Harrumph!

Gloomy prediction time…I’ll say Boston’s new bike-rental program fails. There it is and I would sincerely like to think I’d be wrong. My neck is on the block, particularly as a velophile (word?)

I’ll plug this on Harrumph! and Marry in Massachusetts, as it has both personal and political angles. I’ll admit if I’m wrong and folk can feel gleeful in calling me on it.

Under the urging of Mayor Tom Menino and the excellent dealing and managing from Nicole Freedman, the city’s director of bicycle programs, The Hubway rental system is not only zooming into reality, it’s still on its original schedule, likely this month. With the outside deals, bureaucracy, and finances, that’s close to a miracle (which we have come to expect from Freedman).

Even before the particulars, I was pessimistic on this program. It has worked in other European, Canadian and a few U.S. cities already though. Here though, I don’t see it getting enough ridership, nor making the vendor happy with income levels, nor adding substantially to the cycles on the streets, nor getting citizen respect for the property.

To the latter point, we brag about our huge college-student population, while paying for it culturally too often. The tales of disturbances and destruction abound. Far more than other cities, we see that bottles seem meant for peeing in to leave on streets and stoops, or to smash on roads or sidewalks. I recall that lesson when I commuted daily from JP to Southie by bike. I had to learn to avoid Columbus near Northeastern, particularly by the campus cop station, where broken, tire-ruining beer-bottle shards were the norm.

Prove me wrong, Boston, but I can easily see drunken, drugged or just nasty college students and other youth trashing the bikes in rental stations. What fun, eh?

Today, looking at the announced pricing structure, I think it is too similar to parking garages. In between only a few initial stations and the pricing reality, the system is not all that attractive. Fundamentally, it works only if you will start and finish in those limited locales and can get where you want to go in under 30 minutes.

The stations will be in what most of us think of as the larger downtown area, out to one here and there also in Back Bay, South End, Seaport, Fenway, Longwood, and Brighton/Allston. I don’t see the actual spots on the site yet, but it’s pretty sure they’ll be kind of like Zipcars and only sort of convenient. Yet, this is not Athena emerging from Zeus’ head fully grown. It’ll take many months to figure out the right station locations.

The nut starts out reasonably enough, with an annual $85 fee (introductory $60). Then the nickels and dimes add up very quickly.

Again, 30 minutes is the magic period (set your carriage-to-pumpkin clock). If you have an annual membership or are an ad hoc renter (Casual member in Hubway lingo), you can theoretically have thousands of 30-minute maximum rides a year for no charge. In fact, if the station locations and timing worked for you, it would make the most sense to go up to a kiosk and use a credit card to reserve a bike every time, so long as you kept to the half hour. Annual memberships come with the convenience of a key that lets you grab a bike, as it maps to your data.

In the real world, if you don’t end up in the midway of your trip at a station, you pay by the hour. Here the fees leap up to and then far beyond parking garages. They really, really don’t want you having a bike out for more than 30 or 60 minutes. The whole pricing card is here. A taste of the acceleration is:

And so it climbs by about $8 an hour for casual and $6 per for annual renters. It tops at 6 and one-half to 7 hours at $94 and $70.50 and then from 7 to 24 hours at $100 and $75.  Lord help you if you keep the bike over a day. Hubway will consider it stolen and truly put a parking garage’s rates to shame — $1,000 on your credit card.

If you think Nexflix’ 60% just announced gouging rates are absurd, this gives some perspective.

On the other hand, for a limited number of potential users, $85 for a year of bike use, zero maintenance, and practically unlimited 30-minute trips is such a deal. Truly.

I remain to be convinced that we’re collectively mature enough for the Hubway. I simply don’t have the faith in Bostonians that Menino and Freedman have exhibited here. In fact, announcing this program at City Hall plaza in April, the Mayor committed to the three Italians, adding U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano and Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone, to taking the first trio of Hubway bikes out of the racks.

Here’s hoping they prove me wrong.

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Probably all of us as adolescents had our cranky periods. Brookline never outgrew its.

Unless you live there, they are too good for you anyway. They don’t even want you parking there. They don’t need your damned tourist dollars. If you are from a neighboring town, why don’t you just stay there?

Speak to someone from Brookline and you are likely to hear how friendly they are. After all in schools, income, personal achievement and every other way, they are superior and have a lot of reason to be happy.

