New Bedford Seagulls

Seagulls are ever present around SE Massachusetts.

We shared some Little Caesars with a dozen New Bedford gulls. I know that pizza crust isn't their ideal meal, but we were out of herring.

We couldn't get one to eat out of our hand, even when we held a crust out and pretended to be preoccupied. Those little sky rats can smell a camera.

Most Ghetto, SE Massachusetts Edition

Eastern Massachusetts is not without her faults. However, one thing we are not is Ghetto.

Granted, we have Fall River. You can get the Fear nice and easy in Fall River. It's a tough town. Most famous resident? An axe-murderess. Most beloved? Probably the same girl.

Taunton, Brockton and New Beddy are no walk in the park, either... or they're a walk in the park where you get beaten up by a gang of thugs for no reason. After that, there is what skiers call a precipitous drop-off.

Some of the tougher parts of our region aren't THAT tough. I'm not taking about individual citizens. I'm sure there's at least one bad-ass Kennedy (found him!) drawing breath somewhere, and you can get beaten up at the Bia Bistro in Cohasset just as badly as you can get handled at South Side Annie's in New Bedford if you cross the wrong opponent.

Still, if you put on NWA and drive around Brockton, it sort of makes sense as long as your eyes don't go to the your-reflection part of the rear view mirror. Try going down King Caesar Road in Duxbury with Bring The Ruckus playing. Your own silliness might strangle you.

There's nothing wrong with this. "Escaping an urban nightmare" is a top reason for moving out to the countryside. "Good visual environment for my Nasty Nas CD" isn't.

Still, if someone establishes a scale for Ghetto, and if the numbers on that scale can be applied to any town anywhere, you can rank towns with it. Lo and behold, that's just what someone did.

They used a simple formula.

Household income levels
High school graduation rates
Number of convenience stores
Number of drug stores
Number of discount stores
Crime
Twitter mentions of #ghetto

It's a flawed formula, but it should be fun to play with.

Run run run from the Ghetto Bird

Here's their Top 15:

Lawrence
Springfield
Chelsea
New_Bedford
Brockton
Holyoke
Lynn
Lowell
Fall River
Worcester
Everett
Revere
Boston
Fitchburg
Wareham

Wareham

Wareham is sort of the WTF on this list, IMHO. I feel badly knowing that she'll be 4th once I start a whittlin' everything North and West of Bristol and Plymouth County out of the master list.

There are definitely some flawed criteria. Twitter references are worrisome. I was a teacher for a while, and I heard kids describe every town on earth as "ghetto." Kids own Twitter, I suppose, and may lack the seasoning to know True Ghetto and why Marion doesn't qualify.

Brockton

I was very much looking forward to the bottom of this list, as I wanted to see how the silver-spoon towns fared against each other. It'd be fun to imagine a couple of stockbrokers arguing about whether Hingham is more thugged out than Sandwich. Alas, the list plays out before we get to the Blue Bloods.

The convenience store angle seems to be ranked right up there with Poverty and Crime, which would to throw a wrench into things. I think that if a Cumby's opens up near the Tedeschi's in your cow town, it shouldn't suddenly make you more Gangsta than someone from Lowell.

The discount store thing may be a bit unfair, although you don't see a lot of (Holla Holla) Family Dollar stores in Duxbury.

However, only my love of Wareham and the lower ranking of Boston makes me really have any issue with the Top 15.

I may get a bit of static from my readers, and I just ask them to remember that I am merely passing along the information on this list. I'm not smart enough to factor that many variables into an equation, even with My Damned Aunt Sally helping. I am smart enough to take a Top 100 list and chop it down to show just the towns in our region, and that's what we're about to do.

More Brockton

Regional Rank  City   Crime Score Original Rank

1) new_bedford 161.7 4
2) brockton 146 5
3) fall_river 190.3 9
4) boston 155.6 13
5) wareham 115.4     14
6) quincy 169.1 26
7) taunton 143.5 33

Well, maybe they have some points after all. Some people might flip Fall River and New Bedford, Most people might see the flaws in not having Boston as the anchorman. Larger towns suffer a bit in the ratings, as the sheer number of people make for lower rates.

Wareham seems to be ranked too highly, but maybe they just try really hard. I worked Boston in mostly to knock the 'Ham down a spot.

Our coverage area showed well, taking 4 of the top 14 spots.

Now, remember when I said "precipitous drop-off" earlier. Here we are!

