CAPTION: Pictured, left to right, are Diane Grant, Charlestown Business Climate Committee member and the Charlestown Business Association’s liaison to the Charlestown Neighborhood Council; André Porter. deputy director of the City of Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development; Lynne Levesue, CBCC chairperson and CBA member; and George Morton, CBCC and CNC member.

The City of Boston wants to help Charlestown businesses, but business owners need to let the city know what issues and challenges concern them
“We have long wanted to have a stronger presence in Charlestown,” said André Porter. deputy director of the City of Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development, during his presentation at the annual Charlestown Business Association meeting last week. Porter added that ways the city could assist local businesses include providing matching grants to overhaul their storefronts, helping them with bookkeeping, providing translators to help overcome language barriers and even designing their company logos.
Today, the city in partnership with the Charlestown Business Climate Committee, an ad hoc committee that aims to reinvigorate the local market, begins its third round of face-to-face interviews with Charlestown business owners. While the first two rounds, which were conducted in December, focused on Main and Bunker Hill streets as well as the area between City Square Park and the Navy Yard, this one will concentrate on Charlestown’s outer ring, which consists of Sullivan Square, Rutherford Avenue and Cambridge Street.
One of the primary goals of these interviews is to encourage business owners to respond to a survey that will help the city and the CBCC better understand the neighborhood’s business climate. So far, feedback from the survey has been underwhelming, with only 25 responses received as of Monday afternoon.
CBCC chair Lynne Levesque chalks the poor responses up to business owners being unavailable around the holidays, but she said without input from businesses, no action could be taken by the city.
“We recognize that Charlestown is unique and has its own set of issues, and we need input from business to develop action plans to improve the business climate here in Charlestown,” Levesque said. ”Before we can move forward, we have to recognize the challenges and issues facing Charlestown businesses.”
City Councilor Sal LaMattina, who became involved with the effort to reinvigorate Charlestown’s business climate after visiting a CBA meeting last fall, is discouraged that the survey hasn’t received more feedback. “I get frustrated because there are so many business opportunities in Charlestown,” he said.
In contrast to Charlestown, Councilor LaMattina points to the North End, where he helped conduct a survey after local businesses owners complained about sluggish business in the neighborhood. This effort has already paid off, he said, resulting in increased foot traffic and business on Salem Street.
This week, the survey gets another boost when a letter goes out of 800 Charlestown businesses and institutions encouraging them to weigh in on the study.
But as important as the survey is, Diane Grant, a CBCC member and the Business Association’s newly-appointed liaison to the Charlestown Neighborhood Council, insists that business owners also need to do their part to publicize this effort.
“The survey is long term, but we can all contact other business owners and tell them immediately about the services available to them,” Grant said, adding that the next CBA newsletter would also encourage businesses to contact the city and to take advantage of the services being offered.
The business survey is available at the Charlestown Branch Library, 179 Main St, or online at http://www.cityofboston.gov/business/default.asp.

Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss appeared before a capacity crowd at Bunker Hill College Tuesday as part of its Compelling Conversations Speaker Series. The star of “American Graffiti,” “Jaws,” ”Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus” was on hand for a book signing and reception following his speech.

When the Walsh Brothers first took the stage at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway Theatre in Davis Square two years ago, the Charlestown duo didn’t need to worry about being upstaged by the entertainers sharing the bill with them. “I remember we hired a really lousy band to open for us, which wasn’t purposeful, but it worked to our advantage,” said Dave Walsh, who at 32 is the elder of the siblings. The band was supposed to play at the beginning of the show to warm up the crowd, which consisted largely of the brothers’ friends from Charlestown and fellow comedians, but they refused to leave the stage.
“We made them leave,” Dave said. “The audience was just ready for anything else. It was great. It exceeded all our expectations”
Later this month, Dave and his brother Chris, 29, return to Jimmy Tingle’s for a record six performances. Not only are they bringing their unique blend of stand up, improv and sketch comedy back to the same stage where they caught their first big break two years ago, it also marks their last local performances before they leave Boston — perhaps permanently.
“We could pull an ‘Eddie and the Cruisers’ and just come back many years from now,” said Chris in reference to the 1983 film about a rock star who fakes his own death.
During their upcoming performances, the Walsh Brothers will incorporate new material with some older routines that will likely be retired afterwards.
“Some of the sketches and characters we’ve created we’ll be waving goodbye to after this point,” Chris said.
And while this marks a new direction for the duo, this doesn’t mean they are abandoning their roots.
“We’re not going to change who we are inherently, and we’re not going to forget where we’re from,” Dave said. “We hope to evolve as people and performances.”
The Walsh Brothers will embark on a national tour next month that will bring them to Chicago, New Orleans, Tempe, Ariz., and San Francisco, among other locations. Afterwards, they will settle in Los Angeles, where they hope to find a bigger audience and to refine their craft.
“The main thing for us is to learn,” Chris said. “LA will offer us the opportunity to become better performers because there are better performers out there.”
Dave added, “Boston has some of the best comedians in the country, but eventually you have to move. The industry is in LA, so we have to go where the industry is. If we were into wearing wooden shoes, we’d have to go to Holland.”
And while the Walsh Brothers hope the move brings them good fortune, this isn’t the first time they’re courted industry types in LA Following an appearance at HBO’s U.S. Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., last February, the Walsh Brothers visited the city in an unsuccessfully bid to pitch “The Brothers Walsh,” a semi-autobiographical sitcom that followed the brothers through the streets of Charlestown and featured locales such as the Monument Mishawum Park and the Warren Tavern. Several agents expressed interest in the pilot before ultimately passing on it.
“We’re going back [to LA] because we found out that we’re a quantity we don’t know,” Dave said. “The Townies they don’t know are better than the Townies they do know, essentially.”
But, for now, the Walsh Brothers are just looking forward to performing in front of their hometown crowd at Jimmy Tingle’s again.
“At Tingle’s, it seems like we’re performing in our living room,” Dave said.
The Walsh Brothers will perform at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway Theater in Davis Square in Somerville on Friday, Feb. 9, Saturday, Feb. 10, and Friday, Feb. 16, and Saturday, Feb. 17, at 7:30 and 10 p.m. Tickets are $15 and are available www.jtoffbroadway.com.

