Pete Stidman

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It won’t tear up a velodrome, but it will make parade-goers stare with wonder. A 14-passenger, pedal-powered van chassis called the “Busycle,” introduced last summer at Boston’s bicycle festival by JP artist Matthew Mazzotta and collaborator Heather Clark, is now going nationwide—coast-to-coast. Their idea is not necessarily to promote busycling, but to present a great piece of art and listen to the stories it triggers.

“It’s an extension of the dialogue,” said Mazzotta, who sat on the dusty earth eating lunch outside the Busycle’s bleak, industrial warehouse location last week. “It doesn’t go really fast, it’s not really useful technology, but it brought all these people together. That’s the biggest gift of everything. We want to have an extension of that.”

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MOSS HILL—A wild coyote allegedly killed an 11-year-old dachshund named Betty on Calvin Road May 24.

“She was in the back yard at dusk,” said Betty’s owner, Miren Uriarte, in an interview. “She didn’t come back and we were whistling and calling. Then my husband saw a coyote walking off our driveway.”

“I just want people in the area to know so they can protect their pets and young kids,” Uriarte wrote in an e-mail to the Gazette.

Coyotes have been spotted on a number of occasions in JP, including at least one other dog-killing incident in May, 2005. In that case, a 12-year-old West Highland terrier named Maggie was seen in the jaws of a coyote. Reports of coyote attacks on family pets are becoming common in suburban and rural towns across the state, but less so in Boston.

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HYDE/JACKSON SQ.— Teachers from JP Head Start organized a hasty playground escape for around 70 children, ages 3 to 5, when an anonymous tip from a bystander advised them to evacuate Mozart Park at around 4 p.m. on May 18.

“We just barely got out of the park when we started hearing shots,” said teacher Kendra Buckli, who said she and 18 toddlers were only yards from the park when eight gunshots rang out.

“Initially they kind of did what we said,” said Buckli of the kids. “But I have one little boy who still asks, ‘Is the park safe? Have they stopped fighting in the park?’ and ‘Will the people in the park come here?’”

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As phone, internet and television technologies converge, behemoth telephone and cable companies are baring their claws and preparing for battle over “bundling,” or selling all three services in one package. Stations like Boston Neighborhood Network, which is soon to move to JP’s Egleston Square, may become collateral damage.

Verizon, AT&T and other phone companies are aiming to change the way they and cable companies like Comcast negotiate for the ability to rip up city streets and lay down fiber optic and other cable networks. (Read more)

Target: Japanese knotweed

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The third in a series chronicling Jamaica Plain’s invasive species.

Philip Burgess of JK International did not need to describe Japanese knotweed to the audience. The crowd of greenspace-oriented professionals, students and volunteers sitting in the front room of the Hunnewell building at the Arnold Arboretum had already been frustrated by its bamboo-like, reddish hollow stems and oval leaves for years.

“This little guy is tenacious when it comes to life,” said Burgess, pointing to a photo of the plant projected at the front of the room. “It is one of the most durable plants I’ve ever come into contact with.”

The photo showed a baby Japanese knotweed plant growing next to a steel-belted radial. The painted yellow line next to the weedling was the second clue that the knotweed does not need black loamy soil to grow. It was pushing up through a crack in road’s asphalt.

Mowing doesn’t kill it, and the clippings will take root even without soil, said Burgess. Spraying it only kills the top growth, and new shoots quickly replace those. Even the combination of mowing, then spraying into the stems doesn’t work, because the poison won’t travel far enough through its root system. As if that weren’t enough, the plant is also a rhizome. Dozens of plants can be connected by rootstalks underground.(Read more)

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A crowd of 40 to 50 concerned Latinos wearing everything from power suits to polo shirts with nametags gathered in the parking lot of the Martha Eliot Health Center (MEHC) Wednesday to support three Latina women who were fired without warning.

A spokesperson for Children’s Hospital, which runs the clinic, said that the three were terminated along with Executive Director Catherine MacAulay to resolve morale issues. However, MEHC representatives and some of the ex-employees hinted at racial tensions.

“I just want to know why,” said Ana LaMarche, an 11-year employee who was termi-nated from her position as the HIV/AIDS project coordinator. “Security came with me to my office and escorted me to the door.”

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Neighbors are strangely silent so far, but the mayor and one daily newspaper columnist are in an uproar over the proposed destruction of eight historic columns framing the entrance of Franklin Park Zoo.

Taken from the 1837-1847 Customs House downtown when that building received a new tower, the columns were placed in the park by the parks commissioner in 1917.

According to zoo director John Linehan, Ivan Myjer of the private company Building & Monument Conservation told the zoo that the columns were completely unsalvageable due to erosion caused by acid rain and moisture and the zoo sought funding and approval to take them down. Approval for the teardown was granted by the Boston Landmarks Commission in April. (Read more)

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Even though the sun shone through where the roof used to be, the sound of raindrops could still be heard inside the wreckage of the First Baptist Church. Water still dripped down from charred skeletal gothic columns and the rusted out light fixtures that dangled from the top of their arches. It collected in pools in offices and ran down carpeted staircases littered with crumbled drywall.

Standing on the island-like pulpit above a sea of crispy roof columns and debris crashed down over beautiful pews of black walnut, it’s hard to imagine the place new again. A once-grand piano is dry-rotted, moldy and covered with half-melted shingles. The organ that once could be heard outside of 633 Centre St. is reduced to a few rusty steel plates and a pile of ashes. But in front of the church, in the clean, white dou-ble-wide trailer with interior wood-paneling that houses the congregation these days, thinking ahead is the buzz.

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“They up and closed everything,” said one man as he walked down a deserted section of Centre Street on May Day, May 1.

“We need our immigrants back,” said his friend, dramatizing his plea with prayerful hands.

Nearby, in Hyde Square a steady line of cars entered the Hi-Lo Supermarket parking lot, only to circle confusedly and leave again after observing that the store was closed.

Jamaica Plain’s Hyde and Jackson squares area represented one of the city’s most organized blocs of immigrant businesses closed in solidarity with the "Day Without Immigrants,” a call for protest that emanated from Los Angeles to make a statement about immigration reforms passing through the US legislature...

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The second of a series of articles chronicling JP’s invasive species.

Hailing from Europe, northern Africa and parts of Asia, glossy and common buckthorn are experts at fitting in with a crowd. Other invasive species clumsily give themselves away with pretty flowers or unusual habits, but these two, also known as European buckthorns, would have you believe that they are just shrubs, minding their own business.

If that were the case, teams of volunteers in Franklin Park, including Northeastern University’s field hockey team and Social Capital Inc.’s youth council from Dorchester, wouldn’t have been attacking them with wrenches and hacksaws on recent Saturdays.