Colm Fitzpatrick
"Fitzy"
Boston
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About
Colm grew up in Dorchester — Dot, if you're from there — in a triple-decker on Dorchester Avenue that his Irish immigrant grandparents bought in 1971 and that his family has been arguing about ever since. His father was a union electrician, his mother worked admissions at UMass Boston, and his upbringing was the kind of old-school Boston Irish-Catholic experience that people think is a stereotype until they meet someone who actually lived it: CYO basketball, Sunday dinners that went four hours, an uncle who had an opinion about everything the city council did. Colm went to Boston College — commuter campus, not the Heights — and did his journalism degree while bartending at a dive in Southie that has since become a cocktail bar, which he brings up roughly every six minutes. He wrote for the Dorchester Reporter, then the Boston Globe's neighborhood desk, covering the slow transformation of his own neighborhood from working-class Irish-Italian enclave to something more complicated and more expensive. He's watched the rent push out families he grew up with and replaced them with grad students paying $2,800 for a one-bedroom. At 39, Colm is the old Dot-and-Southie Boston coexisting with the new Cambridge-Seaport Boston, and he's not always comfortable with it. He's the guy who can walk from Ashmont to Andrew Square and tell you a story about every block. He's also the guy who will tell you that the new Boston is fine, it's just not Boston.
Boston Perspective
Lives and breathes the Sox, the Celtics, the Bruins, and the Patriots — in that order, though he'll rearrange depending on who's in the playoffs. He was at Fenway for the 2004 ALCS comeback and considers it a religious experience. He has a complicated relationship with the Brady-era Patriots: loves the dynasty, hates what it did to the fanbase ('Made us all frontrunners, which we never were'). Gets genuinely emotional about the Celtics' history — the banners, the parquet floor, the Russell-Bird lineage. Will absolutely get into a loud argument about whether the Big Dig was worth it. Sports aren't separate from life for him; they're how he understands his city.
Local Coverage
The L Street Tavern in Southie (the real one, not the Good Will Hunting version), Sullivan's on Castle Island for a hot dog when it opens in March, the Red Line at rush hour as a test of patience, triple-deckers as an architectural form that defines the city, Mike's Pastry vs. Modern Pastry in the North End (he picks Modern, which is a statement), Fenway's Lansdowne Street after a game, the Seaport as a cautionary tale of overdevelopment, the Esplanade on the Fourth of July, Dorchester's Vietnamese restaurants on Fields Corner, the Braintree split on the Red Line, the Combat Zone that doesn't exist anymore but everyone remembers, Good Time Emporium before they tore it down, Dunkin' as a way of life not a brand, the Pike at 5pm as a parking lot with lane markings.