My North End
Memories have a way of jumping and punching you in the face sometimes. Perusing Facebook tonight, a black and white photo of an old North End street in Boston stopped me. I recognized the corner store at once. Polcari's Coffee. Into my nostrils immediately came the mixture of coffee, spices, and all the dark brown, heady smells of the store. I found myself a little girl again, waiting inside a store with alluring sacks wide open with all sorts of coffee beans and legumes, while my mother bought some mundane thing. An old set of scales on the wooden counter was in continuous use. The shelves behind the counter were filled with merchandise. On the window sills and along a shelf in the window, too, boxes and bottles of different things. On the counter a container filled with candied fruit and orange peel. Chocolate and candy umbrellas, too, beckoned to me with their bright colored wrappings. If I was very good, my mother would buy me one, or a piece of candied orange peel. At Christmas time she would very occasionally buy me a piece of Italian nougat, chewy and different from the Spanish turrón I later knew.
In the summer there was slush. I loved the lemon slush. It was so refreshing in the sticky Boston summer heat. I think I remember it scraped from a metal pail into a paper cup. Again, my mother would sometimes buy me a cup. Some days we would only walk past and continue down Salem Street to Bova's bakery. I remember a butcher's, I think across the street from Polcari's, where freshly skinned rabbits were almost always hanging on hooks in front of the door. I didn't like that shop, and never would eat rabbit, neither as a child, nor after we came here. At Bova's bakery my mother would buy fresh bread, much more tasty than that we bought in supermarkets, though still not as flavorful as bread in Europe. And, if it wasn't there, it was in a grocery store that offered all types of foodstuffs from Italy, including their own home-made pastries, down the street from Martignetti's Liquors, on Cross Street, that she sometimes bought me sfogliatella. I loved that Italian pastry, with all the layers of dough that crunched in my mouth, with a rich, not too sweet filling.
At that Italian grocery was where I found Nutella for the first time in Boston. I remembered seeing it on a trip to Spain, next to the Nocilla, and how they tasted exactly the same, sweet and different from what I had known, and exotically European. That was also where they sold fruit shaped and colored marzipan pieces for twenty-five cents each. I loved them, but they cost the price of a bus fare, and my mother bought them very sparingly.
I also remember the fish monger's at the corner of Hanover and Cross Streets, where my mother sometimes went if she didn't like the ware in the Haymarket on Saturday mornings. From there along Hanover we would go to Mike's Pastry, where we bought every birthday cake we ever ate. The ricotta cheesecake was also to die for, and the Italian cookies fifty times better than any Danish butter cookie. I remember also Green Cross Pharmacy, where my father would sometimes take me to buy a square of Cadbury's chocolate, preferably with raisins. Afterwards, we would go to the park nearby with a statue of Paul Revere. The stone benches were generally occupied with ancient men, talking in gesticulating Italian. I would run around the statue, trying to keep on the low ledge around it without falling off. From there we went home, to an apartment on Hanover Avenue, where our porch was the fire escape, and where my mother had to hang the clothes with care, or go down to the parking lot in the street behind to pick up the fallen laundry.
But those are the years farther away from the present, from before I was five years old and we moved out to a triple decker in Jamaica Plain. From those years I also remember a public library up the street from Polcari's. Every time my mother and I walked past, I wanted to go inside and look at the books. She wouldn't let me, though, probably because she didn't understand what it was. When we emigrated from Spain, there weren't any locally. Years later, she let me go to a branch of the Boston Public Library near our bank in Roslindale Square.
The last time I was there was in 2005, when I took my then eight-year-old daughter to see where I had grown up. Already there were changes. The Expressway and the parking lot underneath was gone. Mike's Pastry was becoming a tourist mecca, and the old men talking in gesticulating Italian had disappeared. Everything looked more genteel, less working class, and there were tourists everywhere. The red line of the Freedom Trail, inaugurated in 1976 and a dusty red back then, generally ignored, now practically screamed, and led outsiders to the spots I had always known were historical, but that, living with them, had become landmarks in my own personal history. Anthony, running home to his mamma and Prince spaghetti, would feel out of place. The North End is becoming, if it hasn't already metamorphosed, an open-air museum where day-to-day living is discouraged, and where visitors outnumber the inhabitants. But I hope Polcari's stays just where it is.
In the summer there was slush. I loved the lemon slush. It was so refreshing in the sticky Boston summer heat. I think I remember it scraped from a metal pail into a paper cup. Again, my mother would sometimes buy me a cup. Some days we would only walk past and continue down Salem Street to Bova's bakery. I remember a butcher's, I think across the street from Polcari's, where freshly skinned rabbits were almost always hanging on hooks in front of the door. I didn't like that shop, and never would eat rabbit, neither as a child, nor after we came here. At Bova's bakery my mother would buy fresh bread, much more tasty than that we bought in supermarkets, though still not as flavorful as bread in Europe. And, if it wasn't there, it was in a grocery store that offered all types of foodstuffs from Italy, including their own home-made pastries, down the street from Martignetti's Liquors, on Cross Street, that she sometimes bought me sfogliatella. I loved that Italian pastry, with all the layers of dough that crunched in my mouth, with a rich, not too sweet filling.
At that Italian grocery was where I found Nutella for the first time in Boston. I remembered seeing it on a trip to Spain, next to the Nocilla, and how they tasted exactly the same, sweet and different from what I had known, and exotically European. That was also where they sold fruit shaped and colored marzipan pieces for twenty-five cents each. I loved them, but they cost the price of a bus fare, and my mother bought them very sparingly.
I also remember the fish monger's at the corner of Hanover and Cross Streets, where my mother sometimes went if she didn't like the ware in the Haymarket on Saturday mornings. From there along Hanover we would go to Mike's Pastry, where we bought every birthday cake we ever ate. The ricotta cheesecake was also to die for, and the Italian cookies fifty times better than any Danish butter cookie. I remember also Green Cross Pharmacy, where my father would sometimes take me to buy a square of Cadbury's chocolate, preferably with raisins. Afterwards, we would go to the park nearby with a statue of Paul Revere. The stone benches were generally occupied with ancient men, talking in gesticulating Italian. I would run around the statue, trying to keep on the low ledge around it without falling off. From there we went home, to an apartment on Hanover Avenue, where our porch was the fire escape, and where my mother had to hang the clothes with care, or go down to the parking lot in the street behind to pick up the fallen laundry.
But those are the years farther away from the present, from before I was five years old and we moved out to a triple decker in Jamaica Plain. From those years I also remember a public library up the street from Polcari's. Every time my mother and I walked past, I wanted to go inside and look at the books. She wouldn't let me, though, probably because she didn't understand what it was. When we emigrated from Spain, there weren't any locally. Years later, she let me go to a branch of the Boston Public Library near our bank in Roslindale Square.
The last time I was there was in 2005, when I took my then eight-year-old daughter to see where I had grown up. Already there were changes. The Expressway and the parking lot underneath was gone. Mike's Pastry was becoming a tourist mecca, and the old men talking in gesticulating Italian had disappeared. Everything looked more genteel, less working class, and there were tourists everywhere. The red line of the Freedom Trail, inaugurated in 1976 and a dusty red back then, generally ignored, now practically screamed, and led outsiders to the spots I had always known were historical, but that, living with them, had become landmarks in my own personal history. Anthony, running home to his mamma and Prince spaghetti, would feel out of place. The North End is becoming, if it hasn't already metamorphosed, an open-air museum where day-to-day living is discouraged, and where visitors outnumber the inhabitants. But I hope Polcari's stays just where it is.
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