Middleboro

8) bridgewater 172.5 39
9) west_yarmouth 124 41
10) attleboro 116 42
11) middleborough_center 154.3 43
12) fairhaven 117.3 46
13) barnstable_town 168.1 48
14)plymouth 149.9 52

I went to college in Bridgewater, and it's more bucolic than ghetto. A great bit of the town is structured around the fact that there is a college in town. The college is not the only entity in town that may be weakening the stock. As someone on a Bridgewater Facebook page said, "The nuthouse down the road lowers our ratings, as does the mental hospital."

Just kidding, I went to BSC. Class of 2000, blogga!

West Yarmouth? How? You could put on a shirt made of $100 bills and walk down the toughest street in town at midnight screaming racial slurs, and probably survive. Try that in Roxbury.

Fairhaven has castles for the high school and the library, much of the town looks like Washington Street in Duxbury, and the school is 300 yards away from (the former) Temptations gentleman's club in New Beige. Fairhaven may be ghetto-by-proximity. 

Plymouth and Barnstable have their rotten parts, but rarely would one fear to stroll through them. They do the service of grouping their poor into certain areas. Bourne is good at that, too. They stash them right by the highway.

Barnstable and Wareham trade the "Brockton-by-the-sea" nickname back and forth whenever someone is murdered. Wareham has sole ownership of the catchy "Sea Lowell."

Kingston

15) weymouth_town 152.8 59
16) middleborough 69.3 60
17) nantucket 115.8 61
18) east_falmouth 149.7 64
19) foxborough 62.9 64
20) south_yarmouth 105.9 66
21) kingston 80.3 69

Foxboro is plummeting down the list now that Aaron Hernandez Inc. has gone to his Reward. They should sign Tyreek Hill.

I wonder if Nantucket is America's most ghetto island? I suppose that Long Island has them beat.

Middleboro has a urbanesque center of town, but much of it is woodsy. It is somewhat as if somebody started building Brockton South, before stopping expansion and saying "Know what? Let's just keep it as a cowtown." Rockland sort of has the same look.

I have no idea what Kingston is doing there, unless the guy who made the list counted Halifax and Plympton's dropouts from Silver Lake as all being from Kingston. Halifax, which is also in Silver Lake, is considerably more ghetto than Kingston.

25) yarmouth 136.5 76
26) mashpee 115.7 77
27) somerset 154.1 78
28) abington 85.9 78
29) hull 166.3 81
30) harwich 71.8 83
31) rockland 112.4 88
32) mansfield_center 49.4 96

We're really reaching here, and I sort of understand why the list gets cut off where it does.

Conspicuous in their absence....

Sandwich
Marshfield
Chatham
Rehoboth
Dennis
Freetown
Halifax
Rochester
Wellfleet
Marion
Truro
Swansea
Plympton
Mattapoisett
Norwell
Eastham
Scituate
Lakeville
Provincetown
Acushnet
Carver
Brewster
Hanover
Dighton
Whitman
Hingham
Cohasset
Duxbury

Duxbury

Content Reblogged from roadsnacks.net

Fort Phoenix And The Battle Off Fairhaven

The Fort Phoenix State Reservation is a small park in Fairhaven. It is on the site of a Revolutionary War fort, and it is armed well enough to chase off Captain Jack Sparrow.

Military purposes aside, it's a lovely spot to spend a day. We did just that a few weeks ago, and it was cool enough that we're writing now to recommend it to you.

For starters, there aren't that many (there are some, especially around here) parks where the expressed purpose of said park is to Kill Englishmen.

You gotta like that!

That's a cannon-eye view of the mouth of the Acushnet River, the wet way into New Bedford. You may have been some big bad Brit admiral, but you weren't getting into New Beffuh without dealing with the hastily-mobilized toothless farmer enjoying this same view two centuries ago.

New Bedford and Fairhaven were very, very important to the colonial era economy, as well as to the colonial era military efforts. They were active ports, bringing and sending out goods that drove the local economy. They could host American warships. They were also excellent privateer bases.

Of course, stuff like that is going to attract the attention of the people you are at war with or in rebellion against. That's why little Fairhaven has a Marne-like history, with multiple military activities.

Now, in an era where you can whip out the ol' nuclear football, push a button and obliterate 500000 people on the other side of the world, a fort with a few cannons aiming out at the ocean isn't really a big deal. Strategically, Fort Phoenix is a zero.

However, it is (and was) of great Tactical value, especially back in the Day. If you have to sail what is essentially a big wooden kid's fort into the Acushnet River, a bunch of cannons aimed at you from a hill overlooking the harbor is what stereotypical Native Americans in old cartoons call Heapum Big Trouble.

