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The mean streets of Westie
By adamg on Thu, 09/24/2015 - 3:29pm
The Montreal Gazette talks to former Canadiens enforcer Chris "Knuckles" Nilan about "Black Mass." Seems Nilan was once married to Whitey's stepdaughter, so he's obviously qualified to talk about the movie. Also, he's "a product of Boston’s rough-and-tumble West Roxbury," the Gazette reports.
Ed. note: To be fair, at Tony's at Spring and Baker, they have an old newspaper clipping about how Tony opened the place back in the day when that intersection was noted for gang problems.
H/t Stephanie.
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Comments
"rough-and-tumble West
"rough-and-tumble West Roxbury"
Meaning he once dropped a ice cream cone when a wild turkey gobbled at him.
Well...
...I read the Gazette article. I guess the movie would have been a trilogy to explain all the complications that were involved with the Boston Irish crime wars.
Just for your knowledge...Winter Hill is in Somerville, not Southie.
Maybe you can look it up online, sure it's all true...
On a different scale:
West Roxbury was primarily known, in other parts of the city for Billings Field and Fallon Field.
Never heard anything much about Center and Baker. Oh, Spring and Baker. Sorry. Never heard about that, either.
I went to high school in Roxbury. I knew a lot of kids from West Roxbury. So, how many uhubbers can tell the difference without a google?
Ya, thought so...
Or even the difference between WRox and Rosi?
Not you, apparently:
Fallon is in Roslindale...
Fallon is in Roslindale...
LOLWUT
Um, all of them, Katie?
Mean streets of Boston..LOL.
I suggest you take a trip to LA, Chicago and NY if you want to see real "hardscrabble, rough and tumble, mean streets"
Boston is a joke and always has been when it comes to "toughness". I mean, ppl here thought New Kids on The Block were "tough"...LOL.
Also, the so-called "toughest" guy had a nick name of "whitey"...ooooooh, that sends shivers down my spine.
You'd piss your pants if you ever ran into Whitey
And you certainly wouldn't be talking shit.
Don't kid yourself.
I encountered him once and he wasn't even in a bad mood but very intimidating
I encountered him once and he
Well, you are from the Boston area so that may be why you were intimidated.
People from cities with real, violent gangs...probably not.
Knuckles and Whitey
http://www.cbssports.com/nhl/eye-on-hockey/22972950/photo-chris-nilan-wh...
fruits and veggies
to whitey
(No subject)
Westie?
I soooo want this on a T-shirt.
Lol.
https://www.google.com/#q=buy
https://www.google.com/#q=buy+%22trek+yourself%22+t-shirt
Thanks. Amazon.com has it.
$14.99-17.99. Sizes. S-4XL.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00P82B5LS/ref=pd_aw_sbs_193_2?ie=UTF8&ref...
He's from the West END not
He's from the West END not West ROXBURY.
Spring and Baker
Spring and Baker
Thanks
Fixed.
Did Westie piss in your
Did Westie piss in your cereal this week or something? You've have a real hard on for God's Country the past few days.
Yeah
So are you rough or are you tumble?
Someone
Is acting like a keyboard tough guy today.
A better question
Are you a fruit or are you a vegetable?
I'm surprised
that the adjective "hardscrabble" isn't in there somewhere.
Very sad
I guess "tony" and "leafy" won't be called in from the bullpen and can take the night off
Nuckles Nilan
Tony (Ilio Imbornone) had to take on half the football team from Catholic Memorial Not any gangs
Warriors
Quiet now, we're leaving the territory of the Two-Toilets and entering the turf of the Curtain Twitchers.
Um
Lace Curtain. Think Kennedy. They carry themselves so well.
Say what you will
About west roxbury but its one of the last true neighborhoods left in boston. Take a look around,places that used to have strong neighborhood ties such as Southie are now a bunch of condos and luxury apartments. We're a bunch of middle class people who have a strong love for our city with a majority of us having family ties in boston extending back a few generations. A good majority of residents are civil servants that serve this city and are damn proud.
Oh!
So just like Roslindale and Hyde Park?
