Pete Stidman

BOSTON COURANT

After four years of putting out their newspaper on pure volunteer power, the Fenway News board of directors has hired Stephen Brophy as editor.

“We still have to hold their feet to the fire,” said Brophy, speaking about real estate developers during his acceptance speech at the Fenway News annual meeting on June 14. “There are ways to be involved, and the newspaper is an essential part of that: a way for people to know what's going on and affect what's going on.”

On changes at the paper, Brophy is conservative yet ambitious. He is interested in bringing in new advertisers to support more pages, publishing a website and adding content that bridges the divide between long-term Fenway residents and the student population.

BOSTON COURANT

Investors backed by an Irish bank have been on a real estate buying spree along Newbury Street since late last year.

The transactions total $117 million to date, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, and the Suffolk Registry of Deeds. By all accounts, the bank and its investors are eager for more.

Using funds from the Dublin-based Anglo Irish Bank (AIB), UrbanMeritage, a newly formed real estate company, has purchased 11 retail-converted row houses on Newbury and Dartmouth Streets for a combined total of more than $46 million. They began buying in December.

BOSTON COURANT

Hot dogs are back in Copley Square.

A week after being removed to make way for lemonade and Italian ices on June 1, Doug Burrell and his daughter Adrean were back selling all-beefs and Italian sausages. However, Burrell said the absence disrupted his business, and bringing Big Daddy Hot Dogs back was an uphill battle.

“I was very upset that they were going to move me out. I was under the impression that I would have a permit through the summer,” said Burrell. “There's no fair system to make sure these permits go to individuals; there's no lottery.”

According to spokesperson Jan Goldstein of the Boys and Girls Club of Boston (BGC), hardly any competition arises over the permits, and Burrell's situation is a rare example of demand rising above supply. BGC manages vendor carts in Copley, the Boston Common and other parks under the Boston Parks Department's oversight. Only two vendors applied for any BGC location in 2006. Burrell was one of them.

BOSTON COURANT

For Bill Linehan, the new District 2 City Councilor, cozying up to his constituents is priority one.

Although he won May's special election by 551 votes, candidate Susan Passoni routed him in the South End. In order to fortify and hold his seat in November's City Council election, he will have to endear himself to voters across the district.

“We haven't decorated yet,” said Linehan walking into his modest wood panel and bare concrete office on City Hall's fifth floor. “But we've got the district map up.”

The map, the only decor tacked to the wall, is one he is studying hard. In the South End part of District 2, Passoni won 87 percent of the vote. In South Boston Linehan's margin of victory was not quite as powerful. He won 74 percent.

BOSTON PHOENIX

VIDEO LINK!

For cyclists who prefer to do their riding on thin air, the news spread fast. On April 26, MBTA backhoes ripped up the center of their community dubbed the “Fenway Trails,” a nest of bone-jolting jumps hidden in a corner of Riverway Park near the Landmark Center. The MBTA eliminated the jumps to make way for a side track off the D Line to aid in repairs and operations, says MBTA spokesperson Lydia Rivera. She did not comment on whether they notified or considered the affected riders.

“This must be how people feel when they knock down trees for apartments or something,” said Andrew Crede, 19, sitting on his tricked-out bike last Friday, looking blankly at the flat patch of raw dirt. “You know, like tree-huggers.”

Dorchester Reporter

A handful of prominent members in Boston's Haitian American community are calling on the city to defend detective Yves Dambreville in a civil suit brought against him and to let him get back to work.

"We can't stay quiet about this anymore. This is an atrocity that's happening inside the Boston Police Department," said Henry Milorin at a recent meeting of Dambreville's friends in the back room of the Unity Club on Dunbar Avenue. "They're so used to business as usual that they feel they can make any decision they want."

Business as usual is also what the friends of Dambreville say isn't happening. For similar and worse offences, they say, other detectives have gotten the equivalent of a slap on the wrist. They interpret the fact that the wagons aren't circling for Dambreville as a form of discrimination.

Boston Courant

Ned Codd and Jay Doyle of the state’s Executive Office of Transportation had difficulties getting through a presentation of four possible Urban Ring plans to members of the Fenway neighborhood on Monday. The sparse crowd took issue with plans to run articulated buses through the Fenway park system, insisted that some bus routes could be expanded sooner and, transversely, expressed a desire to skip buses altogether and develop rail.

The Urban Ring was first conceived over a decade ago to “connect the spokes” of the MBTA’s rapid transit system. It proposes a kidney bean shaped corridor encircling central Boston and running through Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Medford and Somerville. A newly added sprout would reach out to Harvard’s future Allston campus. Phase one of the project created the CT 1, CT 2 and CT 3 bus routes that run along parts of the proposed ring. Phase two will be one of these four Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) plans.

March 29, 2007
Dorchester Reporter

Governor Deval Patrick signed a $1.47 billion Immediate Needs Bond Bill late last week that included $100 million for the Big Dig's Clean Air Act payback, the State Implementation Plan (SIP). The Fairmount Commuter Rail improvements project is one of four projects in the SIP required to be completed by 2011, but there is still no official word on how much money will go to which project or when.

The speculation, shared by spokesperson Jon Carlisle of the Executive Office of Transportation, is that a portion of it will be spent on the design of three new stations on the line in addition to Four Corners Station, which is already being drawn up. The design processes could begin in the next several months.

March 8, 2007
Dorchester Reporter

Dropout rates in most city high schools are dismal. Jeremiah Burke High School's four-year dropout rate for 2006 was 28.2 percent, according to new numbers from the Massachusetts Department of Education. Noonan Business Academy (33.8 percent) and the Academy of Public Service (44 percent)- two of three schools housed at the Dorchester Education Complex- are much worse.

Ascertaining the cause of it all is about as simple as passing trigonometry without opening a textbook, but the folks at Boston Private Industry Council are getting some of the homework done. They've tried to contact all 1600 of the 2005-2006 school year's dropouts as part of a pilot program funded by the Carnegie Corporation.

In public schools, key is on closing 'achievement gap'

DORCHESTER REPORTER

In a Faneuil Hall speech given on Martin Luther King Day last month, Governor Deval Patrick lamented a development that threatens to nullify Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that spurred integration measures in America's school systems. Two lawsuits aimed at pulling the teeth out of the landmark precedent, one in Seattle and one in Lexington, KY, have reached the highest court.

"The United States Supreme Court is on the brink of rationalizing justice right out of the law," said Patrick, calling the possibility a "giant lurch back in its long struggle for equal opportunity."