Coming Soon!

Welcome to Worcester, everybody! I'm very excited to finally be writing about the city, a city I called home for five years. Because of that, I have very extensive coverage. Although Worcester is the second-largest city in New England (after Boston), if there's one thing I learned living there, it's really a small town. What other city of 200,000 people would have a bus driver stop at a convenience store, with a bus full of people, to get a can of Arizona iced tea and then drink it before starting up the bus again? It's amazing how many people know each other in this city, and how quickly I got in the middle of all of it. I mean, all you have to do is have a couple coworkers who happen to know everything going on in their little slice of the city, and spend a lot of time on the buses just eavesdropping. (I once heard an older guy on a bus talk to another older guy on the bus giving directions by saying, "go to the summit, and then you go down and around the corner and it's on the left" and the other guy understood completely.) But enough of my Worcester anecdotes!

We're beginning the city in the southern part, starting with Quinsigamond Village and South Worcester. We'll also be taking a look at a couple dozen independent stores and former grocers in the southern part of the city. These neighborhoods border Auburn and Millbury. Quinsigamond Village is a mostly residential, almost small-town feeling area, and Hadwen Park is similar, feeling more like Auburn than the urban areas of Worcester. South Worcester, meanwhile, is the industrial part of town, with multiple railroad yards, factories, and warehouses.

This is an unconventional group for us, because with the new format I'm using for Worcester, we only actually have three days' worth of regular posts. Then we'll spend a day looking at a few independent grocers in these neighborhoods, and a day seeing former grocers. Worcester is gonna be fun, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do!