Heck
Hyde Park still has that small town feel from the pre-1912 era if you ask me.
By then again, West Roxbury folk are special snowflakes, so let him keep on thinking that the rest of Boston has gone to hell in a handbasket. These folk tend not to venture north of the Parkway anyway.
Well
"Hyde Park still has that small town feel from the pre-1912 era if you ask me."
Someone's been doing their history.
No HP does not feel like a small town. Jeebus. The rest of Boston has changed, quite a bit. I've seen it. That's called change. It happens. West Roxbury (or 'westie' as you call it) changed quite a bit too. Less of the old German influence , more Irish. It's a tight knit community, they're in it for the long run.
I admire it as a community.
Hyde Park has a small town feel
Look, it's an opinion, but my opinion comes from running, driving, and hanging around Hyde Park. Yes, it is quite different from when I was born, but it still has a distinct, isolated feel.
There are families who have roots in Hyde Park back to the town days. Same with most parts of Boston.
Straight Outta ...
Westie?
Did you send
Smoke signals from the burbs.
Forget it
Whatever that means. You ain't gangsta, you ain't Boston.
Go back to Harvard.
In your child killing diesel car.
Fruity
Twenty years ago any one saying "Westie" would have been wedgied for putting on airs...it was never uttered, because the lace curtain private school boys knew that they were thugs in music only and their turned in alligator collars and piped sweat be-eebies were the uniform of the ghetto in their minds only. "Westy" is now the last bastion of a world that didn't have the stones to nut up during bussing and actually go cross town, but now talk as if they were personally screwed by the libs and are still picking brick shards out of their hack asses. It never happened, Westy, and you're still just Dedham with a fake Boston accent.
I live in West Roxbury
I like it here, have no plans to leave, and also have no idea what you are talking about and kind of like it that way.
Did you just move in yesterday?
Because he pretty much nailed it. And cracked me up in the process. Sweats bi ebe...dang.
No
But I don't associate with any of the kind of people mentioned. There's room here for people who just don't care about neighborhood rivalries.
I laughed when I read that in Nilan's book
I cannot believe he has gotten people to believe that West Roxbury is the gritty streets of Boston. Meanwhile, he admits that his dad worked in a skilled trade (I cannot remember which, but there is no trade union for it) at MIT and the family rented a cottage every summer growing up on the Cape. I've never spent the night on the Cape in the summer, so I guess the streets of Roslindale were that much meaner.
Anyone ask Nilan about stealing a speedo at South Shore Plaza?
Speaking of history, did anyone ask about Chris Nilan's arrest a few years back at the South Shore Plaza after stealing a men's speedo? Or speculation in the media that Whitey was able to smuggle much of his ill-gotten gains inside the hockey equipment bags of the Montreal Canadiens for deposit in Quebec safe-deposit boxes, since Customs rarely did more than a cursory check of the team's plane/bus? The media is a shadow of its former self. Thanks for the comic relief.
Well to be fair....
West Roxbury was a little different in 1970-1980 than it is now. The projects in Roslindale and Hyde Park were mostly white kids, and they went to public schools in West Roxbury (Shaw and Joyce Kilmer) with the West Roxbury kids, and many of them went to CM which was pretty cheap back then. The bowling alley and boys club were kind of dumpy and always had druggies and punks in and out, and Charlie's was a true dive bar with local good guys and bad guys often mixing it up.
This was also a time where a teacher married to a housewife could probably buy a 3 bedroom house in Wellesley, Newton or Brookline and not even think twice about it. West Roxbury was the place where you went when you couldn't afford that, as most of the housing is still smaller 3 bed/1 bath capes.
West Roxbury
Kubli Square at Washington and Grove intersection was the trouble corner, hard by Jado's lounge.
West Roxbury in the 1970's was full of blue collar, cop and fireman families. It is a lot less so now. Nilan was a known tough guy in the neighborhood back then, he was not the only one. More than a few of them ended up dead or in prison. It was a great place to grow up but not without its problems. An no one who grew up there calls it Westie, no one.
