their usual librarian garb. The eight-member troupe filed on stage with drums, guitar, clarinet, bass, ukulele, keyboards, cowbell, and even a rain stick to match their brand of hoppy folk rock.

Guided by Morrisey from The Smiths, Cacciola injects her post-punk rage into DNFMOMD. She thumps the drums and sounds like Kim Gordon with a smokier baritone but slightly better manners. Epstein plays bass. The project is based on the 1967 secret agent TV show, “The Prisoner,” with each song corresponding to an episode. The video for “Episode 1 – Arrival,” directed by Theodore Cormey, is a scene-byscene recreation of the show’s opening segment. Last year it appeared on one of Time.com’s yearend lists, landing sixth among the Top Ten Creative Videos.

In December they played Arlington’s Regent Theatre, dressed in black with white trimmings. From her drum set, Cacciola commanded every beat and measure while Epstein unleashed a firestorm of unforgiving feedback. At times it was like chainsaws were falling from the sky and Cacciola’s voice served as a warning — the soundtrack to sweet revenge.

The Somerville scene has kept the musicians’ calendars full. They performed at ArtBeat last summer and have played the Farmer’s Market in Union Square. “The city has done a nice job of having various arts festivals that support bands,” Epstein delights. The support is mutual. The two penned and recorded a song for the Shift Your Shopping holiday campaign last year and have paid homage to a wild neighborhood turkey. “We make sure we also do projects that are reflective of where we are,” he says. “I’m a big advocate of Somerville,” Cacciola adds. “I love it.”

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Photo by Ilan Mochari

BY ADAM VACCARO

Waste Management (WM), a $14-billion company with an excellent reputation for social responsibility, operates a trash transfer station at 10 Poplar St in the Inner Belt-Brickbottom area. Widely recognized for its employee treatment, specifically its openness to the veteran, LGBT and minority workforces, WM has also made the city more than $7 million in the last 10 years, according to Mayor Joseph Curtatone.

But in October, the city notified WM that its lease would be terminated, effective October 1, 2012. The reason? The transfer station smells. The plant is ugly. The plant is outside the cusp of Boston. And Somerville wants to look attractive to commercial tenants when the Green Line extension opens its Washington Street stop. “It’s a very important symbol to remove and get rid of the transfer station,” says Curtatone. “[The station] is just bad symbolically for the city. It’s at our front door.”

Changes at the top

Shortly after the City notified WM, it hired Michael Glavin from the Boston Redevelopment Authority to head up the Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development (OSPCD). Glavin took the place of Monica Lamboy, who had resigned in June despite – according to a source close to OSPCD staff – not having another job lined up. Before Glavin’s hiring, the city fired Director of Economic Development Rob May. As of early December, May’s position had not yet been filled; Glavin said he and Curtatone were working in tandem to find a successor. Michael Meehan, the city’s spokesman at the time of May’s dismissal, told Scout that the shifts in personnel did not indicate a shift in economic planning and philosophy. (Meehan himself would join May and Lamboy in leaving the city at the end of October, saying the fast pace of the job was keeping him from his family.)

Curtatone contradicted Meehan, saying the city was excited for Glavin’s new ideas. “We never stay the course,” he says. “When it gets quiet around here, I don’t like this.” He also refused to single out a priority among the three transit-oriented sites in Inner Belt-Brickbottom, Union Square and Assembly Square, instead declaring, “All three are priorities for us.” “There are a lot of projects,” says Glavin. “That’s part of the reason I came here. It’s very exciting.”

One source told Scout that the inconsistent focus from the top is the reason for OSPCD’s turnover, and that the turnover means the staff needs to frequently restart projects. Brad Rawson, the city’s Senior Planner of Economic Development, acknowledged that the “once-in-a-century” chance to redefine the city through new public transit puts pressure on the staff, but he sees that as a positive. “It’s both exciting and kind of intense for all of us,” he says. “It’s both a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous challenge.”

