Not your father's Boston
We're holding up pretty well after 374 years -- and we're not obsessed with the past
Let's cut right to it: You don't think much of us, do you? You think we're Norm, or maybe Cliff. You view Boston as unfashionable and anachronistic, a sitcom trying to survive real life.
If we're not simplistically working class, then we're a town of reedy bankers in Brooks Brothers suits and bob-haired matrons in
You think we're an occasionally charming little backwater best known for our puffy-faced politicos, pedophilic priests, and preying press, an overpriced outpost just far enough removed from New York to warrant a half-hearted Zagat guide filled with reviews like, "The scrod was good."
Well, we both have a lot to learn over the coming week. You're going to learn about us, and we're going to learn to be patient. So let's get started.
This is not your father's Boston. It isn't even your older brother's. Admittedly, the Boston of 2004 is a place where contrasts flow into contradictions, a city where the paradigm is a paradox. Sometimes we don't even get ourselves.
To wit, we're one of the most Democratic of the United States, yet we haven't elected a Democratic governor in 18 years. And our politics these days are like pillow fights.
We are a baseball-crazed town that hasn't been to the World Series since 1986; spare us another reference to the Babe.
We are a place renowned for its history, yet one of three residents is between 20 and 34 years old, making Boston the second-youngest city (behind Austin, Texas) in America. We are a bastion of equal rights, yet the entire congressional delegation and every statewide officeholder -- save our lieutenant governor, who isn't elected on her own -- is white and male.
We are arguably the most liberal city in the country, yet have had a strand of cultural conservatism -- Banned in Boston -- marbled into our lives since birth.
We are a so-called majority-minority city, with a huge cultural diversity reflected in once homogenous neighborhoods like South Boston and Charlestown. Yet the enduring image is of stones hurled at yellow school buses, police officers in riot gear, the staff of an American flag used as a lance against a black man outside City Hall; 1975 and '76 are a long way behind.
Only this much is clear: Boston is changing every day in mind-boggling ways. But first, a quick story.
Two local developers were leaving yet another interminable hearing in which they faced more obstacles than could ever be overcome and an onslaught of complaints from a perpetually put upon people, meaning Bostonians.
One developer looked at the other and said, "How is it we do bad so good around here?"
Great question. Los Angeles has its smog, Seattle its clouds, Chicago its corruption. Here in Boston, we have our angst, hoisted across each difficult day on our bone-weary shoulders, making us the martyrs we all strive to be.
We complain about the weather, even though our spectacular summers roll into postcard-perfect falls. We complain about our baseball team, even as we pack Fenway every night. We complain about our politicians, even as we send one of them off in grand pursuit of the presidency. We complain about the fact that we always complain.
But from the angst of our complaints, a grand metropolis has risen. Cities are like moods. They change often, sometimes for no rational reason. The Boston of 30 years ago was a dour place. Fast-food restaurants and sleazy lounges with names like the Hillbilly Ranch bordered the Public Garden, which itself was little more than a patch of dirt surrounded by a decrepit fence and some malnourished shrubs. The Back Bay had rows of rooming houses. The financial district, such as it was, was a ghost town. The waterfront was a coincidence. Many of the neighborhoods seemed ready to explode, and when busing came, they did.
But in the pantheon of Boston history, two words changed much of that, and they were not "Paul Revere" or "Tea Party." Try "Quincy Market."
Self-respecting Bostonians never go to the refurbished 19th-century warehouses and former wholesale exchange that make up the Faneuil Hall Marketplace. But tourists arrive by the busload, making it a bigger draw some years than Disney World.
When Quincy Market opened in our bicentennial year of 1976 as the first urban festival mall in the nation, a renaissance took root. Hotels were built. Skyscrapers rose as high as city fathers would let them. Restaurateurs opened places like Olives and Hamersley's Bistro along what were then Boston's frontiers. And soon suburbanites did the unthinkable: They drove into town for a night out. A good mood was getting better.
And still is, with occasional fits. The most rapid changes have unfolded in the past few months and years, as if we're now in rapid pursuit of what John Winthrop described as the "city upon a hill," a phrase he coined while his ship was pointed toward the Massachusetts coast.
Today, you can leave the spanking new Boston Convention and Exposition Center ($850 million) and descend immediately into the Big Dig tunnels ($14.6 billion; thank you very much for your support) or stay on the surface and gaze out at the freshly cleansed waters of Boston Harbor ($4.1 billion in cleanup), where dolphins have been spotted near the Fort Point Channel.
Add to that some 8.8 million square feet of office space that opened in Boston from 1993 to 2003, which is pretty much the size of, what, Toledo or Tampa? The FleetCenter is but nine years old, and two-year-old Gillette Stadium in Foxborough is widely regarded as the nicest in the NFL.
Head out to the neighborhoods. Along Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, bistros, upscale clothing stores, and fashionable bars are the rule of the day. In Roslindale, what used to be the oldest neighborhood in town is now the youngest. In the South End, developer Ron Druker sold a $3.3 million penthouse in a highly sought condo project that he built on what used to be considered the edge of the economic abyss.
How did it happen? Sitting in his office high in the Hancock Tower, advertising executive and local sage Jack Connors has one word: reinvention. Boston is a city that constantly remakes itself, from an industrial center to an insurance capital to the cutting edge of high tech to a financial services conglomerate to, most recently, a hub of biotech and health care. The common denominator is intellectual capital.
"Someone once asked me how you could replicate what we have," Connors said. "I told them, 'Build two world-class universities and wait 100 years.' "
Ted Landsmark is the guy who got bloodied by the hoods wielding the American flag like a weapon that day in 1976, when, as former mayor Kevin White described it, "The town was having a nervous breakdown." Now Landsmark is president of the Boston Architectural Center, among many other endeavors.
"This city is much more cosmopolitan, much livelier as a cultural center, more vibrant economically," he said. He's asked whether he feels safe in all quarters of town.
"Absolutely," he replies, succinctly. "Everywhere."
Of course, with the new, we inevitably, invariably surrender pieces of our fabled past: Anthony at Pier 4, news vendor Max Kaiserman in Copley Square, the European Restaurant in the North End. And it hurts.
Still, Boston will always have something that most other people and places don't: common ground, in the best of ways. We're a city shaped by a past that always leads to a better future, by foul winters that give way to beautiful summers, by perpetual September slides at Fenway that leave us longing for April next, by the gum-stained sidewalks and narrow streets and screeching subway cars that bring us to gorgeous parks and tight-knit neighborhoods where the traditions are deep and the values carved into bedrock.
Which might be a long way of saying that it's one thing for us to complain about ourselves, but it's best if you didn't try. We are nothing if not proud, and at the end of this week, we think you'll understand why.
