Takin A Walk/Episode Twenty One with former Executive Director of The Haley House Bing Broderick in Savin Hill

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Takin A Walk. An excursion to converse, connect, and catch up at a cool location with some of the most interesting people you can find.

Buzz Knight:

This is Buzz Knight and today the Takin A Walk series takes us to the Savin Hill area of Boston, otherwise known as Dorchester. I’m here to take a walk with Bing Broderick. Bing has spent much of his career around the nonprofit world with his awesome work with the Haley House. He was also part of WGBH Enterprises here in Boston and he also was a specialist in marketing for Rounder Records. Now one of the joys of taken a walk for me is walking and talking with interesting people and interesting new people. So, today we accomplish that with Bing. We’ll also talk to someone fresh on the edge of his own career moment of reinvention since so many people are taking that turn to decide what’s next in their life. So, I’m happy to be taken a walk with Bing. Hi Bing.

Bing Broderick:

Hey there. How’s it going Buzz?

Buzz Knight:

It’s going great. Great. Thanks for taking a walk with me.

Bing Broderick:

I’m happy to. Really love my neighborhood and so, it’s fun to enjoy it with someone new.

Buzz Knight:

And you’ve been here a while you were telling me in the neighborhood, you didn’t just arrive, right?

Bing Broderick:

I moved to Pleasant Street in 1998.

Buzz Knight:

Wow.

Bing Broderick:

So, I’ve been here 24 years. It’s hard to believe, but I have.

Buzz Knight:

And you’ve seen some changes.

Bing Broderick:

Yeah, I have and they’re continuing, there’s 450 units going in at the end of my street. So, down by Hancock Street there’s a development called Dot Block. There’s been a complex of factories on that location that were obsolete. And so, a developer I guess bought them up and proposed this development for there. And it’ll impact the people who have been living right around there in a big way. I did sort of advocate for parking during snow emergencies, for us at  because all of the streets in this neighborhood are snow emergency streets. And when there’s a snowstorm and a snow emergency, there’s nowhere to park. So, that was what I was asking for in the equation.

Buzz Knight:

That is city living, right?

Bing Broderick:

Absolutely.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so let’s walk through your journey here, which has some interesting twists and turns and probably more interesting twists coming up here for you. So, tell me how you got really to Haley House first of all, and talk about Haley House and the good work of Haley House.

Bing Broderick:

Sure. I first knew of Haley House in the late seventies. My sister lived around the corner from there in the south end and I knew somebody who lived in the community there and helped to run the soup kitchen. Haley House started originally on Upton street and when Kathy McKenna and her husband, John both had spent time with Dorothy Day on the lower east side of Manhattan at the Catholic Worker and were inspired by that work and wanted to try to do something like that in Boston. And they started welcoming some of the guys who were living on the street, at the time they were mostly World War II vets and brought them into their apartment and gave them shelter and some food. And some of the neighbors thought they were crazy and other neighbors were really inspired and a movement sort of came about to acquire a building.

Bing Broderick:

And in 1967, they bought 23 Dartmouth Street, which is now home of our soup kitchen and our home base. But everything that happened at Haley House sort of sprang from there. As the south end started to get gentrified, we were able to acquire some housing to ensure that some people didn’t get displaced and some folks knew how to bake in the soup kitchen in the nineties, early nineties. We started a job training program and a bakery all at once and that grew and grew. And we moved the bakery to Roxbury and opened the Haley House Bakery Cafe. And I had been working in music and in the film industry prior to coming to Haley House and I’d been feeling like I wanted something new and in a certain way, it was in the post 911 period when people were also making choices in their life about questioning the value of what they were doing.

Bing Broderick:

So, in the post 911 era, people were sort of questioning what they were doing and why they were doing it. And I took a leave of absence from my job and went to organic farm and cooking school in Ireland called Ballymaloe. And there, I became sort of passionate about food justice and came back to Boston and volunteered with a bunch of organizations and got word that Haley House was going to be opening a bakery cafe in Roxbury and they were looking for a general manager. So, I applied and from there that’s how I connected with Haley House.

Buzz Knight:

So, at what point did you realize that your heart was driven towards the nonprofit world?

Bing Broderick:

I think when I was trying to address food security and issues around food access in the city and Haley House really gave me an opportunity to sink my teeth into that. The interesting thing of about the Haley House Bakery Cafe in the early years, we were busy putting the food out and a lot of ideas came in the door. People came in with suggestions for programming and it really was the programming that helped to define the space as a community space and a place that people would run into their friends and it was a true third space. Our aim was around food, but what we created in the process or what the community created was something special.

