Dorchester oasis faces trouble in neighborhood
It's the Beacon Hill of Dorchester, some say. Home to clergy, business executives, a city councilor and a city councilor-elect, Melville Park prides itself in its gracefully curving streets and meticulously kept Victorian homes.
On one street, a twinkling necklace of gas lamps encircles an oval park. Every spring, there is a house tour; at Christmas, neighbors gather to sing carols.
But Melville Park residents also live surrounded by some of the most violent neighborhoods in Boston. Gunfire is commonplace in the nearby Bowdoin-Geneva area. In neighboring Fields Corner, shopowners live with the fear of robbers. At Ronan Park, a 10-minute walk away, John Beresford, a activist, was stabbed to death in broad daylight in May.
Bordered by Dorchester Avenue, Centre Street, Washington Street, and Park Street, Melville Park feels like a self-contained enclave of calm, though it lies steps from more volatile sections of Dorchester. Lee Robinson, a real estate agent who lives in the neighborhood, said she sometimes leaves her house in summer with nothing but a screen door to keep out intruders.
''We don't have problems, and we sure don't have problems like this," Robinson said.
Last year, Mayor Thomas M. Menino called Melville Park ''the first gentrified neighborhood in our city." A hot Boston real estate market in the last few years has intensified demand for real estate there; the 02124 zip code, which includes Melville Park and Ashmont Hill, saw the fastest-growing prices in the Boston-Worcester-Lawrence area from 2000 to 2004.
Prices for houses in the neighborhood range from a minimum of about $400,000 for a small house at the edge of the neighborhood to more than $1 million, Robinson said.
The house where the shooting occurred, a three-bedroom, Philadelphia-style structure with a double-decker front porch, had been listed for $567,000 before its owner took it off the market in October, according to records from the Multiple Listing Service.
Each spring, the neighborhood draws 1,200 visitors to a tour showcasing 19th- and early 20th-century houses, donating the proceeds to poor children in Dorchester, Jack Kowalski, president of the Melville Park Association, said as he stood beside rumbling television trucks near the house where four young men were slain yesterday.
''We do TV shots here all the time; that's the house tour," he said.
The neighborhood is home to old-timers who have lived there for decades and families who have just arrived. There are whites, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Caribbean-Americans, gay and straight couples. Among its most prominent residents are the Rev. Jeffrey Brown a founder of the Boston Ten Point Coalition and unofficial mayor of the Hurricane Katrina evacuees' community at Camp Edwards, and WBUR anchor Delores Handy.
Among others are developer Patrick Lee and his wife Alyce Lee, Menino's first chief of staff; and the Rev. Eugene Rivers, whose daughter was doing her geometry homework Tuesday night when she heard a shot and a scream coming from the crime scene next door.
Sam Yoon, who is a husband and father of two children and who will become the City Council's first Asian-American councilor in January, settled here a couple of years ago, attracted by its racial diversity and its proximity to transportation.
''We've had judges, lawyers, doctors, ministers, a great cross-section of Boston here in this neighborhood," said Councilor Charles Yancey, who has lived here for 30 years.
Charles Kessler, 60, who teaches pastoral care skills in Providence and moved to Melville Park in 1978, said the neighborhood is in many ways a model of a healthy urban community.
''For the most part, neighbors do know one another," he said as he walked his four brown poodles along Melville Avenue yesterday morning. ''They are willing to extend themselves on behalf of one another. I think I'm not alone in feeling I have a lot of friends here."
This has made it all the more difficult for people to digest the macabre events of Tuesday evening. A woman in a fur coat on her way to take her children to school stopped to ask a reporter what the commotion was up the street yesterday morning. Told it was a quadruple homicide, she pointed to a nearby street, exclaiming, ''Oh my God! I live right over here! I live right over here!"
Kowalski said his phone began to ring after the police responded to the crime. ''There's a sense of -- not futility, but we don't want that notoriety," he said.
Robinson said Beresford's murder, which stunned the Ronan Park community last spring, should have been a wake-up call to the city. The quadruple homicide in her backyard, she said, ought to put the mayor on notice that if he does not hire more police officers to reinvigorate community policing programs, neighborhoods across the city could suffer.
''He's attracted a lot of people to the city," she said. ''But it won't take long for them to leave if it's dangerous." 