Going Back

When waves of Irish immigrants settled in Boston during the 1800’s, their first address was usually a triple-decker in Roxbury, Southie, or Dorchester. As members of each generation levered themselves up, filling out the ranks of the post office and the police and fire departments, the Boston Irish began to look southward; first to blue collar Quincy and white collar Milton, then further south to more affluent suburbs such as Hingham, Cohasset, and Scituate.

My family was typical. My father’s potato famine forbears had come directly to Boston and made it as far as Quincy by his generation. My mother’s ancestors had settled first on Prince Edward Island, then followed the job market south to Dorchester. When my parents married, their first home was in Quincy, and they fulfilled the dream of betterment by owning a small cottage on Cape Cod.

My father was delighted that his children had continued that trend. My sister and her husband raised their children in a custom-built Cape in the genteel town of Norwell, and now own a second elegant home on the Cape, twenty minutes by boat from the cottage my father built. My brother is a bit of a real estate mogul. He and his wife live in Silver Spring, Maryland, but own a beach house in Bethany Beach, Delaware, and properties in South Carolina and Florida.

I lived for twenty-five years in an antique farmhouse in the picturesque seaside town of Scituate, in the section of town known as “the Irish Riviera.” Plans for a second home after college tuitions were paid never were consummated; divorce is the great leveler of real estate portfolios. Through a convoluted series of family events, I now find myself back in Quincy, somewhat gentrified now, but still recognizable as the city of my youth.

Two miles east of my house is Marina Bay, for all practical purposes a tiny chunk of Nantucket that broke off and somehow attached itself to Quincy. I go there a lot--for breakfast, for the nautical ambiance, for the social opportunities. It is a bit high-toned, but otherwise pleasant and atmospheric.

Nevertheless, lately I have found myself drawn to another neighborhood. To get there, I head two miles north and cross the Neponset River into…Dorchester. Dorchester's Adams Village is an urban enclave where the brogues are still as thick as porridge. I have begun to feel myself lured there, for coffee and a scone at the Greenhills Irish bakery, for a meaty sandwich at the Fat Belly Deli, or for a plate and a pint at the famous Eire Pub, where one dollar hot dogs have been served to Presidents Reagan and Clinton.

My family is sixty years out of Dorchester, and here I am going back, gleefully undoing decades of upward mobility. You can put lace curtains on the shanty, I guess, but it's nonetheless a shanty. It all just feels so...real.

Sláinte agus saol chugat.