The Wearing Out of the Green

It is still two hours before the St. Patrick’s Day parade, held this year on Sunday the 14th to accommodate a hoped-for larger crowd. In the old days everything except the bars shut down on March 17 on the grounds that it also marked the day in 1776 when the British troops left Boston. Evacuation Day!

I sit in my car in the parking lot at the mid-curve of Pleasure Bay—that unfortunate name Mayor Curley gave to the glittering body of water stretching into Boston Harbor—with its nestled islands, one of the world’s loveliest approaches. Flocks of scaup and a few buffleheads, outposts of winter, huddle in the deeper water. Three mounted policemen, hatless and helmetless, suddenly gallop by along the beach. Farther to the right the open space in front of the Columbia Point housing project is swarming with police and squad cars. To the left of me the flat three-deckers and the pitched roofs of two-family houses follow the bay’s curve, broken only by a single misplaced high-rise apartment. On this pre-spring morning, South Boston looks clean, rinsed, angular, and for the moment empty.

It is still two hours before the St. Patrick’s Day parade, held this year on Sunday the 14th to accommodate a hoped-for larger crowd. In the old days everything except the bars shut down on March 17 on the grounds that it also marked the day in 1776 when the British troops left Boston. Evacuation Day!

I sit in my car in the parking lot at the mid-curve of Pleasure Bay—that unfortunate name Mayor Curley gave to the glittering body of water stretching into Boston Harbor—with its nestled islands, one of the world’s loveliest approaches. Flocks of scaup and a few buffleheads, outposts of winter, huddle in the deeper water. Three mounted policemen, hatless and helmetless, suddenly gallop by along the beach. Farther to the right the open space in front of the Columbia Point housing project is swarming with police and squad cars. To the left of me the flat three-deckers and the pitched roofs of two-family houses follow the bay’s curve, broken only by a single misplaced high-rise apartment. On this pre-spring morning, South Boston looks clean, rinsed, angular, and for the moment empty.