| Egg hunt
Everything Sal DiDomenico needs is within walking distance. He says he wouldn't even need a car if he didn't have to make deliveries for his 35-year-old business, Flowers by Sal. His home turf, the one-mile stretch of Cambridge Street between the Lechmere Green Line station and Inman Square, has lately been bustling with fresh energy. "Youth keeps the area a little more alive," says DiDomenico. "The Portuguese community has grown old, and they're doing the same thing the Italians did, which is move out to Billerica and places like that. And as they sell the old family home, we're getting a lot of young people in the area, which is kind of nice." The neighborhood can offer more than single- and multi-family homes; a former candy factory is being converted into a condo complex and should open by 2006. DiDomenico, 66, has lived here his entire life. When I ask him to give me a tour, his 94-year-old mother, Tina, and his wife, Marie, agree to tend the store. Putting on his fedora-style Borsalino hat, he says the area was once ethnically divided but now just seems ethnically diverse. For a good meal, DiDomenico recommends Portugalia restaurant (723 Cambridge Street, 617-491-5373), which prides itself on salt cod and other cuisine from northern Portugal. We pass Pugliese's (635 Cambridge Street, 617491-9616), where the locals hunched at the bar don't seem to mind if you're not a local yourself. "They've been here since year one," says DiDomenico, and while that is a slight exaggeration, the establishment has been open since the early 1930s. And starting this month, the newly refurbished space will offer grilled food. Mayflower Poultry (621 Cambridge Street, 617-547-9191), which DiDomenico says has also been there since year one, is best known for its rather jarring sign outside, which reads: "Live Poultry Fresh Killed." Owner Jim Gould confirms that the shop kills birds four days a week for customers. DiDomenico says he remembers as a boy a few times when an egg would still be in the slaughtered chicken. "You'd think we found a million dollars," he says. He tells me that two places, in particular, keep former residents coming back: Royal Pastry (738 Cambridge Street, 617-547-2053) - "there are lines and lines at the holidays there" - and Daly's Curtains and Draperies (763 Cambridge Street, 617-547-6986). "If you want to buy curtains," he says, "that's where everyone goes." Patrick Gerard Healy Back |
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