WM’s locale is what OSPCD calls a catalyst site: a spot that could spark organic economic activity. Where WM stands now, the city envisions a 260,000-square-foot mixed-use lot for both municipal services and private office space. Down the road, the city sees McGrath Highway grounded and the Inner Belt-Brickbottom area as a flourishing neighborhood with new residential space and the growth businesses the city has been trying to establish for years. Chamber of Commerce CEO Stephen Mackey estimates that job numbers in the neighborhood could, over the next 20 years, multiply five-fold, from 1,000 to 5,000. The 1,000 jobs there currently are predominantly hospitality, light industrial, warehouse, distribution, automotive and transportation related, with very little retail (2 percent or less, according to Mackey).

In the long term, the city sees Somerville’s neighborhoods as a series of these mixed-use developments. “All of this, of course, results in an increased tax base for the municipality,” notes Tufts urban planning professor Rachel Bratt. Increased commercial taxes, in particular, are essential to a city like Somerville, which desperately needs to rectify the imbalance between its residential ($7.1 billion) and commercial ($1.1 billion) tax bases. According to OSPCD documents, the city hopes these numbers read $8.6 billion residential to $2.3 billion commercial by 2019. These numbers are stronger than more suburban towns like Arlington ($6.5 billion residential compared to $294 million commercial) but pale in comparison to Cambridge, whose businesses reportedly account for nearly 64 percent of its tax levy.

The Messianic Green Line

If commercial taxable value is the reason for WM’s dismissal, the Green Line – and, specifically, its proposed Washington Street stop – is clearly the impetus. We all know the numbers: When the extension and the Assembly Square stop come in, 85 percent of the city’s residents will be within a half mile of the T, compared to 15 percent now. That percentage is crucial to the city’s hopes of establishing transit-oriented mixed-use developments around the new train stations – and thus to its hopes of attracting entrepreneurs and growth businesses.

All of that, of course, is dependent on the Green Line actually happening. One State House source says she finds it very unlikely the project will start on time. Curtatone rebuffed that perspective. “The GreenLine will happen,” he says. “It will happen because it legally must happen. And the Governor realizes you leave a lot more money on the table if you don’t build the Green Line.” Mackey met these two ideas in the middle, saying the entire project may be delayed, but there should be enough funding to at least have a first phase – the Union Square and Washington Street stops – operating on time. A state report released in late November and published in the Somerville Journal says construction will begin on the Union Square and Washington Street stations in the summer of 2013.

What about the here and now?

But summer 2013 is still more than one year away. In the meantime, the city will have to deal with the immediate loss of revenue from the WM lease. And according to Inner Belt-Brickbottom project leader Melisa Tintocalis, the city will likely be responsible for cleaning the lot after the company moves out. Curtatone says the city has budgeted for this hit and “is prepared to absorb” it. There is no timetable for when a new project may break ground at the site, according to Glavin and Rawson. Commercial taxable value in the city has dropped nearly two percent since 2011 (from 12.9 percent to 11 percent). The city has lost nearly 1,200 jobs in the same time.

Alderman-at-Large Bruce Desmond attributes this to a slow-moving economy nationwide, but says the city needs to make it easier for new businesses to open. “We’re trying to deal with that,” he admits. For Rawson, the Green Line and transit-oriented development remain the key. “The Green Line’s a game changer,” he says.

Waiting for the Green Line may not be good enough for some, though. For a decade, the city has been talking about the importance of developing a biotech industry. It has had little success. To this day, Bedford Stem Cell Research (260 Elm St), a nonprofit that does not pay land taxes, remains the only life sciences entity in the city. If there are others, Dr. Ann Kiessling, Bedford’s director, would like to know about them. She has repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked the city for a list of other life science organizations within Somerville’s 4.1 square miles. She and her staff say they love their Davis Square location, but biotech companies require others of their kind in order to sustain themselves through shared research and growth opportunities.

This has her wondering if she’ll be able to stay. “We have to make some decisions,” she says. “We need to grow. We’re a bit constrained here.” Her assistant, Ryan Kiessling, told Scout that Bedford Stem Cell is considering moving to Waltham when its lease expires in March.

Growth companies, like those in biotech and life sciences, are clearly on the city’s wish list. At Assembly Square, for example, the city still envisions a future mixed-use site, home to high-tech and biotech businesses, among others. This remains the city’s projection for Assembly Square, even as its early returns indicate big-box dominance and a preponderance of outlet stores. Inner Belt-Brickbottom is also seen as a potential spot for growth businesses. But it will take years before these developments can really happen, first requiring retail and restaurants to lay the economic foundation.

