Posts Tagged “boston”

Tonight was supposedly the last night of Boston Illuminale (warning: annoying flash site, see also more photos on flickr), wherein several Boston sites were festooned with fancy lighting.  I didn’t get to all the sites, but I’m not sure if they were all in fact illuminaled.  The Moakley bridge over the Fort Point channel was lit up in blue, but I thought that was a year-round thing.  Either way, here are some pics of the area.  Stay tuned for further shots of the more dramatic goings-on at the Northern Avenue bridge.

I’m pretty sure that’s the planet Venus up there in the lower right picture, not any kind of extraterrestrial craft or paranormal phenomenon, but the spotlights were scanning the sky just in case.

Yesterday was the official grand opening of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, the strip of urban parks that has replaced the elevated route 93 and changed the face of Boston.  I might quibble with the execution or the cost, but I can’t say enough good things about the whole idea of creating this green space in the most built-up part of the city.

The Greenway echoes the Emerald Necklace and provides about ten times the park area of nearby Post Office Square.  The project isn’t done - there are plans for two museums and an Armenian Heritage Park - and it’s not clear that it ever will be, but it’s done enough, and it got a pretty good crowd yesterday.

I was helping out at the Hudson Street Gallery most of the afternoon, so I wasn’t able to see the whole thing, but there were a few performance stages and at least one farmers market, outside of South Station, where I saw my old friends When Pigs Fly Bakery and Shy Brothers Cheese, among others. Closer to the gallery was the Chinatown park, where there were cultural performances all day, including lion dances, noodle-making, several kinds of martial arts, and Cantonese opera.  Click on the maplet at right - to which I’ve added the location of the Hudson Street Gallery near the bottom - for more information about the Greenway and more comprehensive maps.

Further along the Greenway, near the Aquarium, was a fountain of sorts.  It’s a spiral-patterned circle of stone and brick, with water jets that fire in patterns, creating mini-geysers in various patterns.  And inviting passers-by to tempt fate by first running through, and then, oddly, just standing still in the middle.

There’s lots more to explore in the Greenway, but I have to leave you with a final cartographic note.  The grand opening events included some kind of text-message scavenger hunt, and the map for that event included one unusual feature: the thick black line represents the approximate coastline of Boston in 1775, which is itself already much extended from the land profile at the time of European arrival.

Click on the map for more information on the game and the full-size PDF map.  And be sure to enjoy your local urban greenspace, wherever you are.

After an evening of lengthy and expensive marketing research, there’s really only one place to go: Chinatown. I dragged about half a gaggle of co-workers and some hangers-on to one of my favorite seafood joints, Peach Farm.

This is not the sort of place that has a website, so I’ll just give the address: 4 Tyler Street, although you can find countless reviews online. It’s a half flight of stairs down and past some dingy-looking tanks of fish and crabs. This is one of those places whose Zagat rating for food is about four times its decor rating. The service rating is somewhere up the middle, and that corresponds to my experience. Our table was equipped with a lazy susan and a teapot with the lid attached by a length of plastic cable.

On this occasion they were on top of their game. We ordered scallion pancake and potstickers to warm up and because were were starving. But Peach Farm really shines when you start ordering seafood. We chose the steamed bass from the tank and the salty fried softshell crab. To balance out, we added beef lo mein (they were out of the usual fave dry-fried beef chow fun) and peapod stems with garlic sauce.

They brought over the plastic bucket and showed me a couple of striped bass squirming around in it. They were on the small side so we had both. If you go to Peach Farm and order fish from the tank - and you really must - they will do the classic Chinese thing and let you approve the live fish before cooking them. If you don’t like the look of them, this is your last chance to send them back for an exchange.

Cooked, the fish were served in a soy-ginger sauce with plenty of ginger, and not much else. The flavor of the fish itself was subtle but delicious. Serving it off the bones without flipping it (that’s bad luck) is a trick worth learning. I’m still working on it, but nobody choked.

The soft shell crab arrived in a heap of golden fried morsels with some chiles and scallions scattered about. Hot and fresh, with equal measure of salt and spice, the sweet crab meat was about as good as I’ve ever had, and soft shell crab is wonderfully simple to eat compared to all the cracking and prying involved with tougher exoskeletons.

I usually go for the dry-fried beef chow fun even at this basement of seafood miracles. It’s just that good. But they were out so I switched the order to lo mein just in case one of the guests wasn’t up for the seafood. You never know, sometimes it happens.

Last to arrive were the peapod stems in garlic sauce. A welcome and delicious bunch of roughage, peapod stems have a cut grass kind of smell and a nice taste to match. The garlic sauce was light but assertive. An excellent break from the greasy crab and noodles.