Yes, you could pretty much dictate what would and wouldn't be coming in and out of New Betty by boat if you could put a few cannons on a hill over the harbor. "A cannon on a hill" is pretty much why the English fled Boston not that long after winning The Battle Of Bunker Hill.

The only way to neutralize those cannon was to hack down a forest grove, build a big floating platform for 45 cannons, sail it halfway around the world and send it headlong into direct kill-or-be-killed conflict with a bunch of whiskey-crazed English hinterland rebels. The English felt strongly enough about the Acushnet River that they took more than one crack at just that course of action.

Fort Phoenix is 1-1-1 in fights with the British, but the L was a big one.

The fort, nameless to me at least, was put up in some form before the start of the American Revolution... perhaps even to fight the French, I'm not sure. True to the hardcore nature of the South Coast, the fort was involved in several fights almost immediately.

Not a lot of people know this, or at least not a lot when compared to those who can tell you about Bunker Hill, but the first naval engagements of the American Revolution went down off of the South Coast.

The British sloop Falcon appeared off of the New England coastline shortly after the entertainment at Lexington/Concord. Both sides were scrambling to get men and supplies up to Boston for the imminent Big Squabble. The Falcon was able to bag two 'Murican ships in one day. One (the Champion) was full of supplies from Maryland intended for the rebels, and they kept that.

The other, a now-nameless sloop from Nantucket, was given a skeleton crew and some scant firearms. It was then sent to Dartmouth (Fairhaven was still Dartmouth at the time), where the Falcon had heard that a smuggler's vessel was docked. They seized that vessel, and went off to find the Falcon. They anchored off Martha's Vineyard for some reason, about 3 miles apart.

The South Coast was having none of that, and assembled a militia of 30 men carrying every gun they could get their hands on. They jammed this militia onto the whaling sloop Success, armed it with two swivel guns, and set off to kick Brit Butt.

Finding the English off of Martha's Vineyard, they immediately seized the Dartmouth ship without firing a shot. They then aimed both vessels at the British sailors on board the Nantucket ship, and closed before the Brits could flee. Shots were fired, and three Limey Poofters dropped.

The Americans then boarded the English ship. English military dudes were among the toughest on the planet. You could dunk them in Boston Harbor in April, march them on soaking foot to Lexington and Concord, and still go 1-1 against every Patriot in Massachusetts. Perhaps the only tougher people on the seas that day were South Coast whalers... especially if they had 30:11 odds.

They took the ships back to the yet-to-be-named Fort Phoenix, and the South Coast had a W in the books against the Empire On Which The Sun Never Sets.

The English had a measure of revenge in 1778. A series of operations known as Grey's Raid resulted in 4000 Brits burning New Bedford in a blaze that could be seen in Newport, Rhode Island. They then destroyed the cannon in Fairhaven before being run off by militia. The fort was rebuilt, hence the rising-from-the-ashes "Phoenix" moniker

The British took another crack at the Acushnet River during the War of 1812. The troublesome British raider HMS Nimrod made a run at New Bedford during action where they also attacked Wareham.

This story has a couple of different endings, one of which looks suspiciously like that of the Army of Two story where a pair of Scituate lighthouse keeper daughters used a fife and drum behind a dune to fool the British into thinking militia were gathering. In this one, it's a bugle or something.

Others say it was a gathering militia and fire from Fort Phoenix which made the British take a pass on tangling with New Betty. There is even a case to be made for the British feinting at Fairhaven to put the militia there, too far away to race the ships to Wareham, which was the true goal of the English visit. If that was the plan, it worked like a charm, because the British beat ?ham down like she stole something.

The burning of New Bedford's docks in 1778 was done under the orders of Sir Charles Grey. His kid, the 2nd Earl Charles Grey, is who Earl Grey's Tea is named for... something New Bedford and Fairhaven people should keep in mind when making tea purchases. Some people forget, but not Cranberry County Mother***ing Magazine.

Things were pretty peaceful since then, although the cannons are still pointing to sea.

Now, it's a nice little park on a beautiful bay, perfect for grabbing a bench and reading a book. 

There is a "Charlie Don't Surf" aspect to this park, as the Brits were misusing the area before Uncle Sam put in the basketball court and the pretty sunbathers.

A day spent watching the boats come in is a lot more enjoyable if you don't have to worry about those ships disgorging 4000 British marines to burn New Bedford. 

A distinctly American primordial urge did jump into me once or twice when I pondered using the cannon against barges and rich people boats that were sailing by, but it passed.