Fore! (Seriously, what did these folks expect?)

There's been a lot of flap in Boston of late about outdoor dining in the North End, the Italian section that's chocked full of restaurants and cafes. 

Anyway, with covid, Boston allowed restaurants throughout the city to put tables out in the street and it seemed to have worked pretty well. The last few springs-summers-falls, there've been restaurants in my neighborhood that have set up shop in the street, and, while I've only eaten out there a couple of times, I love the life that seeing people dining outside brings to Charles Street. European-light. 

But in the North End, there've been a ton of complaints about it. Too much noise. Too much trash. Too much traffic disruption. Too many parking places taken away for the duration.

So some of the folks who live in the 'hood leaned on Mayor Wu to do something about it. Her solution was to charge North End restaurants a fee well in excess of what restaurants in other parts of town are paying for the privilege putting some tables up in the streets. 

I stopped paying attention to the brouhaha that ensued, a brouhaha which appears to have pitted folks who live in the North End (many of them recent yuppie blow ins, and not 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation Italian-Americans, most of who've long fled to the burbs) vs. the restaurant owners (many of them 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th gen Italian-Americans who fled to the burbs but kept their in-town restaurants).

Seriously, I don't really get the complaints. Presumably, you move to the North End because you wanted urban life enough to put up with the noise, commotion, traffic, and parking. You wanted to have the restaurants, the cafes, the tourists, the crowded streets. Then all of a sudden you can't put up with any of the overhead associated with it? 

If you need to park in front of your own house and don't like commotion, you should consider moving out of town where there's plenty of parking, no garbage trucks picking up restaurant trash at 2 a.m., no tourists clogging the narrow streets. You can always Uber in for one of the summer saints festivals, which I understand are coming roaring back this summer. Really and truly, if you don't want the girl in the angel costume flying on a rope across your street while the Roma Band plays loud, live elsewhere. That goes for restaurants in the street, too.

And then there's the Tenczars, a young couple who, a few years back, "moved into their dream home overlooking a golf course" in a town south of Boston. A dream house on Country Club Lane, in Indian Pond Estates. 

They obviously recognized that they wanted to raise their kids in the 'burbs. No North End noise, grime, and commotion for them. But they apparently hadn't really thought through the golf course part of the deal. 

Flying balls shattered windows in their house with such force they sent glass spraying into the next room; the siding on the house was peppered with circular dents, like a battleship in a war zone. Fearful neighbor children wore bicycle helmets when they went out to play, the Tenczars said.

In the four years since moving in, Erik and Athina Tenczar have picked up nearly 700 balls on their property; they no longer fix the broken windows, but instead cover them in thick plastic sheeting. They even built a partition to shield a small section of their deck from flying objects. A golf shot last fall took out a deck railing.

“When it hits, it sounds like a gunshot,” said Athina Tenczar, 36. “It’s very scary.”

“We’re always on edge,” added Erik Tenczar, 43. “It’s been emotionally taxing on us.” (Source: Boston Globe) 

I'm not going to discount how terrible it must be to live on a golf course and be subject to this. (Turns out, the situation of their house puts it on a worse path than other homes in their area. Seems like they should take that up with the homebuilder/developer.) And it does sound like the Indian Pond Country Club was, until recently, a bit douche golf bag-gy in their dealings with the Tenczars. 

But what did the Tenczars expect, buying a house on a golf course? 

The couple say they anticipated putting up with some amount of sound and distraction from living along a golf course. But they were not prepared for the extent, frequency, and intensity of all of it.

“Honestly, if you have all these houses on a course, I assumed it was safe,” Athina Tenczar said.

Erik Tenczar asked: “Should we have looked into chances our house would be hit? Probably. I don’t know. We just fell in love with the house. It was our first house.”

Probably? I don't know? Come on. A golf course would be the next to last place I'd choose to live. (The true last place would be The Villages in Florida.) I don't want golf balls sailing in through my windows, thank you. So I put up with sirens and rats scrounging around in the garbage bags when people put their trash out too damned early.

Apparently, the legal system is - so far - on the side of the Tenczars. 

After a six-day trial in Plymouth Superior Court, a jury on Dec. 6 awarded the Tenczars $3.5 million for damages and mental and emotional suffering. (With interest the award totals $4.9 million, court records show).

Since this judgement was made, the club has jiggered around with the tee location for the 15th hole, and the Tenczars have been golf ball free for a while.

This award seems insane to me, and the Indian Pond Country Club thinks so, too. It's appealing and they're fairly certain this verdict will get tossed. 

I'm sure the Tenczars are a perfectly nice couple, looking for nothing more than safety for their three small children who they don't want to get conked by an errant drive when they're splashing in their kiddie pool. (That pool was hit once, but the kiddos blessedly weren't in it at the time.) But $5M? 

See you in court, I guess. 

As for me, I'm hoping to dine out on Hanover Street in the North End when the weather warms up a bit.