If you find yourself in or near Chinatown - perhaps visiting the Hudson Street Gallery - in need of fresh seafood and a relaxed good time, Peach Farm is an excellent choice. These four dishes are a good place to start, but there’s a lot more to explore there.

Today was the August Moon Festival, celebrating what is held to be the largest full moon of the year. In Boston’s Chinatown that means lion dances, kung-fu demonstrations, moon cakes, and a battle for local souls fought between the Falun Gong and various local churches. This year, it also marked the debut of the Hudson Street Gallery, a Chinatown art space. The gallery held an open house today in advance of its grand opening scheduled for September 6 in conjunction with the Asian Community Development Corporation’s Hudson Street Stories project.

Temporarily located in the garden level of a mixed-use building at 18 Hudson street, Hudson Street Gallery kicked off with two shows: a quartet of contemporary urban photographers, and a show of Chinatown historical material curated by the Asian CDC.

Brian Matiash and Jason Sundram showed portraits and Chinatown scenes in both standard and High Dynamic Range (HDR) processes. Both spent time in the gallery and on the streets shooting, so expect additions to their flickr streams soon.

Two more photographers, Jason Liu and Lee Cullivan took literally night and day approaches to urban photography. Liu presented three poster-sized glossy prints emphasizing the dynamism of Boston, with long exposures turning cars into streaks of light. Cullivan’s early morning Chinatown street scenes are deadpan and static with a soft palette, but there’s energy and humor embedded in the piled-up businesses of Chinatown ready to burst to life as soon as the photographer walks away.

Hudson Street Gallery will be open weekends and by appointment for a while.  Interested viewers and artists should get in touch.  I’m eager to see if and how an art space like this can make a go of it in Chinatown.

Starting to fall behind on SF posts, sorry about that. I asked the concierge at the Hyatt where I could find the best dim sum. She swiftly disparaged all of Chinatown with some references to mystery meat and suggested Yank Sing in the Rincon Center. Dim sum in a food court? I’m not sure if I’m ready to sign up for that. On the other hand, Zagat rates the place tops for dim sum, too. During a meander South of Market, I stumbled into the Rincon Center (a refurbished art deco post office with a Rivera-esque mural!) anyway. The place looked right. I came back the next day with Professor N.

Yank Sing spells it “deem sum” which suggests a certain history and pedigree - they’ve been serving it up since before the orthography settled down. They consider Shanghai soup dumplings a specialty, so we had a batch of those. Also, some shrimp dumplings, my old fave turnip cakes and some interesting veggie items with spinach and peapod stems.

Clockwise from top above: Shanghai soup dumplings (xiao long bao), snap peas, basil dumplings, turnip cake (lobag gao), and shrimp dunmplings (ha gow). If you haven’t had the soup dumplings, you should try them, perhaps at Joe’s Shanghai in NY. They somehow make a dumpling containing both meat and soup. You eat them carefully (since they’re usually piping hot) with both chopsticks and a spoon. Ha gow and lobuk gao are standys, both executed well but not stunningly. The basil dumplings were refreshingly different.

From the veggie cart, we sampled (clockwise from top) savory vegetable dumplings, spinach dumplings and peapod stem dumplings. The colorful savory had a touch of curry in it, or maybe it was just that they were orange. Spinach and peapod stems were fresh and flavorful. The peapod stems have something in common with fresh grass clippings, but in a good way. Oolong tea in a nice glass no drip pot was a great addition.

Having great Chinese food is always a treat, but having it in such a location was just another reminder that the touristy Chinatowns aren’t always what they used to be. Or at least its not so easy for random outsiders to find the gems.

I’ve written about the odd similarity and familiarity of Chinatowns I’ve been to around the world before and it came together again in San Francisco’s Chinatown when I walked past a kosher deli just inside the gate, saw designer fakes openly for sale, and sat on a bus that was stopped to make way for a random passing lion dance. It looks like the same lacquered ducks hang obscenely in shop windows around the world.

Chinatown is a classic immigrant neighborhood. Most of the original immigrants who could afford to have moved away, possibly creating newer, nicer, Chinatowns in their suburbs even while they visit the city center for weekend shopping. And new immigrants from other places have made themselves at home in the old downtown Chinatowns.

Boston’s Chinatown has an additional layer of history on it - it’s one of the oldest, and its been carved up by highways and other urban renewal projects even while it remains a lively patch squeezed in between other old Boston neighborhoods.

For all these reasons, I’m very glad that this weekend, my good friend C will be opening a temporary art space right in Boston’s Chinatown. It will be interesting to see how the mix of contemporary photography and Chinatown history goes down as masses of locals and tourists turn out for the August Moon Festival on Sunday. Read more about the Hudson Street Gallery on facebook, upcoming or going. I hope you can make it to the open house. There will be a grand opening later on.