When I close my eyes, I still smell chocolate! That was an essential aspect of life growing up in Dorchester Lower Mills in the years after World War II. Until the Walter Baker Chocolate Company was subsumed into a major national firm, the chocolate factory operated in the 1950s not very differently than it had for many decades prior. 

Hardworking men and a few women from Dorchester Lower Mills would walk to work, sometimes after attending morning Mass at St. Gregory’s where I was an altar boy. The managers, we were told, would drive to work every day, most likely in large black American cars.

That world ended when the company was sold.

One of the first things I remember when we moved from Fields Corner to Codman Hill Avenue in 1956 was that we would smell chocolate. Before the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, no one really thought very often back then about whatever damage was done to the Neponset River as a result of a centuries old industrial use. This was before the passage of the EPA, or most any other protective legislation.

Yes, we smelled chocolate. Far better to smell chocolate, I have concluded, than some hideous chemical or effluent from a smelting facility. Chocolate. What can be wrong with that? 

Our house was on the side of Codman Hill so that the back porch and the attic, where I slept for many years, looked out directly toward the silos, which legend had it were constructed around the time of World War II to store chocolate in the event there were significant shortages, given that so much of the world was at war and trade was so difficult. To this day, when I close my eyes and look out a window, I see those silos just as I smell the chocolate. 

Little did I know then that I would be one of the lawyers involved with the redevelopment of the chocolate factory into an extraordinarily successful residential community which has helped to revitalize Dorchester Lower Mills in a way that none of us could have imagined: There is a now a food scene on Dorchester Avenue. I am not so sure that Msgr. McNulty would necessarily understand this brave new world!

Lawrence S. DiCara, P.C. is a former Boston city councillor who now practices law. For more of his writings, see his website: larrydicara.com.