A Charlestown electrician is headed to the Super Bowl as his reward for saving the life of an elderly man who suffered a heart attack last month.
Michael McCarthy, 35, performed CPR on 81-year-old Daniel Hurley who he found collapsed on a South Boston street on Jan. 12. Hurley was headed to the funeral of late City Councilor Jimmy Kelly when he suffered a heart attack at East Fifth and N streets.
For his heroic deed, McCarthy and his wife, Dawn received a trip to Miami to watch the Chicago Bears battle the Indianapolis Colts in Super Bowl XLI, followed by a stay at the Ritz in Cancun, Mexico. The all-expenses-paid package comes courtesy of Local 103, WBZ-AM and Mayor Thomas M. Menino. Local 103 received the junket as a marketing promotion from the radio station and asked Mayor Menino to find a deserving recipient for the junket. mayor menino, in turn, selected McCarthy.
Mayor Menino said, “Michael McCarthy is the epitome of what a good Bostonian should aspire to be. He rushed in when a fellow human being needed assistance. He saved a man’s life, no questions asked. It’s an honor to be able to recognize him

In the final stages of liberal and highly-lucrative contractual talks with city officials, Manuel Rivera, who had agreed to come to Boston to run our public schools, did an about turn when offered another position by the newly-elected governor of New York last week.
Without calling Mayor Menino or anyone else in Boston to explain himself, he simply changed his mind, put Boston behind him without giving us a thought and signed on to be New York state’s top education advisor.
If Boston was a woman and Rivera her boyfriend coming on strong, he ended up jilting the city for another lover without explanation. It’s kind of like coming home to your wife, and without a hint of a problem in the relationship, she tells you she’s leaving but fails to tell you why. Without a formal goodbye, she disappears into the night, leaving you to wonder –— what the hell happened?
This is exactly what Rivera did to the City of Boston. It is a black mark against him. It is not a black mark against Mayor Menino. No matter how hard the Globe and Herald try to blame Menino for Rivera’s treachery, he is not responsible for it.
It turns out that Rivera was a 14-karat fraud who negotiated in bad faith and who switched his allegiance even before he had a chance to finalize his new contract. Frankly, it doesn’t get much worse than that in the job search department.
Rivera will make $169,000 in his new New York state job. Had he come to Boston, he would have made $300,000 in base salary, would have been given a $150,000 one-time housing allowance, $50,000 in annual contributions to his pension and a $20,000 yearly performance bonus. In Rochester, where he was the superintendent, he was making $220,000.
Bottom line: Rivera is a guy who cannot be trusted, whose word is not his bond, who has no class, who has shown Boston no loyalty and who is the kind of guy who’d leave his bride waiting on the altar.
And to think Boston was praising his arrival and gearing up for his genius to work out solutions to the complex difficulties facing the public school system here. What a surprise we would have been in for if this guy had been hired.
It is always an embarrassment when first-class efforts by first-class people like the mayor and School Committee Chairwoman Elizabeth Reilinger are all for nothing.
The embarrassment in this situation is Rivera’s. Far better that he lied to us early on than leaving us in the middle of the stream.
We wish him good riddance, and we warn the state of New York to watch out.