That may be too long of a wait for an entity like Bedford Stem Cell. Even if that’s no loss for the city’s commercial taxes, it means its only life science interest would be gone. And in a collaborative industry where, as Kiessling puts it, “all boats would rise with the tide,” that leaves little impetus for a for-profit biotech to set up shop in its stead.

Small victories

Though sorely lacking in businesses employing more than 150 people – only 20 of Somerville’s 2,153 companies fit that description – the city has succeeded in luring smaller entities. One new restaurant, La Brasa, will open in East Somerville under the direction of popular Greater Boston chefs Frank McClelland and Daniel Bojorquez. The duo, in a joint email to Scout, say they see their project as important for economic development. “We expect to see [East Somerville] grow and develop around the people who live there, and at the same time invite entrepreneurs and urban pioneers to build on that strong foundation,” they write.

In addition, Scout has learned that East Somerville resident Rebekah Powers, a protégé of well-known restaurateur Barbara Lynch, aims to open a French restaurant in the same neighborhood. By the end of 2012, East Somerville could be a dining hotspot.

Moreover, the city has helped harness Artisan’s Asylum (10 Tyler St) and sprout & co. (339R Summer St) as creative hotbeds, with the former having leased out all of its space in the old Ames Envelope building. OSPCD’s Stephen Houdlette says high-tech businesses are starting to take note of the Ames building as a low-cost, big-space work area, but was not aware of any competition for the space Artisan’s Asylum currently occupies.

Other new businesses in Somerville have mixed reviews of their city partnerships. BikeBoom (420 Highland Ave) owner Roy Ornath says the city has been helpful and made him feel comfortable since setting up shop over the summer. Katie Rooney, owner of 3 Little Figs (278B Highland Ave), says her new coffee shop hasn’t had a lot of city support, but she hasn’t asked for much. And, she says, “a lot of City Hall folks have become customers.”

Knucklebones (196 Elm St) owner Mitch Zeisler, however, has experienced business administration on both sides of the Cambridge-Somerville border and says Somerville “is not conducive to entrepreneurs starting a business.” In Cambridge, he says, things as simple as getting a bicycle rack or more recycling bins are more easily accomplished.

For better or worse, however, these businesses are now set up in Somerville. But what about those revenue-generating growth businesses? Their arrival in Somerville, it seems, will depend on the Green Line, and thus could be several years – maybe even decades – away. It would be unrealistic to expect development overnight. The city doesn’t. “We’re acting today,” says Curtatone, “with an eye on tomorrow.”

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Photo by Ian Vestrand

BY NANCY BERNHARD

In the spring of 2010, Dolores Porziella assigned her class of seventh- and eighth-grade English-language learners at the Winter Hill Community School (115 Sycamore St) The Diary of Anne Frank, the classic story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam. The students adored the book, but one day, one of them said, “What does a Jew believe, anyway?”

Porziella asked Assistant Rabbi Eliana Jacobowitz, 39, of Temple B’nai Brith (TBB, 201 Central St) to visit the class. Jacobowitz answered the children’s questions about Jewish belief, but her stories about her own family’s history in the Holocaust riveted them. “She made the history come to life,” Porziella says. “It allowed them to draw it to their own home countries,” many of which were also torn by war and disaster.

One of the stories Jacobowitz told was about how her grandparents found one another again after the war, when each thought the other was dead. Her grandmother, Marisha, had been in a concentration camp, and returned home to Lodz, Poland to look for family. She found her husband Tuvya’s brother Shlomo, who had fought in the Jewish Brigades of the Red and British Armies. They heard that Tuvya was dead. But then as they walked down a street, they met someone who told them that he had just seen a man who looked exactly like Shlomo at a nearby address. They went to the house and found Tuvya there.

The children wrote letters to their new friend afterward. One girl wrote, “I think it was magical that your grandparents found each other. It’s like a fairy tale and they were very lucky. I’ve learned a lot of things. And I think that it was unfair to Jewish people to be treated like that just because they believed in something different.”

