I recently entertained you with an odd tale of my current home in Upper Falls.  Here’s a timely tale of our previous home.

We bought a house in a corner of West Roxbury near the Dedham line about 20 years ago.  We had lived in the general vicinity for years and had noticed that there was a business some blocks away from our new home called West Roxbury Crushed Stone.  We didn’t think much about it.

The first week after moving in, I was working in my office and suddenly the whole house shook – an earthquake!!  I had never been in an earthquake before and it was a scary and startling sensation.

Hours later we found out from our neighbor that it was in fact blasting at the nearby quarry.  We had no idea that there was a quarry there.  So the next weekend, when the business was closed, we climbed under the chain and had a look around.  There in the middle of a dense neighborhood in West Roxbury was a massive hole in the ground that looked like a dusty Grand Canyon.  It’s been there since 1887, long before any of the houses.

We lived in that house for 15 more years and it didn’t take long to get used to the periodic “earthquakes” a few times a week.  The only real downside as a homeowner was that it took its toll on neighborhood chimneys.  Wooden houses just bend and move with the shocks but over time the regular blasts would crack the masonry of neighborhood chimneys.

The quarry was in the news today.  The Boston Globe reports that the owner wants to begin trucking in 300 loads of soil a day.  It sounds like they want to become a disposal facility for mildly contaminated soil from construction sites.  They’re going to keep blasting stone out while at the same time begin filling the hole in.

As you’d expect, the local residents aren’t too enthusiastic about the idea.

Yes, I know it’s not a Newton story, but I thought I’d slip it in anyway