Reprinted with permission. Long Boston's most impoverished area, the Dudley Street neighborhood is living an extraordinary story of community rebirth shaped by the dreams of ordinary people of different races and generations. For years, Dudley has looked as if an earthquake had struck, leveling whole sections.
Streets crisscross blocks of vacant lots where homes and shops used to be.
In the summer, the lots bloom with violet wildflowers, nature's gift to a community working to rebuild against great odds. The earthquake that hit Dudley was neither natural nor sudden. Instead, in a pattern repeated nationally, a thriving urban community was trashed and burned. It was redlined by banks, government mortgage programs and insurance companies in a self-fulfilling prophecy of White flight, devaluation and decline. The distance between downtown Boston and downtrodden Dudley could not be measured by the less than two miles between them.