This ability to connect with everyone, whether they are just learning about Judaism or have been practicing their whole lives, is Jacobowitz’s great strength. Longtime TBB member Debra Weisberg participated in a Kehillat (community) service Jacobowitz created in November, and enjoyed how the Rabbi drew people in using the weekly Torah reading. Abraham was wandering in the desert, so she invited anyone “who doesn’t know where they’re going” to say a blessing. He was also having trouble leaving his possessions behind. “Everyone who needs to throw out a few things, it’s your turn,” said the Rabbi.

Jacobowitz’s own spiritual journey has not been a straight line from A to Z. But her blend of learning, warmth and creativity has proven irresistible to the city’s only synagogue at an important crossroads in its history.

To make the world a better place

Jacobowitz was born in Tel Aviv, the oldest of three children. When she was five years old she urged her secular parents to light candles on Shabbat. They politely refused.

She was a child when Israel made peace with Egypt in 1978, and became captivated by the idea that peace was possible between Israel and its neighbors. Her brother Leon, now a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University, remembers her leadership in political youth movements, even meeting members of the Knesset as a teen. She was “always trying to make the world a better place, not through religion, but through politics,” he says. Her family moved to the suburb Ra’anana, where she went to an arts high school, concentrating on graphic design. She also began reading about Jewish mysticism. When she was 18 – and began her mandated stint in the Israeli army – she flashed a bit of her rebellious, art-school side. She was thrown out of her first Army unit for staging The Rocky Horror Picture Show, complete with men in corsets. When her army years were done, Jacobowitz wanted to go to art school or none at all; her parents insisted she learn a profession. To please them, she enrolled in law school, but also enrolled in fashion design school at the same time.

Meanwhile, her hopes for a peaceful Middle East grew, embodied by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Accords he signed in 1993. But those hopes were soon dashed; she was present at the Tel Aviv rally where Rabin was assassinated by a fellow Israeli in 1995. “Sadly, many of us felt our hopes for making a difference in the Middle East and for bringing peace died too,” she says. Her path toward a spiritual life, at this point, was still not clear. It was not exactly smooth sailing for a woman to become a religious leader. Throughout her life, Jacobowitz was told that when women pray out loud, God cries in sadness. In Israel, where organized Judaism is largely controlled by Orthodox sects, women are not allowed to set foot on the bima, or pulpit, in most traditional synagogues — let alone become rabbis. These divisions manifest themselves in basic consumer interactions, too: On one occasion, a bookstore refused to sell her a religious book, telling her it was out of stock even though she could plainly see it on the shelf.

When she was 26, during her final year in law school, Jacobowitz took a hiking trip to the Rockies. She met an American man who was working on an Indian reservation, got married, and moved to Colorado Springs.

Backyard treasure

Her interest in spirituality and mysticism was rekindled in the mountains by Native American practices. She attended community college and then the University of Colorado, doing office work, teaching Sunday school and flipping burgers to pay for her degrees. One day, while reading a book about Jewish spiritual practice, she thought, “Instead of trying to understand intellectually, why not just light Shabbat candles?” She did and found it ineffably powerful. After all her seeking, she remembered that she’d been born with a religion. She cites the revered Jewish teacher, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “We travel the world looking for a distant treasure that is buried in our own backyard.” But her path was still not clear, because of what she’d been taught about the role women were supposed to play in Judaism. It took years before Jacobowitz believed that she could be a practicing Jew without having to surrender the inclusive – and innovative – parts of herself.

Moving to Boston

Her marriage ended after three years. She moved to Boston for two reasons: She was familiar with the city (and loved it), having frequently visited her sister, who’d lived here in the early 2000s; and she’d decided, all things considered, to become a professor. She came to Boston University to study medieval Jewish mysticism, initially intent on getting a PhD. But once she spent time in academia, she realized it wasn’t a fit; she wanted to practice spirituality as a leader, as opposed to teaching it in a classroom. She finished her studies with a Master’s degree in 2005. Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, provided crucial support in her decision to dive more directly into spiritual life; she was accepted to Hebrew College Rabbinical School in Newton.

Her background differed profoundly from those of her 12 classmates: She was fluent in Hebrew and knew Jewish history, but had never touched a Torah scroll or stood on a bima – and she had difficulty praying out loud. By contrast, her American classmates had grown up with women rabbis. (In the United States, Reform Judaism began ordaining women in 1972, Reconstructionist Judaism in 1974, and Conservative Judaism in 1985. Today more than half of seminary students are women.) One classmate taught her to breathe deeply and sing out, while another would bump into her when she was praying too softly.

A groundbreaking temple

In her third year of rabbinical school, she saw an opening for an education director at TBB. From the very first interview, the match was clear. “It resonated with how I feel that a Jewish community should be selfdefined, that it should encompass and mirror the town that it serves,” she says. A snapshot of TBB makes it clear what she means: Like Somerville, TBB has a diverse population and an independent spirit – so independent, that it has been unaffiliated with traditional Jewish sects – Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist – since the 1978 retirement of Rabbi Leo Shubow. (TBB had been Conservative.) The community has a comeas- you-are informality and progressive social beliefs, while still adhering to traditional observance.

Few members grew up in the congregation; most chose it. This self-chosen mix represents the future of American Judaism, according to Ellen Smith, Associate Professor at Brandeis and co-editor of The Jews of Boston. “The congregation is a strong example that given opportunities, this diverse Jewry can and will choose Jewish life.”

The best estimates put the city’s Jewish population between four and five percent, or 3,000-4,000 Jews, which mirrors the percentage in Massachusetts. For most of the 20th century, the Jewish community was made up of Eastern European immigrants. It centered in Magoun Square and up Broadway to Winter Hill. Founded in 1903, TBB built its Byzantine revival-style Central Street building in 1922. But in the decades following World War II, many of Somerville’s Jews moved to the suburbs. The congregation lost a generation. By the late 1970s, only a couple of dozen elderly members remained, joined by the occasional student.

In 1980, a philosophy graduate student named Phil Weiss began attending Shabbat services at TBB. Morris and Ada Kleiman, longtime officers of the congregation who owned a pharmacy on Walnut Street, were the heart and soul of TBB. They were struggling to keep it going in the face of the suburban drift and Shubow’s retirement. Weiss had grown up in a Conservative congregation, taken courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and studied in Jerusalem. The Kleimans saw in him a leader that he did not yet see in himself. Morrie Kleiman asked

Weiss to read the Torah during Shabbat services. Eventually, Weiss was leading almost all the services. Thirty years later, he says with characteristic understatement, “no one has asked me to stop.” Weiss goes by the title darshan, or teacher, but everyone calls him “Phil.” During the day, he teaches philosophy and religion at Wheelock College.

By the mid-2000s, the congregation had stabilized around 170 families, but the young people who – along with Weiss – had helped to revive the congregation were now entering their fifties. TBB needed another youth infusion. One other issue troubled the TBB community: The beloved old building had three floors separated by steep stairs, and no easy place to add an elevator. The lack of handicapped access was increasingly untenable. To afford an elevator, the congregation would have to grow, raise dues, and fundraise. The Board of Directors committed to raise the money in 2008, just as the recession began.

Into this climate stepped Jacobowitz, who was hired in the summer of 2008 to lead the congregation’s Sunday school and adult education programs.

Traditional enough and free-thinking enough

As she approached her graduation and ordination in 2010, the Board of Directors decided to hire Jacobowitz full-time, believing that she would attract new congregants – and perhaps, down the line, the increased membership would help TBB afford an elevator.

New members have indeed come. Enrollment in Sunday school has doubled. Davis Square resident Katia Green tried a children’s service with her daughters two years ago and was delighted to find a young woman rabbi who is “smart, vibrant, funny, and has an edge to her.” Green says that Jacobowitz creates events that neither “dumb down” adult content nor bore kids. The synagogue feels like a seamless part of her family’s Somerville community, always nimble and reinventing itself.

Jacobowitz – today more than capable of praying out loud – leads children’s services on the High Holidays free of charge to the community, and hundreds of people attend. She has helped start support groups for new parents, a social group for teens, and created a weekly Friday night prayer service. TBB member Morissa Wiser is particularly grateful that Jacobowitz has helped create a venue to “talk about parenting, talk about life, get to know one another, make a connection.” Her two-year-old daughter Yaela gets excited when she hears they’re “going to see Eliana!”