So we finally have someone
So we finally have someone mention Kubli Sq. The area between Spring and Centre sts.over to Washington st. is all private roads,was known as 'the Jungle,' and was where working class people lived in W.R. And yes, there were some tough kids from there. The Keyboard Kowboys on this site would have shit their pants if one of the Kubli Kids looked them in the eye.
Let's face it - the average U-Hubber's knowledge of Boston goes back about ten years. The real old-timers go wayyy back to the '90s, and think Kevin White wore a powdered wig.
Yes, the Grove is a little bit different
But that's not where Nilan grew up.
I'll put it this way. Chris grew up a few blocks from where a sometimes contributor to this website also grew up, albeit about 20 years later, yet 20 years ago. I know this because when said contributor was born, his family lived next door to me in Roslindale. They're a good family, despite their close Menino ties, but they were working up from working class. And trust me, the family by the mid 1980s was exactly what one would think of when one thinks West Roxbury, for better or for worse.
I'll write it again. When your family heads down the Cape during the summer, you are no longer scraping by. The Nilans headed to the Cape during the summer. Sure, the weren't as well off as Patrick Roy's family, but hardscrabble doesn't cut it.
Westie Gangs
There's a bunch of sketchy stuff in the woods between Roxbury Latin and the quarry, including several burned cars. I was assured by a friend, whose dad was a cop, that these were the leavings of old Westie gangs from the 70s.
I took a lot of pictures back in the day, maybe I'll see if I can scan some of them.
The Quarry
There was a murder there in the late 1970’s Denise Daly.
The most notorious place in to hang by the way was the Trestle never Billings, Fallon, Draper or Hines Field.
Well that's a horrible story.
Well that's a horrible story.
I found a lot of mattresses and clothes in those woods - including underwear. Freaked my 18yo self right out.
West Roxbury
I knew Denise Daly..the 15 yr old girl who was murdered in 1978. Denise was a sweet & naive little girl. She had a crush on an older guy..a 20 yr old asshole..named Dennis Chubbuck. Dennis took Denise into the woods behind the Altenheim nursing home in West Roxbury..where he proceeded to drop 95 lb rocks on her face & head..until she was dead. And then..he brutally raped her dead body. Denise's body was found the next afternoon..in the woods behind the Altenheim..by another good friend of ours. And..not a day goes by that I don't think of Denise and pray for her. Denise is still much loved and sadly missed,
This coming from a guy
Who lives in the most irrelevant section of Rozie.
Say what you will ...
At least the kids around here never formed a gang, let alone one with the most ridiculous name in the history of the universe.
Be more out of touch
Dale St had its fair share of shitheads, druggies and drug dealers.
Yeah, it did ...
Until they made the mistake of trying to take on the kids from Egleston. You know who else used to hang out down by the bridge? The little brothers of the Fruits and Veggies bad boys. Probably had their moms drop them off ...
But that's a different 'hood than mine, bro.
Wait--there's a relevant section?
Can you draw a little map for us?
Why are you so butt hurt
Someone from Westie stuff you in a trash can or call you a yuppie?
What's the problem, kid?
Didn't get into your first-choice college and now all the bros at Catholic Memorial are making fun of you?
Nailed it
Someone from Westie is bullying your kid. How old are you?
Old enough to know better than engaging in an online flame war
With a Westie kid who probably doesn't need to shave yet.
So I'm exercising my moderator's prerogative and bringing this to an end. Have a nice day.
I grew up in west roxbury all
I grew up in west roxbury all my life lived here for 45 years, the fruits and veggies are ridiculous that gang came out when i was 30. There were no gangs when i was growing up, you hung at billings field or draper feild, fallon feild is in roslindale. Kubli square was where you bought pot and booze and went to billings to drink and smoke, ran from the cops, stole cars. Hung with southie kids, rozzi kids, hyde park kids we all got along. Westie was a high school in west roxbury. My mom, dad and grandfather worked very hard to have a house in west roxbury and down the cape. They also all fought in Vietnam and protected our country so anyone who has anything to say bring it!!!!