Estela makes news again
Last week I exposed how District B Councilor Estela Reyes was doing major renovations to the house she owns at 173-175 Haverhill St. in Lawrence, next to the Oliver School, and the fact that she did not have a building permit issued by the city. I don’t know if she ever paid for one and I no longer care; the fact is that the work got done without it.
Among the pictures I took that day, there’s one of a little plaque explaining that Robert Frost lived there only one year from 1896 to 1897. Some people think that it makes it historical so I checked on that. The house itself is in the North Common Historic District of the city.
Frost’s grandfather owned the house and had lived there. His daughter (Robert’s mother) lived there and had her private school at that location. Frost and his wife Elinor lived there for a year and it was also where their first son was born. So four generations of the family lived there.
My surprise was finding out that the repairs are being done under the review of the Prospect Hill Historical Commission. How could repairs on such a big job take place under the supervision of a city commission and nobody noticed there was no building permit?
This is one case that I know but I wonder how many friends of politicians are getting away with similar things. Several years ago an employee told me that there are buildings that never get billed for water; one, in particular, didn’t pay for water for close to twenty years.
Before two buildings on Jackson St. next to the Spicket River were demolished, the owner owed several years of taxes and water bills. The easiest way out was giving them to the city in lieu of payment instead of selling them. Mayor Patricia Dowling ordered them razed. Just ask José Santiago who was state representative at the time and insisted that it shouldn’t be done because he had someone willing to buy them.
It’s all who you know! I don’t know the frequency but the Collector of Taxes publishes a full page of property owners who owe lots of money to the city. I have the one published on November 10, 2019. I wonder how many get away with that.
New book about Cubans in Massachusetts
Paul V. Montesino, PhD. has published the story of how the Cuban population grew in the state in the ’60s and ’70s. As a result, we created the Cuban Cultural Center of Boston and in the early eighties, we responded to the Mariel exodus with aid to the arrivals.
His recent publication Twentieth-Century Cuban Footprints in Massachusetts is a bilingual (English-Spanish) Kindle e-book, a paperback in regular print, and a paperback in large print at Amazon.com chronicling those two efforts of our community.
You may buy them through Amazon. The Kindle edition is $10; the regular print paperback for $15; and the large size print paperback for $18.
The book has been registered with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress and copies have been submitted to Cuban-oriented public libraries and at various universities.
Be the first to comment