Congregant Abby Laber feels an intellectual affinity with Jacobowitz that helps her better connect with Jewish practice. In her Yom Kippur sermon this year, the Rabbi talked about God’s judgment in a refreshing way. Laber remembers her saying that, in dreams, “you visit God, and you judge yourself in the presence of God.” This aligned with Laber’s understanding of dreams, and made Yom Kippur more accessible and meaningful to her.

An informal formality

In a 1988 oral history of TBB, Weiss was asked about the advantages and disadvantages of hiring a rabbi for such an unconventional synagogue. He said that rabbis often bring formality to a congregation, and TBB’s great strength is its informality. “The question is whether they make rabbis who are informal enough and innovative enough and ‘socially wonky’ enough, and also traditional enough and free-thinking enough to fit us.”

It took a few decades, but just such a rabbi has arrived.

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By Shannon Cain Arnold

Parking in Davis Square on a Friday night is a pain.

Yes, I just realized this.

No, I’m not a newcomer to the city who is just learning the ropes. I’m a 30-year-old defector who’s just now learning what she really misses about her former city.

I never knew how difficult it was to park in Somerville because I never had to. I lived 15 minutes from the T and on three major bus routes. We had a grocery store, restaurants, coffee shops, hardware stores and half a dozen of our good friends within a short walk or bus ride from our apartment. In the winter, my husband and I walked three miles to the farmers market at the Armory (191 Highland Ave) just to get a little outdoor exercise.

I moved to Somerville when I was 25, a suburb-raised yuppie who wanted to spend her last few carefree (i.e. child-free) years in a fun, energetic city. Somerville fit the bill perfectly. It was affordable on my nonprofit salary; diverse; big enough that there were always interesting things going on; and small enough that I had a sense of community.

My husband and I loved the city so much that – three years ago – we decided to stray from our house-in-quiet-suburb upbringings and put down roots right here. We made an offer on one of the only single-family houses we could afford – a cute barely-three-bedroom with a tiny paved yard on short-sale in East Somerville.

We waited almost a year for an answer.

Then we started thinking more seriously about having a family. The house seemed smaller and more in need of expensive repairs. We realized our commutes to work would be nightmarish unless the fabled Green Line came. We thought about our own backyards growing up, and all the time we spent outside just running around and playing imagination games.

We withdrew our offer on the house. But we kept looking for the next two years, still hoping that our dream house would come up in Somerville. It did, many times – except it was always about double the highest price we could afford. We started to rethink our priorities, realizing most of what we loved about the city was what we wanted for ourselves – not necessarily for the children we hoped to have.

Sometimes I say we stopped being selfish. Sometimes I say we lost our nerve. We widened our search by fewer than 10 miles on either side and found half a dozen houses we loved within the first month.

Since May, we have lived in a small town 10 miles northeast of Somerville. It’s a place most people would call charming, and it is. Our first child is due in March. He or she will have a yard with a swing-set and a playroom in the house. We can still walk to a lot of things, including a downtown and a beautiful lake. But somehow it’s not quite the same. The buses don’t run on weekends. There are only three bars in town, and almost every restaurant is Italian.

I miss Somerville, but the truth is we can’t afford to go out every weekend anyway. And we’ve been busily settling into our new house and preparing for the kid.

One thing that drew us to our new town was that there seemed to be so many other young couples like us there. When I’m a new mom, I’ll be surrounded with other new moms with interests similar to mine.

But the one thing I underestimated is how boring it is to live in a place where so many people seem just like you. Though I am learning to leave behind many parts of my life in Somerville, I miss being surrounded by such a variety of people.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t pretend Somerville was a perfect melting pot. I know there are tensions and inequities, and that many long-term residents feel resentment – a good bit of it probably justified – against yuppies like me taking over many neighborhoods. But I was never at risk of thinking that my way of life was the only one.

Here in my new home, I have to work a little harder to connect with the wider world.

Needless to say, I’ll be searching for parking in Somerville many times in the years to come.

Shannon Cain Arnold lives in Wakefield with her husband Ryan and her three-year-old cat Doris. She is the communications manager at the nonprofit Discovering Justice (discoveringjustice.org). She has written for Scout about food access and insecurity (“A Seat at the Table”) and on innovative, interior design ideas for crowded, clutter-filled apartments (“Somerville’s Sweetest Spaces”).

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