Buzz Knight:

And your work with WGBH, tell me about how you got to that work and also your work with Rounder Records.

Bing Broderick:

Sure. Well I started work at Rounder like most people did in the old days, which was picking orders for stores in the warehouse. And everybody came in the door that way and worked their way up through different channels. And I had identified that there was a certain area of stores that weren’t record stores. Rounder was well set up with record stores around the country, but they were more specialty oriented and they might be the feminist bookstore network or Irish sweater shops. These little niches where they would sell music, but it wasn’t thought of as a conventional record outlet. And there were distributors who sold to those people and I really developed a market, so that there were outlets for records that might not sell a lot through conventional record retail but would sell a lot through these channels.

Bing Broderick:

And so, I became the Director of Special Marketing working those channels. But at a certain point around 2000, I was ready for a change and my skills were around marketing and niche marketing in particular. And I had done some work with WGBH because we had put out the Arthur soundtrack for the TV show and I explored the possibility of what opportunities might exist there. And Nova had just produced a IMAX film or a giant screen film about Ernest Shackleton and they needed to self distribute and they needed help. And so, that’s how I came on board there and I did that for about four years. So, it was a fun experience.

Buzz Knight:

So, you get the itch every how many years?

Bing Broderick:

Well, this stretch at Haley House has been 16, so that’s a little different.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah, it depends on the timing. Timing is irrelevant, just fill the itch, right?

Bing Broderick:

Yeah. And to be honest, in my time at Haley House I spent the first eight years running the bakery cafe and the second eight years I took over from our founder, Kathy McKenna as the Executive Director.

Buzz Knight:

So, as we’re walking here in Savin hill area, how do you use walking to benefit you whether you be just in the creative process or just to help you in the midst of a day?

Bing Broderick:

It’s funny. I am a walker. It might be the only exercise I get and I’m a city walker. I’ve done mountain climbing and hiking and that kind of thing, but I’m really someone who enjoys sort of engaging in community in the way that city walking gives you that opportunity. Pleasant Street is one of my favorite streets in Dorchester. It’s a big wide street with the houses set back a little bit, a lot of three deckers. Back in the day, this was Orchards, the Clap Orchards and I guess around 1910, a lot of these three deckers were built. It was all sort of developed for as a housing area. But there are houses on Pleasant Street that are older than that and my house actually is a row house and it dates to 1872.

Bing Broderick:

So, there must have been this strip of row houses right in the middle of the Orchard, which is kind of fascinating. This here is the Meaney Playground, which I always thought was a humorous name for a playground. And that features in I think it’s Mystic River or no, it’s Gone Baby Gone. The Dennis Lehane book that was made into a movie. Dennis Lehane grew up in this neighborhood. I think his detective had a office in the… It used to be Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, must be St. Teresa of Calcutta now in the bell tower there. But it’s a great neighborhood to explore and I’ve gotten to know people over the years. Shortly after I moved to the neighborhood, I was doing laundry at the laundromat and there’s a guy there who told me that there was going to be a coffee shop opening up on the neighborhood on Stockton Street. And that coffee shop probably opened in 1999 and some of my best friends to this day I met in that coffee shop. And that’s what I love about the Dorchester, it’s got that sense of place and this zip code is one of the most diverse zip codes in the country. We’re on Pleasant Street and my partner calls it the pleasant valley because we’re between Savin Hill and Jones Hill. And he was born at the St Margaret’s Hospital at the top of Jones Hill. And he now lives a quarter mile from there at the bottom of the hill, so.

Buzz Knight:

How cool.

Bing Broderick:

Yeah, it’s pretty great.

Buzz Knight:

But what’s amazing about two of these houses, I mean it’s far from cookie cutter. They all have similarities in terms of some of the design, but yet they’re all extremely different either in color or in the way that the decks look. I mean it’s really an interesting area.

Bing Broderick:

And when you get inside them too, it’s interesting how especially on I think some of the little side streets, they’re really quite grand. The stairwells and the entryway are really remarkable. This is the street where Marty Walsh grew up, Taft street. Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

I have to think with the way this area and so many areas like it around Boston have exploded that real estate’s got to be out of control here.

