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Terrier town
University’s “Newton Campus” a true BU community
By Brian Fitzgerald
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BU in the ’burbs: (front row, left to right) Evelyn Bell and Helen Meltzer; (middle row) Ginger Kenney, Patricia Jessico, Carolyn Kaufman, Renée Delatizky, Elaine Alpert, Arnold Meltzer, John Jiang, Daniel Primack, Jasper Primack (in front of Daniel), Margaret Primack, and Will Primack; (back row) Charles Jessico, Richard Primack, Jonathan Delatizky, James Collins, and Bill Marsh. Photo by Lauren Hansen-Flaschen |
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Have you been to BU’s Far-West Campus? No, not the Student Village area, Packard’s Corner, or even Allston and its environs.
Head even farther west, young men and women. Keep going down Commonwealth Avenue, past the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and Boston College. In Newton Centre, a full six miles from the Charles River Campus, you’ll find a sizable colony of BU people who live near the intersection of Stiles Terrace and Westminster Road. How many residents are BU through-and-through? Well, there might as well be a big red Boston University sign in the locality.
“Out of 26 homes in this neighborhood, 13 families have immediate BU connections,” says CAS Biology Professor Richard Primack, who lives on Stiles Terrace. At first I’m skeptical. Half the households? Granted, BU is an enormous institution — more than 29,000 students, 8,200 employees, and 246,000 living alumni — but it seems unlikely that its influence could extend to a neighborhood so far away from campus. Primack says he’ll invite his BU-related neighbors to his house on a Sunday afternoon, and I can see for myself. I take him up on it.
At BU’s unofficial “Newton Campus,” Primack introduces me to his wife, graduate student Margaret (CFA’92,’05), and his two oldest sons, Daniel (CAS’06), and Will, a senior at BU Academy. There are other Garden City Terriers to greet me: Westminster Road residents Arnold Meltzer (CAS’47, GRS’47) and his wife, Helen, who has taken courses in the University’s Evergreen Program. Entering the house seconds later are the Primacks’ neighbors: Renée Delatizky, a faculty member in BU’s CELOP, and her husband, Jonathan, who was an ENG adjunct faculty member in the 1980s. They inform me that their daughter, Bethea (SMG’04), will graduate in May, and their son, Michael (CAS’07), is a BU freshman.
A large pack of Terriers now walks through the door: ENG research assistant John Jiang, whose son Justin will be a BU freshman in September; UNI and ENG Biomedical Engineering Professor James Collins (his wife, Mary, a doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital, performed her internship and residency at the BU Medical Center in the early 1990s); and Stiles Terrace resident Ginger Kenney, whose son Adam graduated from BU Academy in 2000.
On their heels are BU hockey season-ticket holders Bill Marsh and Elaine Alpert (SPH’85), who is a MED associate dean and an associate professor at MED and SPH. Both are wearing their construction hard hats picked up during a recent tour of Agganis Arena. That’s the spirit! Marsh admits that his official BU connection is a bit tenuous, having taken “a few summer courses in 1977”; however, he’s a rabid Terrier hockey fan, and that’s what really counts. Alpert tells me that her son, Dan Glidden (COM’06), is a sophomore at the College of Communication. But wait, more people file in: alums Patricia Jessico (SED’71), Charles Jessico (SMG’72), Carolyn Kaufman (SAR’87), and Iris Leigh (SAR’76, SED’03), and Evelyn Bell, whose daughter, Gilah Bell-Cohen (SED’74), now lives in Israel.
“Since there are so many BU families here,” quips Collins, “maybe BU snowplows could come over here and plow our streets and driveways in the winter.”
Seriously, how does this Newton neighborhood happen to have so many BU-tiful people? Is it some kind of statistical-geographical glitch? Despite the presence of all the impressive BU brains in the house, including Collins, recipient of a 2003 MacArthur “genius” award, no one really has an answer. “Obviously, some of the children of people who work at BU attend the school because of tuition remission benefits,” says Richard Primack. “And I know that John Jiang came to BU in part because Jim Collins and I told him about career opportunities in our bioengineering program.” Still, the BU-Newton Centre anomaly goes largely unexplained. Maybe chaos theory could help unravel the mystery.
People in the neighborhood keep a small garden in the triangular traffic island at the intersection of Stiles and Westminster. Could there be a paranormal influence to this BU phenomenon — a Newton Centre “triangle” drawing BU people?
Whatever the reason for the BU concentration, the Stiles-Westminster area is a true community. There are social activities and outings, including attendance at BU arts events, and of course, hockey games. As everyone spills out of the Primack house for a photo, the gathering turns into an impromptu neighborhood meeting/bulletin board. Alpert announces a can and bottle drive for the Stephen Glidden Foundation, which raises scholarship money to send children to summer camp. The foundation (www.stevegliddenfoundation.org) is named after Alpert’s son, who was killed, along with three other Newton Middle School students, in a 2001 bus crash during a field trip to Canada. The youngest volunteers, neighborhood children who were friends of Steve’s, are known as the Steve Glidden Kids Corps. “Steve was a BU hockey fanatic,” says Alpert. “He was a real rink rat at Walter Brown Arena.” In fact, there is a seat dedicated to him at the facility — as there will be in the new Agganis Arena.
After the photo is taken, Renée Delatizky reminds everyone that neighbor Vera Shaw, a member of the BU Women’s Council, soon will be returning to her Stiles Terrace home after recent surgery. “The people in the neighborhood will bring food over her house and check up on her,” says Primack. “Everyone was also very supportive of Elaine Alpert’s family after the bus accident. That tragedy deeply affected everyone here.”
BU “has had a huge impact on this neighborhood,” he says, “and this is a neighborhood in every sense of the word.”
16
April 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations