So, haven’t written in a while. The last post I wrote was on how my neighborhood — Wellington-Harrington in Cambridge — is awesome, because it has really good restaurants. This is true, and I continue to think that Wellington-Harrington is awesome.
Of course, since I wrote that post, Wellington-Harrington has become perhaps more widely known as the home of the illustrious Tsarnaev brothers. I was away during the week of the Boston Marathon bombing and the manhunt, but I live close enough to their house that my poor cats were frightened by sirens and helicopters, as well as the initial gunfire in Kendall Square.
I don’t really have a takeaway from all this. Basically, I continue to really like my neighborhood. It’s vibrant and diverse and interesting, and I’m a little bummed that this is now at least partially how people know it. Though it has been interesting to see it on TV and read how various news outlets describe it.
“It is a multicultural neighborhood where hardware stores and butcher shops are mixed with cafes and Brazilian and Portuguese restaurants,” said the New York Times, which is accurate but necessarily incomplete. I also vaguely remember an article referring to it as an “urban hipster” neighborhood, which to me suggests the reporter may have wandered into Grillo’s Pickles, where bearded men with iPads work on their media saturation strategy, and to my knowledge nobody has ever bought a pickle.
But I’m being mean, because I really like Grillo’s Pickles. I also really like Atwoods Tavern and Tupelo, the amazing Southern restaurant which sold pulled pork sandwiches to cops and FBI agents investigating the house, and the Kendall Square Cinema. Not to mention Indian street food at Punjabi Dhaba, beautiful Donnelly Field and the Valente Library. Then there’s Christina’s cream, the East Coast Grill, 1369 and Lord Hobo. And soon we’ll have the cricket-themed sports bar, Hit Wicket.
The only thing we no longer have at the moment is Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, which from my point of view makes this the perfect time to check the neighborhood out! Lets all work to put them out of our minds and concentrate on food, beer, Little League baseball, books, cricket, and movies, which are all far more deserving of our attention. The end.
Calamity Blog 