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Where is downtown Brookline?
By adamg on Tue, 10/23/2007 - 9:17am
Apparently following up on a Daily Free Press report, the Globe today discusses the issue of turkeys in "downtown Brookline" (the Free Press used the same phrase). Is that anything like Boston Village? Also, memo to Globe editors: Turkeys have been in Brookline for awhile now.
But bonus points for detailing a savage attack by one of the Beacon Street brutes on a poor woman from Dorchester - Should Boston start warning residents about travel to Brookline?
Bonus turkey report:
Mr. Gobbles is alive and well in Kendall Square.
Free tagging:
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Comments
A week or so ago, I saw at
A week or so ago, I saw at least a dozen of these wild turkeys in Brookline on Brookline Hill (aka Fisher Hill). Three of them angrily kept each other busy chasing each other in circles around a utility pole.
The turkeys have not only been found in downtown Brookline, now they've also been found in uptown Brookline.
And let's not forget Deep South Brookline
The turkeys have been around Putterham for at least a couple years now.
Turkey Day
Has it been lost on us all that the Turkeys started attacking just before Thanksgiving? I consider this a potential cullinary boon and yet another reason why its great to live in Boston (or Brookline in this case). Here, Thanksgiving diner comes to you, fresh from the countryside. No frenzied trips to the supermarket for freezer-burned Purdue butter balls necessary. Just reach out on the sidewalk and pick up diner. Its nature's bounty. I suspect that soon there will be fish swimming in our gutters after rain storms and wild boars crawling into our ovens and basting themselves just before Christmass.
Drudge
This phenomenon made the Drudge Report this morning.
Drudge?
He's reporting on the local paper's inability to identify neighborhoods in towns it covers? :-).
The Tab harrumphs at how the Globe "discovered" the issue it's been warning residents about for ages now, but surely takes no glee whatsoever in noting (two days in a row) an entry in the Brookline police log that a Globe photographer had to be "advised" not to get too close to a turkey on Beacon Street.
Downtown Brookline
I can sort of understand what they mean by "downtown Brookline." Large parts of Brookline are residential; some are even woodsy. Turkeys might not seem out of place traipsing about Fisher Hill or Allandale Farm or Larz Anderson Park or thereabouts. Other parts of Brookline are significantly more urban, such as Coolidge Corner, Brookline Village, or Washington Square.
But calling those areas "downtown Brookline" doesn't really make sense for three reasons. One, the most obvious - nobody calls those areas "downtown Brookline." Two - they already have names. What's wrong with calling them the perfectly good names they already have? Three - Brookline has more than one downtownish area. Brookline Village and Coolidge Corner aren't even contiguous, but they're both areas that could be called "downtown."
That's the reason it makes some kind of sense to talk about "downtown Jamaica Plain," or "downtown Roslindale," but not about "downtown Brookline." You pretty much know where that "downtown" might be. It'd be Centre Street in JP and the Village in Roslindale. But "downtown Brookline" might be several different places; it's indistinct and unhelpful.