We met at a coffee shop doubling as a lottery ticket dispenser. The man I was meeting was Chris Marchi, who has called East Boston his home for more than five decades. Now he and his friends have become vanguards of public health by raising questions about the multibillion-dollar airport that borders their neighborhood.
Marchi is six-feet tall and is built like a former high school varsity athlete. But now his muscles are just beginning to turn soft around the neck and stomach. Wrinkles around his eyes and forehead are present from long days in the sun and past years of smoking. He's long since quit. He wears Adidas sneakers, jeans, a North Face windbreaker and a well-worn green Celtics winter cap that covers dark hair turning to speckled grey on the sides and retreating across his scalp. You can hear the stamp of his blue-collar neighborhood known for its beach, immigrant community and airport when he says his "r's" and "e's."
When it comes to the airport, he was born in the thick of a fight that has spanned generations of East Bostonians.
[For more on this story by Kit Norton, go to http://www.truth-out.org/news/...port-sacrifice-zones]
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