Early experiences of living in Somerville: churches

I really wanted to write a blog post about how Andrew and I went windsurfing on Saturday--we did, it was super fun, much better than surfboarding--but I don't have any pictures to include in the post. We were, you know, on the water, on easily tipped sailboards, which wasn't a conducive setting for picture taking. We spent most of our day at Old Silver Beach either in the windsurfing lesson (1 hour) or actually windsurfing (4 hours), so we don't even have any pictures of Cape Cod, or of the nearby town of Falmouth.

Instead, this post is about some of the churches in our area.

I've noticed over the last month that there are a lot of churches in the Boston area and so I thought it might be interesting to take pictures of the buildings. Just the exteriors. These are small-ish churches that I wouldn't expect to be open to random visitors/tourists. And I feel weird enough standing on the street taking pictures, so I'm not about to knock on doors and try to get inside.

The first church is the Mission Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith (whew, what a mouth full). From what I can tell, this is only the name of the congregation and sadly, the church's website doesn't seem to provide any additional historic information about the building.

The second building is actually a Jewish Temple, Temple B'nai Brith, which is described as: an independent egalitarian congregation with historical roots in the Conservative movement. Again, I'm struggling to find any historic information on the Temple (the website appears to be down), but a secondhand source suggests it was built in 1922.

Right around the corner from the Temple is a Spanish-language church, Vida Real, which from what I can tell is a large Spanish-Christian organization that runs several churches around the United States. I'm really striking our on trying to provide background information on these buildings. The website for this one is all in Spanish, which of course I can't read. At least there was a stone with the date 1908 carved into it this church, so I'm going to hazard a guess and say that was the year it was built or founded.

The final church I photographed today was the Somerville branch of the Christ the King Presbyterian Church of Boston. This congregation also seems pretty new and their website says that Presbyterian Church of America wasn't founded until 1973, which surprises me, as I assumed it would be older. Maybe that's only in Canada?

And this concludes my not very informative tour of the churches, and temples...the worship facilities? I suspect there's a proper word for describing churches and temples en mass, but I can't remember what it is right now. Maybe next time I'll succeed in finding some historical background information on buildings in my neighbourhood.

Ciao,

Andrea

Early experiences of living in Somerville: a walk around the neighbourhood.

I took a walk around my new neighbourhood this afternoon. This served the duo purpose of giving me some exercise, but also giving me the opportunity to take some photos. Further, the exercise was also a method of getting myself out of our apartment, and the photos might give those of my readers who don't live in Somerville (which I assume are most of you) an idea of where I now reside.

Garden's are very popular in Somerville. Lots of houses have flowers out front, and we've also seen some extensive vegetable gardens. I felt it would be a bit weird to photograph other peoples' residences, so I didn't, but I did stop in the small public space we pass on our way to the local grocery store. It's the Quincy Street Open Space, if you can't tell from the picture, which includes chairs and stones to lounge on while you enjoy the shade and flowers.

As I said in my last post, Union Square is the square closest to us. It takes less than ten minutes to walk there and it contains a number of restaurants, a few businesses, churches, and our local grocery store. There's a farmer's market on Saturdays (in the space shown in the third picture below), but it seems that all the produce is fancy-pants organic, for which I'm unwilling to pay. I also noticed while I was out this afternoon that there was an interesting mural painted on the exterior of one of the buildings (fourth picture below).

It seems that we've landed in an area with lots of history--perhaps not difficult since Boston itself was founded in 1630, and Somerville was established in 1842 when it separated from Charlestown. There are several monuments close by. The first is for men who died in the American Civil War, and the one below is for men who died in the war with Spain (which I'm assuming was the war over Texas). There was a memorial for the Second World War, but it isn't terrible attractive so I skipped the pictures.

The public library is also close by, and if I remember correctly, the building was erected in the 1880s ('84, maybe?). The top pictures show the exterior of the library. What you can't tell is to the left of the main column, there's a 'Fallout Shelter' sign. I tried to get a closer shot, but the picture wasn't all that attractive. After a quick survey of the initial foyer area, I determined I need to go upstairs to find the adult and non-fiction collection. The space is open and brightly light, and I headed straight up to the gallery area (so I didn't look like some weird lady taking pictures in the library) to get a couple of shots. Overall I was pleased to find that the interior was really rather nice.

The last set of pictures for today comes from the Somerville High School and City Hall, which happen to be located next to each other. I don't know anything about the High School, except that it's there. I'm really not going to try to poke around a school, especially when students are out for the summer, it just seems like a recipe for a trespassing charge. The second picture is of the HUB bikes I've talked about a couple of times. There are stations all over the city, one being right outside City Hall. The last image is the front entrance of City Hall, although again, I don't know much about it as at that point I wanted to head home.

So that's my neighbourhood. It was a beautiful day.

Ciao, Andrea