The Real Heart of the Commonwealth : A 3-Decker Salute to That ‘Gritty Mill Town’ of Worcester, Mass.

When Bruce Springsteen began his last tour here in February, the New York Times couldn’t understand why the Boss would want to play a “a gritty central Massachusetts mill town” whose only attraction was “its close proximity to Boston.”

In July of ‘87, the same newspaper declared that Worcester “can be considered Massachusetts’ utility closet.”

Well, stuff it, New York Times. You should live in as pleasant a city. I took a walk around the old neighborhood the other Sunday, and it’s as nice as it was 30 years ago, except that the trees are even taller.

I love this walk. The neighborhood was charted before bulldozers, and each house and lot is different. Take the three-decker at the corner, where the O’Tooles used to live.

Worcester is famous for its three-deckers: Three flats on top of each other, each with its front and back porch (with clothesline).

They were designed in the early 1900s, when, as Gov. Michael Dukakis has said, “everybody was ethnic” and everybody had a big family. The idea was that the grandparents would live on the first floor, the parents on the second floor and the newly married children on the third floor. When one generation died, another would move down.

Did it ever work out that way? I don’t know, but three-decker dwellers thought of themselves as living in their own homes, not in rented flats--and certainly not in tenements. Tenements didn’t have front yards with hedges.

I know the O’Tooles’ house by heart, from having played there so often, but I don’t know some of these other houses at all. It wasn’t a neighborhood where people were always dropping over for coffee. Worcester people liked--still do--to keep a little space around themselves.

For example, our pastor at Blessed Sacrament Church once decided to have a special collection for some parish cause, the collection to be labeled “the substitute lawn party”--so we wouldn’t actually have to go the trouble of having one. Everyone thought this was quite sensible.

Again, when my cousin Anne moved to Texas, she couldn’t get over the way her neighbors would send over a cake or some tomatoes, “and no one had even died.”

At the same time, the neighborhood was full of kids. Here’s the hill where we used to slide in the winter, when the street lights came on. Here’s where we used to play scrub (the girls too). Here’s where we stole horse-chestnuts for that strange game where you mount a chestnut on a shoelace and try to crack the other guy’s.

To sound tough, we called each other by our last names. This was “Goodwin’s” house--Richie Goodwin, who got polio one summer. Here’s where “Hennessey” lived--Eddie Hennessey, whose mother famously marched in front of the No. 5 bus when the driver closed his door in her face during the Christmas rush, and got her picture in Life magazine.

A lot of famous people come from Worcester. Ever hear of Robert Benchley? Benchley was sitting on the front porch with his mother one afternoon in 1917 when a telegram came that his big brother had been killed at the Front. “Oh, Robert,” his mother said. “If only it had been you.” (Typical Worcester story.)

Ever hear of Abbie Hoffman? He was in my brother’s class at May Street School.

Ever hear of Sigmund Freud? He wasn’t from Worcester, but he delivered his only American speech here, in 1909, at Clark University.

Ever hear of Clark University? Ever hear of Worcester Tech? Ever hear of Holy Cross College? Ever hear of the American Antiquarian Society? Ever hear of the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology? Ever hear of the Worcester Art Museum?

Gritty mill town, eh? Well, at least they’re not scraping medical waste off the beaches. Worcester may no longer be “the largest industrial city not on an inland waterway in the United States” (as the Chamber of Commerce once cautiously boasted), but neither is it anybody’s broom closet.

It’s still the Heart of the Commonwealth--”r” not pronounced. Boston is lucky to be close to us .