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March 1, 2010
Table
of Contents
Home @ Roofscape
About Roofscape
@ Play
Bikeways
Beans About Boston
Bird N-E-W-S
Book Bag
Cityscape
Cookout
Coop Confidential
Funk Shui
Garden Gates
Garden Girl TV
Garden
Journal
Greenways
Kid'scape
Landscapes
Outerwear
Outside Office
Paths to the Past
Radio Roofscape
Roofscape News
Roofscape Realty
Roofscape
Views
Rooftop Movie Night
Screenscape
Siteseeing
Skyscape
Soundscape
Starscape
Streetscape
Street Scene
Thought for the Week
Urban Myths
Wild Lives
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South End Handyman
Serving Boston's South End, Back Bay and Beacon
Hill
We specialize in small jobs
No job too small
Free and fast estimates
Custom carpentry
Fine painting
Household repairs
Landscaping
We do anything
On time and in budget
30 years experience
South End Handyman
southendhandy@gmail.com
857-272-7500
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| Roofscape is devoted to the
enjoyment and enhancement of the urban outdoors around the world.
The magazine explores all aspects of outdoor urban living - nature
and the environment, history and historic city walks, sports
and recreation, gardening and landscaping, alfresco cooking and
dining, outdoor living and work spaces, plus the sky and stars
overhead. |
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Welcome. March 2 marks the 55th anniversary
of one of the seminal events of the civil rights movement. On
this day in 1955 an angry black teenager, Claudette Colvin, refused
to surrender her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in
Montgomery, Alabama and was dragged off to jail shouting, "It's
my constitutional right!" This was nine months before Rosa
Parks, age 42, secretary of the local NAACP chapter and trained
at the Highlander Folk School, took the same stand.
To learn about this major, but not well-known,
civil rights figure and get a fresh perspective on the subsequent
Montgomery Bus Boycott, we'd like to recommend an excellent new
book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Maine
author Phillip Hoose.
Garden Journal, Roofscape's
blog, is a sneak peak inside the inner workings of the magazine.
And sometimes we even talk about gardening. It's chatty, bitchy
and catty with both dish and the dishes we're serving up in our
weekly Sunday Cookout.
Radio Roofscape is party central. Turn on, tune in, drop out. We
program a full spectrum of music. Our only mission is to rock
the party. We've also got a weekly Sunday Gospel Set to
give praise and repent.
Beans About Boston is like Car Talk's puzzler, but with fewer
vacations. Plus it's trivia with a progressive twist. A question
is posed about Boston history, geography or driving habits. The
answer in the next issue, if read and remembered, will have info
to help you solve future Beans.
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Dr. Martin Luther King's time in Boston had a profound influence
on him. Malcom X's life and work was forged in Boston. Here,
Martin did his doctoral studies in Christian theology at Boston
University. Malcolm learned to read and created his own education
while imprisoned for burglary in Charlestown and other state
penitentiaries. Both sons of Baptists ministers preached and
ministered here, Martin in Baptist churches, Malcolm at Nation
of Islam temples.
We're going to look at the lives of both men
in Boston and also see what the city was like at the time, during
the postwar years and early 50's. Dr. King
in Boston begins January 15, on Martin's birthday, and X
in Boston starts May 15 to celebrate his birth on May 19.
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| Frederick Law Olmsted, following
his popul.ist inclinations, referred to his last and greatest
work, designed for his adopted city of Boston, as The Green
Ribbon. We're going to meet the man and follow his struggles
over twenty years to design and build what came to be called
The Emerald Necklace. |
| Charles's short stories regularly
appear in the Urban Myths section of the magazine. This is his
first work of non-fiction that we've published, a stroll around
and appreciation of Paris, sketchbook in hand. |
| Croutons are one of life's large
little pleasures. They make soups and salads sing, but sometimes
they step out from the chorus and become stars. Without them,
for example, a Caeser salad would be just a bowl of lettuce.
The key to croutons is crispness. How crisp?
Can you hear everyone around the table crunching quite clearly.
That crisp. It's crunch time. |
| Dedicated bike lanes are finally
appearing around our cities. This is promising, but there's also
peril - the dreaded possibility of dooring. Michael recounts
some hair-raising incidents and suggests how riders can avoid
this menace. |
| Chy-chy made up this fun new
take on hide and seek. Join her team! |
| The depths of winter are a good
time to think about the height of summer. It gives us a lift
when the skies are gray, temperatures freezing, earth mantled
in snow, winds biting and streets filled with slush. For gardeners the dead season also serves a very practical
purpose, that of planning for the upcoming growing season in
the garden. And just in time, with the year end holidays now
past, the new year's seed catalogs start to arrive in the mail.
Let's plan our twenty-ten gardens. |
| On the Trail of Black History is a walking tour through time along Boston's Black
Heritage Trail which winds its way around Beacon Hill, formerly
the center of the city's African American community. This is
a fascinating, tragic and eventually triumphant tale which has
never been fully told until now. Come walk with us. |
| Get your rooftop, backyard or
house party started with Radio Roofscape. Our sole mission, should
you accept it, is simply to shake your thing. R&B, jazz,
rock, house, hip-hop, soul, reggae, blues and gospel are all
in the mix. Whatever it takes to rock your body and the party
or power up your workout. |
| Square Foot Gardening Tips
for March | Garden Girl TV . 4 | Urban
Sustainable Living |
| Patti Moreno, The Garden
Girl, and Mel Bartholomew, author of Square Foot Gardening,
team up monthly to offer timely garden tips. For March they talk
about getting your garden going again and compost. |
| So you think you know beans
about Boston? We'll see. Take our trivia test. Beans poses
a fresh question in each issue, carefully crafted by our crack
trivia team, on Boston history, culture, customs or driving directions.
If you think you know the answer email it to roofscape@gmail.com.
Check for the answer in the following issue. Then read the background
briefing that accompanies it - the information will help you
solve future Beans. |
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Old Beans ...
On February 2, 1775, Abigail Adams wrote a
letter to her friend Mercy Otis Warren with this prediction which
soon proved to be all too true.
"... the die is cast." The King,
she wrote, was determined to implement "the acts passed
by the late Parliament, and to Maintain the authority of the
Legislature over all his dominions ... The Sword," she concluded
solemnly, "is now our only, yet dreadful alternative. We
know too well the blessings of freedom to tamely resign it."
What did John Adam's beloved wife so presciently
predict?
A - New England would develop a thriving munitions
industry.
B - Fort Sumter would soon be stormed.
C - The American Revolution for independence would soon break
out.
D - The colony's gambling debts from dicing would soon come due.
E - A ceremonial sword gilded with gold and a diamond encrusted
hilt must be spent immediately to England to appease King George
III.
F - Colonial weaponry would prove to be dreadfully designed.
Answer ... C - The American Revolution for
independence would soon break out.
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New Beans ...
The models in H.P. Lovecraft's 1926 short
story Pickman's Model, set in Boston's North End, were
what or who?
A - Tall and leggy.
B - Starving art students.
C - Venus and Serena.
D - Monsters.
E - Thin and neurotic.
F - Stalked by paparazzi.
G - 36-24-36.
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Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give
you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take
it.
Malcolm X. Malcolm X Speaks, 1965.
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Image (top of page) ... Sunbather in a
Saltmarsh. Gloucester, Massachusetts.
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