I went looking for Pedro Martinez in Jamaica Plain.
This neighborhood in the geographic heart of Boston is and always has been a battlefield. It’s a place that redefines itself from one block to the next, from one year to the next. In the east, it’s a post-industrial jumble of warehouses, body shops, and empty lots waiting to be turned into six-story condos with rooftop patios. There’s a river buried under ground here; I’ve heard that it once powered more breweries-per-square-mile than anywhere else on Earth, but that sounds like the type of statistic no one’s ever actually calculated.