Rick Berlin

Rick Berlin

My name is Rick Berlin.  I’m 63, and I was born in Iowa.  Back in the eighties, I lived in Newton Highlands, and a friend of mine and I were looking for a place to live.  We found an ad on a board, and moved down to, I believe it was Williams Street.  That was back in the eighties.  Then I moved to a place near Doyle’s, where I work, and then another place near Doyle’s.  Then I left town, but I kept working at Doyle’s.  I went back and I live on Centre Street — right up the street.  I’ve been working at Doyle’s for 18, and I lived here before that, so I think it’s 24 — a third of my life.  I’m an artist primarily, which means that, really first and foremost, a song writer, and that’s mostly what I do.

Jamaica Plain has a long history of activism, and at the same time it’s sort of talking about things and not getting things done.  It’s kind of a blend of energy and divisiveness intellectually, but I think it’s a great place.  It’s one of the few places that people can move and almost immediately begin to say it feels like home.  H-O-M-E.  I don’t know why except that all of the buildings are different.  Most of the houses are different.  All of the faces are different.  The t-shirts are different.  The clothes are different but people don’t hide as quickly as they do in other northeastern towns.  Certainly downtown Boston, or even Cambridge, or Davis Square.  People don’t cower.  I think they’re more willing to invite you to your house to help you shovel out if it’s snowing.  I think there’s a tremendous desire for empathy here, even as there are problems.  My friend Todd Drogy and I decided to make a film about Jamaica Plain as if it might be different in an instructive way then most small communities in the country — that it has a history of that.  People try to get along here, even with all of the problems.  The guy on NPR, who, at Harvard, and for the last 30 years made a study of diversity in communities, and found out to his astonishment the diversity had negative reverberations in most communities.  More walls were built economically, culturally, orientations and everything.  While he was on the air, somebody called in from Jamaica Plain and said, you know, I live in Jamaica Plain, it’s not like that here.  He said, you know, Jamaica Plain is an exception.  Our project, Jamaica Plain Spoken, hopes to understand what that exception is.  Even with all of the cracks.  We have a long way to go.  There’s a pride here that’s not fake.  There’s an ugliness and a beauty that coexists that I really adore.  I love this place.  I love it.  I really love it.  I’m really happy when I’m coming back from somewhere else.

A friend of mine, who grew up in Brooklyn, said it was the Brooklyn of Boston.  I would say that you don’t know what it is until you land here, and hang out with somebody that lives here — maybe three different kinds of people.  Walk around, hang out and see what you think.  I think it’s very, very special.  I think it’s unusual.  I think it’s like The Shire in a lot of ways.  I’m idealistic about it.  There’s danger, and there’s help.  There’s a lot of rich people that are making is pretty but pushing a lot of people out that have grown out here, so there’s antagonism.  I have friends that were moving into a house and someone said they were having a party tomorrow — come over, and they’d go.  So it’s a proliferation of friendship.  I go to the Brendan Behan a lot and everybody gets along.  So the network of friends, and the support from that, is really special.  There’s something very unusual here.  I stand on my roof, and it’s The Bronx on one side, and it’s Province Town on the other.  It’s Florence Italy on another direction.  It’s crazy.  I love walking up the street and hearing four languages, here in this little ‘burb.  I don’t think I could tell you what it is.  You’d have to feel it yourself, but I don’t think it would take you long.

MJ:    Tell me about one of your favorite hangouts in JP.
RB:    The Brendan Behan.  I’m there after work almost every night.  I’ve never had a corner bar or pub that I wanted to go to always.  I found my apartment.  I found a lot of my new friends there.  Todd and I met there before the Jamaica Plain Spoken got started there.  I found jobs for friends there.  It’s a talking bar.  It’s not a who can you score.  It’s not predatory.  It’s got all this writers on the wall, and I think they look down in their drunken stupor and encourage conversation.  I think it’s a talking bar, and it’s very small, and that’s my favorite place in JP.

MJ:    What are the most pressing issues that you see in your community in JP?
RB:    The cliché would be gentrification and all of the ensuing advantages and disadvantages. I was talking to a friend of mine today, on the phone.  She said, do you rent or do you own.  I said, I could never own.  I only rent, and there’s a lot of places you can afford here, and there’s a lot that you can’t.  The good side of gentrification is that it’s made streets safer, and more beautiful, and the houses resurrected, and become a rich person’s park.  The negative side of it is that people who’ve lived here for generations can’t afford to live here anymore, and they move out and they’re pissed off.  I think that there’s some streets that are safer than others, but I think that people would like to make things safe.  They would like to get over their differences, and understand each other, and I think you need money to do that.  I think — I hope there’s less shouting here and more listening, but I’m not sure.  I’m not in the heart of those kinds of problems.  I have six friends who’ve been mugged.  I’ve never been mugged.  But then they have spontaneous celebrations.  We have the Hyde Square Task Force, who have institutions that are trying to bring something to kids that’s not fake and phony that surpasses the opportunities that crime affords.  Doyle’s, where I work, has every kind of person there.  The only kind of person that’s really not terrifically there are yuppies.  We’ve got blacks, and Hispanics, and blue collar people, and families, and sometimes they walk in like, I don’t know, and in ten minutes, they feel good there.  It’s been like that for years.  Not to say that it’s perfect, but I think more of that is good.  I don’t know.  Nothing is ever perfect, and it’s growing, and I think it’s going to survive with its’ differences rather than eliminate them.

MJ:    What changes would you like to see in Jamaica Plain?
RB:    People seeing themselves in others.  The parenthetical in our title is Jamaica Plain Spoken — This Is Un-gated Community in the 21st Century?  I’d like not to lock their doors and go away.  Rich people here have jobs down town.  They go to their jobs.  They come home, and they cook dinner.  They go to their jobs and then they come home.  They don’t interact.  But the festivals — The Wake of the Earth Festival — the parades.  All of that stuff will continue.  Ideally I would say more of the inclusive nature — politically, culturally, economically, and less of the isolationist direction.  These are just generalizations.  The cops are good.  I like the cops.  They’ll answer your questions in a good way.  All I know is that the best way to judge a situation are the people that you know, and the people that they know.  In my case, and yours, most of them are good people.  Maybe that’s the rule, and not the exception.  What we’ve learned making this documentary, there’s some extraordinary people here, and they all have open hearts.  They think, and they are caring.  They’re not so different in the big things, which are family, love, survival and self education in life.  I think there’s a premium on that here.  It’s not houses with lots of yards, and dogs barking.  There’s a lot dogs, but if a lesbian can live next door to a doctor, to a lawyer, to a huge Columbian family, which happens here all the time.  It’s pretty great.  More of that.  More of the best, less of the worst.
MJ:    How do you describe Jamaica Plain in three words?
RB:    Honest.  Self-aware.