The Power of Words. Sometimes a good story is right under your nose

1/7/98
Sometimes a good story
is right under your nose

       Karen Lee Ziner found a story in the fact that a boat was rotting away on a vacant lot in the middle of the city. Here's how she found the story:
       I drove past that damned boat for several years, and always wondered who had left it there in the middle of a city lot, unclaimed, rotting, a potential fire hazard and precariously tilted toward an adjacent house.
       To me, this wasn't just an abandoned boat, however. It represented the worst of a vacant city lot. I wanted to hold it up as an example of a spreading pocket of decay, in an urban neighborhood struggling to revitalize. After all, the boat sat immediately next to a rehabbed Victorian.
       My methodology involved gathering forensic detail. I wanted to plunk the reader smack in the middle of that reeking, rotting part of the city.
       That involved compiling a list of everything in my field of vision on that lot, small and large, from the abandoned car, tin cans and rotten sleeping bag, to the toothbrush, coconut, fish heads and numerous rat holes, broken refrigerators and chemical drums.
       The overlay involved a good deal of records-searching at City Hall, as well as on-the-street interviews with Arch Street residents, to find out about the former owner of the boat.
       My questions were, how did the boat get there? How long had it been there? Why had no one been able to get the boat moved? How did this affect them? (answer: crackheads/fear of fire/ threatened them).
       The bottom line was that tax court regulations had left the property in limbo. For awhile, I got tangled in the drama of it all and nearly lost my story thread.
       Here's what I discovered:
       As Paul Brun lay dying in a New Bedford trailer park, a tenant of his hung herself on the first floor of his building. No one found her for a week or so, and when police cut her down -- presumably from a light cord -- all the power in the neighborhood went out. (yuck).
       Two weeks later, a locally well-known real estate magnate, Pat Conley, bought the house. Then it just sat there, and sat there, catching fire, drawing squatters and detritus. Conley owned the house, but not the adjacent lot. Brun had owned both.
       So the focus got tangled. Should I write about just the lot? Or the lot and the house?
       Then, at the last minute, Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci ordered the lot cleaned up and the boat hauled out of there. In the end, I focused on just the lot, and the boat.
       The story only ran in one edition. Don't ask me why! I think people in Barrington and Tiverton should know about the unglitzy, struggling side of their capital city -- the flip side of the Providence renaissance.
       But hey, they don't have to live next to such a nasty hellhole, so who cares, right?

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