Address: Victory Road between I-93 and Dorchester Bay
Pricing: Free
How To Get There:
From downtown boston: I-93 S for 2 miles. Get off at exit 15 for Columbia Road/JFK Library. Turn left to go under I-93 and make immediate right onto Morrissey Blvd. Stay on Morrissey for 1.6 mi, past the Boston Globe and UMass Boston. Left at Freeport Street to left on Victory Road to park and LNG tank.
Parking:Free
Rainbow Tower, dog run off Southeast Expressway
May 25, 2010
Some people call it Rainbow Tower, but it’s really just a big gas tank.
But because the rainbow-striped tank just off I-93 on Victory Road is on land that sticks into Dorchester Bay, it is often the first clear Boston landmark seen by Logan-bound airline passengers.
Vacationers driving south to Cape Cod see it on the left. And every work day, just south of the UMass Boston campus, thousands of commuters can see the brightly painted liquefied-natural-gas tank as they inch through traffic on the Southeast Expressway (I-93).
Painted in 1971 by the late artist Corita Kent, it is the world's largest copyrighted artwork. But stripes in the 140-foot-high design have been controversial for years.
The tank is on the edge of Dorchester, which has many Southeast Asian residents. Some in the neighborhood, especially older refugees from the long wars in Vietnam, have said they see a secret face in the rainbow stripes.
They say they see Ho Chi Minh, the late Communist North Vietnamese president and revolutionary leader.
The artist made no secret of her anti-Vietnam-War views, but gas-company officials continue to deny any link to the man known to soldiers on both sides as Uncle Ho. The bright stripes are just stripes, they say.
And for all the local controversy, not a lot of people know about the adjacent Victory Road Park, the tank neighbor that some call the best unofficial dog park in Boston.
It’s a small island; across Victory Road from the LNG tank, next to the Old Colony Yacht Club. There’s a footbridge to the island, where dogs, and a lot of people, delight in running in the ocean winds. And, for dogs who like it, plunging into the bay.
Most of the dogs and owners, like resident Tom Doyle, are from the extended neighborhood. But some few who know about Victory Road Park get off I-93 or Morrissey Boulvevard to cross the footbridge. Doyle said it’s a great place, with grass and trees and the bay. But only one of his two dogs will jump in and swim.
Access to the fenced-in rainbow tank is, of course, restricted. But the unimproved Victory park is open to all -- if they know it’s there.
- by Dan Sheridan, Boston Reporter for HelloMetro
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Dan SheridanDan Sheridan is an editor, reporter and media specialist with a background in newspapers, magazines and publishing. He has reported from Tokyo, Singapore and Bangkok and wrote Access Boston, the popular guidebook, from 2002 to 2008.