Brookline as a town makes its attitude plain on every street and road coming it. I think of it particularly as I bicycle around Eastern Massachusetts. (Fortunately for lesser mortals such as me, Brookline does not put up toll roads at its borders…yet.)

Other burgs in the area, such as Boston, Newton, Somerville and Cambridge, are different. Signs on streets entering those have this curious term that seems unknown in Brookline — WELCOME. Driving, cycling or walking into those ordinary places read WELCOME TO…

The Brookline version appears here. You are not welcome. You will not park anywhere in town for more than two hours, and there will be places that permit less time or none at all for non-residents. You will not park on the street anywhere overnight.

Go home. You don’t belong there.

It doesn’t work the other way, of course. Many from Brookline work in the financial district, medical facilities, corporations and universities of Boston and Cambridge.

You get a sense of the long standing of the Brookline attitude from its geography and governance. Brookline is a self-selected island of Norfolk County. As you can see from the map, it appears to be a thumb protruding into Boston’s bottom.

The rest of Norfolk County is to the South. Brookline refused to join Boston on several occasions, the last in 1873 when the town of West Roxbury agreed to annexation. Now Brookline is an exclave (not coincidentally sharing the first four letters with exclusive).

Back to bicycling, for all its snootiness, Brookline as a town is OK by riders. They don’t have nearly enough bike racks (goes with the car-parking attitude surely), but the cops there expect drivers to play nice with riders.

It has one nice, large park, plus the Olmsted site. We attend an old UU church there. The Brookline Village and Coolidge Corner areas have numerous OK, some good, but no great restaurants. (Note: Be very careful in the Village in the evening. Predatory towing services constantly monitor all off-street parking lots of closed businesses. They will get your car within 10 minutes.) It also has a concentration of kosher restaurants and bakeries.

Brookline never joined Boston, never formed its own county and apparently never got lonely for the rest of it body and buddies. It is content to float solo.

If you want to visit, bring quarters for the meters and for God’s sake, get out within two hours!

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, parking, Brookline, welcome

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Other former team athletes must recognize their own as swimmers do.  I don’t know what the telltale signs are, even for another previous sport, wrestling.

Swimmers exhibit frequent acquired idiosyncrasies. Even when we have no intention of hitting the water, we stretch by folding one arm over the head, with the biceps on the ear and pushing on the elbow with the other hand.

Among the more subtle indicators are developed shoulders, particularly for women. I think of a new bartender at Redbones in Somerville last year.  The usual small gang of old farts was on the stools like crows on a fence when she took our draft orders. She wore a typical summer tank top. When she returned I asked whether she had been a swimmer, specifically fly. She smiled, said yes and we talked our teams. She knew why I had pegged her from her build and said she could recognize swimmers sometimes too.

Another swimmer connection came several years ago at work. At a conference table with a dozen or so of us around, I ended up across from Nancy, whom I knew but not well. She was in charge of version control (ClearCase) and was a serious software geek. As documentation manager, I had a stake in her business because that product was the only one with a native recognition of the binary files for my department’s major development tool, Framemaker.

We went on about the products we were developing, test schedules and on and on. I moved slightly back from the table to cross one leg over another when I saw a swimmer tic. Nancy was alternately moving her big toes over the second toes and reversing that.

Swimmers are almost prehensile with our toes. It may be the strokes or the years of gripping the starting block edges. It may also have to do with naked feet. Nearly every other team athlete practices and competes with socks and shoes.

Swimmers generally can pick up objects from the floor and move them to a trash can or into a hand…very chimp like.

On the way out of the meeting, I asked about swimming and we too talked teams and strokes. Amusingly enough, her best friend in the company, a guy I worked closely with was irritated when I mentioned that I was pleased to discover a swimmer among all the runners around. I was not aware that he had a great pride in knowing Nancy better than the rest of us. He had no idea about her wet background.

Of course, he had no reason to know or notice. When he saw her gesticulating with her toes, he probably thought nothing of it. It takes one to know one.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, swimmer, sports, toes, idiosyncrasy

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I truly appreciated the precise, anal retentive assistant who set up the stage for Sen. John Kerry at his Tufts Fletcher School address. In his well dimpled tie and understated sports jacket, he looked for all the world like a grad student, maybe a student-government VP.

