Codman center can celebrate its work, plans

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I never lived in Codman Square yet in every sense of the phrase, I grew up there. I was 11 and in the seventh grade, a commuter student at St. Mark's in Dorchester and as lonely as I would ever be. That's when I discovered the square and the library that overlooked it.

Every day when the neighborhood kids went home to lunch and the other commuters ate their waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches in the gloomy auditorium, I walked up the hill past Girl's Latin to the Codman Square library.

I graduated from St. Mark's in 1960 and didn't go back to Codman Square until the mid-'70s. The place was a ghost town by then. The library and most of the stores were deserted.

Once a major center of commerce, its deserted buildings were being torched at a rate of one a day. After Blizzard of '78 there were more fires and looting and the neighborhood seemed doomed.

But Bill Walczak could see beyond the gloom. He was just 20 in 1974 when he was asked to chair a committee to look into the possibility of opening a health care center in the old Codman Square library. From the library, Walczak could see a decrepit commercial district, a tree growing through the roof of the city's most historic building. Everywhere he looked were poverty and hopelessness.

But what he could also see, and what he focused on, was potential.

Ten years ago, I was driving through Codman Square, noticed that the library had been converted to a health center, parked my car and knocked on the door. Walczak gave me a tour. The place was basic, but he talked about all the things that were going to be. He pointed to a row of run-down buildings and described what they would become.

It takes a long time to build anything worthwhile, 20 years to grow an oak tree and a community is certainly as grand.

Codman Square grew and is still growing, Bill Walczak a driving force behind its resurgence. But it's the health center he wants to talk about.

"It's tough to find something on a community level that the center doesn't provide," he said Monday, showing off a facility that has outgrown the library and spilled into new buildings and has grown in its mission, too. "Our job is to take care of people," he says, explaining how the health center is really a community center. It's where neighbors take classes and kids study for the Latin School exam, where people can come for counseling or for clothes and where everyone gathers.

Walczak picks up litter as he walks around. In the years when graffiti greeted him every morning, he scrubbed it off. Being the executive director of the Codman Square Health Center isn't his job; it's his vocation.

"The Square that's a Star" is the logo on the decorative flags that now line the city's busy streets. "This is as nice as any New England village," Walczak says.

Tonight Mayor Tom Menino will address the community as it gathers in the Great Hall to celebrate its accomplishments and plan its future.

The Great Hall, now beautifully restored, seems a fitting place for accomplishments to be recognized and futures to be dreamed for it was once the main room of the Codman Square library. It's a place that has long nutured dreams, mine included. Today it still does.