Pete Stidman

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

The Town of Brookline’s planning department is seeking to mend a few gaps in the bike path that runs along the Muddy River section of the Emerald Necklace. The path, leaving Olmsted Park at the northwest corner of Jamaica Plain, is a critical link to Longwood, Boston University, Cambridge and beyond for hundreds of JP cyclists and pedestrians who travel it every day.

One of the largest gaps in the path is the absence of any crosswalk or signal where the path crosses Route 9 coming out of JP. The situation has brought the ire of bicycle activists since the early ’90s and seems to be a perennial local story.

MISSION HILL GAZETTE

As long as tourists with little white socks and khaki shorts aren’t obscuring the view, it’s what people notice first. The dead bird.

It lays prostrate in a white, centrally-located, glass-enclosed, air-tight pedestal, and it forms the centerpiece of Henrik Hakansson’s “Cyanopsitta spixii Case Study #001,” an art installation at the Isabella Gardner Museum through Sept. 17. Hakansson is the museum’s most recent artist-in-residence.

The bird is exceptionally dead. The feathers are almost imperceptibly blue, its natural brilliant hue faded after decades of storage at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The application form Hakansson filled out to get the bird is just as carefully framed nearby.

BY PETE STIDMAN
GAZETTE STAFF

When green activist Gerry Wright couldn’t see the bottom of Jamaica Pond, he knew something wasn’t right.
“I noticed that the water was becoming murky,” said Wright. “Around the dock you used to be able to see 6 feet down easily.”
Blocking his view, he later learned from a specialist, was a large algae bloom.
In a letter to the Gazette, Wright, director of the Jamaica Pond Project, speculated that the bloom might somehow be connected to global warming, possibly created by less ice cover in winter months, but said that more monitoring was needed to find the true answer.

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

As the number of times a developer fells a tree in Jamaica Plain to make room for new construction rises, so grows the number of neighbors clamoring for chainsaw accountability. It isn’t necessarily a rule of thumb, but it’s happening.

When developer Gary Martell clear-cut two very old trees at 33 Bynner St., the JP Neighborhood Council (JPNC) scheduled a joint meeting between its Housing and Development Committee and Parks and Open Space Committee on June 20 to brainstorm ways developer buzzsaws might be checked, or at least put under a public review process.

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

FRANKLIN PARK—“I’m just nervous about doing a story,” said John Linehan, director of the Franklin Park Zoo. “They throw cats over the fence. They leave chickens in cardboard boxes. We get left in a position where we just can’t take anymore.”

The zoo cannot handle the influx of animals abandoned by irresponsible owners at its gate, but by that method at least one wayward rare bird has found a new home, and possibly, a new love.

Over a month ago, a perfectly regular-looking cardboard box left at the zoo’s entrance yielded an extremely rare pair of feathered friends. Inside perched a lesser green broadbill, a monogamous native of Asia with only 17 pairs in captivity in U.S. zoos, and a paradise tanager, native of South America and listed as a threatened species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List.

A small group of community newspaper reporters, web developers, graphic designers and I have been working on a new idea called the Alliance for Community Journalism. In the past few months we have put together the beginnings of an organization that would work towards fulfilling a number of goals, most prominently supporting locally-owned and owner-operated community newspapers, educating new reporters and exploring new ways to improve the interaction between local media sources and their readers, such as “citizen journalism.”

One of our early projects is simply meeting people and getting reporters together to hang out and talk. That's what's happening at JJ Foleys this Friday at 6pm. Call it a learning phase. We’re just in it to make new friends and listen to what’s going on out there.

A more ambitious undertaking of ours is the Boston Bee project, a web-based project that is already underway. That one is under wraps for now, but will become public in the next few months. To hear more about it feel free to ask us at the event at JJ Foleys this Friday night or give me a call at 617-620-1989.

Other members of ACJ have begun looking into grants that could fund our first workshops for reporters. Some of these will be aimed at Boston youth, others would focus more on reporters already in action. That’s it in a nutshell right now, as I said, we’re just coming out of the shell so anything is possible.

We’re always looking for new people to help us build this thing, just email or call if you’re interested.

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

FRANKLIN PARK—Heavy rains drew complaints, but did not thwart around 40 hardy park supporters who tromped out to the Franklin Park golf clubhouse to hear plans for re-generating the parks aging tree population on June 10. The Franklin Park Coalition (FPC), a mostly volunteer association that advocates for and leads volunteers into the park, presented a draft of their Woodlands Management Plan.

The strategy, estimated to cost $1.5 million over 10 years, calls for managing in-vasive species and improving soils to encourage natural regeneration of the forested areas as well as reworking the park’s path system and removing a number of sickly, threatened or dead trees.

Holding signs that read, “Children’s cheated, they should be defeated,” and “They say cut back, we say fight back,” an enthusiastic crowd of 40-50 people rallied and made their case heard bullhorn-style in front of Children’s Hospital in the Longwood Medical Area Monday.

Ana LaMarche and others asked through a bullhorn not only why she and three other members of the community were fired at the Children’s run Martha Eliot Health Center in JP on May 24, but also why they were “fired like criminals.” She and others present alluded to the possibility of “union-busting.”

JAMAICA PLAIN GAZETTE

This past Tuesday, one day after two fatal shootings and one fatal stabbing occurred in Dorchester, Mission Hill City Councilor Mike Ross presented a report detailing findings by the City Council’s special committee on youth violent crime protection. The re-port names causes and raises suggestions for stemming the increase in shootings, drug-related deaths and other violent crimes among youth.

The levels of youth violence in Mission Hill have fallen consistently over the years, but haven’t ceased to be an issue. A recent meeting of youth from Sociedad Latina and MissionSAFE at the Tobin Community Center had local kids talking about current conditions.

For a man who isn’t going to run for office, Al Gore sure is acting like a candidate in his new film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Even conservatives are talking about his potential as a presidential candidate for 2008.

And if he isn’t running, and he has said he isn’t, why all the deeply personal auto-biographical references in the movie? Why the repeated mantra, vote, vote, vote? Why the continual mocking of republicans without a single criticism of a democrat?

If the movie is tied up in the strategy for the 2008 election, it’s a good move. After all, the environment is the perfect trump card to use against a weakened republican party. Climate crisis can be, after many long years of suffering under stereotypes associated with the far left, a non-partisan issue, and even a religious one. Pulling the race-card with Katrina is powerful as all hell...