Honk. I was wrong on that. This week, at the other half of those policy addresses, Kerry had his stage in Lynn’s North Shore Community College prepared by the same precision team of one. I realized that this guy was on the Senator’s staff.

Moreover, so were the plants. Both stages has the same five waist-high plants in woven baskets. As befitting Halloween, the plants followed Kerry week to week, college to college, stage to stage.

I was at the Tufts foreign-policy address with my wife, who also noticed the amusing ballet of flag, sound baffle and mic fine-tuning. All three of us from Left Ahead! showed up this week for the economics version. Then we got a few minutes with the master afterward.

We three kings of Orient…no, that’s we lowly blogger/podcaster scum queued up for Kerry behind the local Salem rag in Lynn. To my delight, I got to meet the flag fine-tuner himself.

Jason is on the communications staff in Kerry’s D.C. headquarters. I told him sincerely how much I admired his attention to detail in turning each canton of each of the five flags in Somerville precisely the same. He ‘fessed up that there were a lot of small details related to sound, photography and vision that he paid attention to for each appearance.

It turns out that those were the same plants. Kerry’s folk rent them for aesthetics for speeches. I honestly had never thought that there were rental plants other then for offices and movies. Now I know and knowing is half the battle.

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My uxorial unit and I went to farthest Somerville yesterday to bathe in liberals gone, if not wild, at least demonstrative. A certain junior U.S. senator, a John Forbes Kerry, was up for a foreign-policy/national-security address.

The Cohen auditorium was bit inadequate for the interest level. Its 616 seats were overbooked. Kerry is bright enough, accomplished enough and important enough, but he’s no telegenic movie star or sex god. Yet Tufties are politically savvy and eager to hear a major player in D.C. put down the word.

The wonderful people on Kerry’s staff and Netroots Nation invited this pathetic blogger (not for Harrumph!, rather for the Left Ahead! podcast and Marry in Massachusetts blog).  Terri and Karen saved me two spots, or so I thought, and so I had on my invitation printout.

We arrived at about a quarter to 6 for the 6 p.m. speech. The foyer was chockablock with well-mannered young scragglies. It was like a scene from Blazing Saddles with lots of harrumphing.

The funnel overspill was the result of two petty bureaucrats disguised as campus cops feeling their transient authority. They’d call out that if you were not on the reservation list, you couldn’t get in, go back to your dorm. Then, there was a cry to have your ID ready.

I’m bigger than my wife, so I ran interference between the woe-begotten unreserved masses. However, let us never underestimate the ephemeral power of the foolishly consistent.

The vocal cop-like personage would have none of it. List is a list is a list. The 20-something woman had my name, but neither Terri nor Karen had provided my wife’s. She was thus persona non grata. She, her unworthy self, was not listed on the sacred clipboard sheets. I presented my confirming emails for two invites to the address and following reception. No cigar.

I recognized the blank expression on the cop from my military-family upbringing and my time as a newspaper reporter by Parris Island and the airbase. I’d bet this guy has been a staff sergeant, someone who knew how to take orders, someone who knew rules were rules, someone who’d take charge in lieu of a commissioned officer, and someone who thought only off-duty.

Towering over the petty tyrant and speaking to the ears of the two event organizers behind him, I won. A middle-aged woman with pearls stepped forward and said, “You are your wife are welcome. Come this way.”

She led us down to the fifth row reserved seats and God again was in his heaven.

The students were seemingly all busy with their electronics. Those who were not dicking around with their $600 video cameras were testing the acuity of their cell phone cameras from 25 feet to the podium. It appeared as though we were the only non-students in the hall.

The preparations were wonders of ant-hood before us. Four or five well-dressed students, the modern equivalent of the 1960s A/V squad, scurried here, then there, and back here again. They reminded us strongly of a busybody at our UU church who rushes about in the 15 minutes before the service. Liz turns the altar flowers the tiniest angle and steps back to the first pew to look before repeating the cycle. She then does the same with the chalice. Who knows what would befall the congregation if she did not?

