RE "SOUTH End getting (a lot) younger: Influx of babies altering neighborhood's urban edginess" (Page A1, March 15): There are and always have been dozens and dozens of babies and children in the South End.
Stroll through Villa Victoria, walk past the public housing near the cathedral, or through Peters Park, especially in the summer - children and babies are everywhere.
The difference is that the children who have always lived in the South End generally are of a different race from the Caucasian moms and babies featured in your article, and are rarely, if ever, seen riding around in enormous Bugaboo strollers.
While we welcome any new residents to the South End, including white families with children, please acknowledge that the richness and diversity of the neighborhood are derived from the multiple races and ages of all its residents, both new and longtime.
All children and babies in the South End deserve front-page attention, even in a newspaper as increasingly irrelevant as the Globe.
MARTHA BYINGTON
South End
WHY IS it that any time a current story on the South End is written, an inevitable subtext finds its way in to take not-so-subtle potshots at the minority (mostly black and Hispanic) population that used to make up its neighborhoods? How come the South End was "skid row" when mostly minorities lived there and the Orange Line ran above ground, but now that gentrification has replaced the poor with primarily white, upper-middle-class types pushing their kids around in nearly thousand-dollar Bugaboos, it's now the "domain of urban sophistication"?
Some may stroll the streets of the South End and be tickled pink by the pricey restaurants, boutiques, and $320 diaper bags. But I grew up in Boston, and saw the good, decent poor people of the South End displaced as soon as the tracks came down.
Last Saturday's article just made me sad.
SERGE GEORGES JR.
Randolph