Bing Broderick:

I think that’s the safe thing to say. It is out of control. It’s interesting living in the row houses because most of the row houses in my stretch have been broken up into one bedroom condos. It’s a classic first time home buyer, a couple will get married and move in and have a baby and move out. So, the turnover in the row houses is pretty high, but me and the guys upstairs in my building have kind of holding down the block.

Buzz Knight:

That’s awesome.

Bing Broderick:

But you look at a building like that and you see, wow, that’s a grand building and we’re coming up on the Filene, the old mansion Filene, which is really quite spectacular too.

Buzz Knight:

So, you get out and you take a walk and you kind of use it to just escape and connect with your neighborhood.

Bing Broderick:

Yeah and in the early days of COVID, when we were spending all of our time on computers, I started to just take different destinations in mind. And set out for a walk and go to Mount Ida or to Bowdoin Street or to Upham’s Corner out to U Mass. Any number of points you can identify and move toward.

Buzz Knight:

So, as you decide Bing, what’s next at this time here where so many people are deciding that either personally or professionally I’ve gone through my own versions of it probably on a daily basis. So, how are you going to be thinking about what’s next and what’s your thought process there?

Bing Broderick:

Well I think the first thing that I came to was that it was a good time for me to pass the baton to the next it’s director. And I did that because we have a really solid staff right now, we have a strong board and we’re in good fiscal shape. And so, I felt like rather than let circumstance define when I’m leaving to be intentional about it. And my priority was really to see our next executive director into place, give them the tools they need for success as we move forward. I wasn’t thinking so much about what my priorities were after that. And I did want to take a little break, but I know that the things that bring me joy are introducing people to one another, connecting people to resources, and I’m interested in exploring ways I can do that with different platforms. And I’m also interested in producing programing for community based organizations or the community at large.

Buzz Knight:

And when you say programs, what do you mean? You mean in terms of audio or video or all of the above?

Bing Broderick:

At the bakery cafe, we did a lot of programming in partnership with other organizations. And one of the organizations we worked with was Discover Roxbury, which no longer exists but was an amazing organization that really its mission was to showcase the treasures of Roxbury. And during that we did for about six years we did a series of history nights and talking about the history of Roxbury history of jazz in Roxbury, history of Elma Lewis, the legacy of Elma Lewis, a lot of different topics like that. And that’s the kind of thing that really jazzes me and that’s what I want to pursue.

Buzz Knight:

Well that sounds fun.

Bing Broderick:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah, I mean just figuring out what touches you and what you don’t have to think about automatically when it comes to what it means to a paycheck, what joy like you said that it brings you is really an important thing. That’s what led for me to certainly the Takin a Walk series because like a lot of people, I found that there was a lot of walks over the last few years, having two dogs, you got two walks easily a day. And then beyond that, other opportunities just to get out clear the head. I truly think in many cases Zoom has fried the brain over these last few years.

Bing Broderick:

Walking helps.

Buzz Knight:

So, walking helps and I’ve certainly taken to it when it comes to the mindfulness that’s important with it to be able to maybe even I mean, I’ve just learned a something called meta, which is a form of meditation that you can do when you’re walking or some other physical activity. And also the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh who just recently passed away. His writings, how to walk, certainly have motivated this. So, I think as a way for the creative spirit and our own all search for joy, walking plays an important part of this as does connecting with new people.

Bing Broderick:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I find that walking around my neighborhood, it’s a little different from walking around other parts of Boston. I find that in Dorchester people do say hello to one another. Whereas in the south end people look at me a little strange when I say hello to them on the street. I think there’s just a different way that cars act even, if a pedestrian steps out into the street, it’s pretty likely that the car’s going to just stop and wait for them to cross. That doesn’t happen in other parts of Boston But in Dorchester and Roxbury, I find it happens pretty regularly.

Buzz Knight:

But surprisingly where I live next to Concord, many people don’t stop there either. And unfortunately many don’t say hello either, so it’s very odd. I mean I do think the last few years seemingly have brought out the best and the worst of people.there’s a lot of anger out there,

Bing Broderick:

Yeah, very much so.

Buzz Knight:

I’ve really enjoyed meeting you and hearing your journey and I’m wishing you well on that journey anyway I can sort of be of help in that.

Bing Broderick:

Thank you.

Buzz Knight:

I’m all ears, but Bing Broderick thank you for taking a walk with me.

Bing Broderick:

Thank you Buzz. I really appreciate you

Buzz Knight:

Been a pleasure. And when you’re listening to this, please download it, subscribe and rate and review the Takin a Walk podcast.

Speaker 1:

Takin a Walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.