In this case, it started with the mic height. Kerry is tallish, but not a giant. The young man with the closely cropped do and the drab New England suit jacket — looking for all the world like a member of Young Americans for Freedom — was the leading fussbudget. He adjusted and readjusted the mic for height and distance from the inside of the podium a half dozen times. He then turned each of the four American and one Massachusetts flags so they draped in matching patterns, with the canton of the flag facing frontward. Oddly enough, he ignored the five matching potted plants between the podium and stage front. Doing that could have consumed another 14 minutes to no noticeable effect. Finally, he visited and revisited the Plexiglas™ sound baffles on stands next to the mic.

He’ll be a real catch for a sloppy woman or man who needed an anal-retentive counterpoint.

We honestly had so much entertainment before Kerry appeared about 6:20 that the address was merely dessert.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Somerville, Tufts, Kerry

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First it was Ashmont, which was far too overpriced to attract buyers, and now let us consider Cabot Farms, apparently locked in some mysterious post-mortem struggle.

Pix: Click on an image for a little larger version.

Those of us on the southern side of Boston — JP, HP and Rozzie, not Southie — have oldster moments ruing the closing of Ashmont. Not only was that nowhere near Ashmont, but it was a portmanteau of oddments. Sure, there were construction supplies in the back, but that’s not what people came for. There was no need to head to the ‘burbs for a vacuum-cleaner bag. No matter how outdated or unusual your little sucker was, Ashmont had that bag. Likewise, it still carried the glass door knob sets, and if you had lights that used the big clear screw-in bulbs usually available only during Christmas, Ashmont had those all year. Hardware, housewares, electronics…whatever.

That looks like it will become a Staples. Yawn.

Apparently the owners finally relented a bit on their outrageous price, enough for a rich chain to buy in. The entirely forgettable replacement brings Natick right into Beantown.

About 10 miles north-ish in Somerville on the Medford line, another long abandoned business on another busy main drag looks to remain empty, despite eager customers. The Cabot Farms/On Broadway/Garden thingummy has become the stuff of whispered tales in Powderhouse Square. The view from 880 Broadway is through dirty glass. The view into it is of barstools which haven’t felt the weight of relaxed drunks for decades.

The skeletal marquee frame presages horrors that apparently have never happened there. The major Cabot Farms sign is replete with heavy undergrowth and its very own car door at the base.

The front is mostly what I insist on calling VFW brick — those glass blocks so popular at men’s clubs when the old guys gather to drink from the morning as heavily diffused light shields them from the world.

There is an abandoned function hall, The Garden at the other end, which apparently got a little use for wedding receptions and such a decade or so ago. The middle has a small, still used apartment set, which must generate enough income for building expenses. The northern side that was Cabot Farms catering and restaurant and then briefly in the 1980s, On Broadway nightclub, is the time capsule, apparently sealed for the past 20 years.

The building front has large poster-style musicians, Satchmo and Sinatra, with the implications of nightlife and vitality far more intense the Tufts area reputation. On the outside of the inner door glass is a sign reading, “PRIVATE PARTY PLEASE NO SMOKING INSIDE THE PREMISES.” That very late 20th Century attitude belies the best legends about 880.

There are whispered tales of politicians, mobsters and celebrities. There’s one that says it hasn’t been used since John Kennedy was last there.

What you can see inside has a great Cheese it! look. The classic post-WWII red barstools and gear left around suggests a panicked exit, followed by locking up…forever.

Someone I know who casually knows the owners has a more plausible explanation. The property seems to be imprisoned in some probate hell. I couldn’t find any record through the county of 880 changing hands, at least since 1974 when the online records start. The probate court doesn’t do online, except for currently scheduled cases.

Instead, this property attacts many interested potential revivifers. It seems they all get turned away. The property is not for sale. The owners responsible for the apartments say that the trust is not interested in selling. Oooo, the trust.

I can’t prove it (let if know if you have solid info), but it smacks of a family dispute. I can see greedy relatives across two or three generations all sharing in the inheritance that includes 880. It would only take one who figured that this is worth a great fortune (fat chance!) and holding up any settlement or division in terror that he will somehow be swindled out of what is rightfully his.

I like that version.

Meanwhile on Broadway, there’s a thriving haute Mexican joint, Tu Y Yo, a few doors away, a popular bike shop and around the triangular intersection several hopping restaurants. The ghost restaurant gathers dust, bidders and folklore.

It’s always sunset at Cabot Farms.

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