The Good City
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Geographically, Boston's hub holds both the reigning state and city governments. Only Providence, small enough to fit in George Washington's tri-corner hat, boasts the same proximity between its domed State House and city hall (though that mini- city's currently incarcerated former mayor did his best to shift the coinage from the former to the latter.) Elsewhere, the capitols of America's downstate or upstate legislative locales are far from the Downtown cities whose fate they decide with imperial indifference. More's the pity, say we, who scorn the xenophobic feelings of these legislative bodies in the boondocks whose xenophobic feelings for the urban core lead to neglect for their well being.
Remote from urban sensibilities, the legislators in these governmental outlands are prone to use the power of their votes to further the sprawl that undermines the core city and subsidizes the outburbs across the nation. Developer-driven (non)-planning and hardtopping characterizes the local funds that route citizens route from downtown to the fringes via massive highways. And we Bostonians and, admit it, democrats--who cherish cities hate the local pols indifference,
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My work and admittedly chauvinistic view insist that above all cities, politics and place are intimately entwined and that Boston proper, as we're wont to say, for all its beauteous suburbs and growing exurbs, is a hub and spoke place. Officegoers and workers still make the trek downtown, some percent of them walking. Foot traffic is not an oxymoron and shoeleather abets the web of streetcars and buses, those primers of urbanity. Alas, the latter-- those buses looking for an equity in education that fails all city systems, it seems--still transport students to far off schools, undermining parental place and true neighborhoods.
Still, Boston's sidewalks are for people, the shops alive with what seem to be 100 percent of the city's 100,000-plus college students along chic Newbury street on balmy days. Other more newly prosperous local neighborhoods boast Main Street program makeovers which have turned nowhere to somewhere, reviving once downtrodden mini-metropolises into emporia of the ethnic and chic. Their inhabitants remain blisteringly, boastfully urban; doing errands on foot, taking the bus or still-labeled "trolley" downtown, jamming the seemingly elastic "D" and "C" streetcars to cartoon size as they head for Fenway Park: to watch the Red Sox win...and lose ...again. And yet again.
While we trundle in and out, our state government's center stays as it has for centuries beneath the State House dome. Our 19th century Old City Hall by Gridley Bryant remains intact, a'brim with preservation or activist organizations like Historic Massachusetts housed in their bowels and WalkBoston pedestrian advocates elevated in their uppers. The first group honors the old and alerts to its demise; the second, sounds out for walkers rights, feet first and "Safe Routes to School" to set our youngsters down the straight and narrow. Nothing new here, an everyday occurrence since we first called our starchier aristocrats The Proper Bostonian, stealing a leaf from Cleveland Amory, who was, admittedly, rather more concerned with lineage than mobility. Our new granite City Hall, a single generation old, and a mighty fortress of the so-called New Brutalist School of architecture by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles, likewise lies in the radius of the state house, a five-minute walk away from this founding father structure.
To be sure, the city has also sidled away from the center of what we still call "Boston Proper," away from the core-based neighborhoods...stretching first to so-called streetcar suburbs, now to car-bound commuters. The city's neighborhoods fan into clusters of parallel (ever-changing) ethnic groups and races linked to the Hub a century or so ago, as "streetcar suburbs," joined by the umbilical cord of rail. But new services water, electricity, and sewage--from the turn-of-the-century hooked most of them more securely to a technically-link with Boston. For all the vaunted Politics of Neighborhoods, the edgy ethnicity, the fractiousness of racial diversity and shaky finances, those so-called streetcar suburbs...share the consciousness that the core is the center of Boston's metaphysical as well as physical hubs. Boston's universes of medicine, law, and literacy resist change and operate as Robert Moses in their own turfdom, blithely offering such grandiose.
Boston is a book for which the city has movie (moving) rights. Conflict and the vestigial Puritan conscience share space, from folks virtually pasted with prison stripes as conspicuously as Billy Bulger--brother to criminal Whitey; to university real estate dealmakers demolishing and asserting their reign. With blissful arrogance, Harvard's president recently opined that his university's turf would no longer cover the scant map of Cambridge's paltry "02138" but acquire Allston's "02l34." The casually uttered over-running of the neighborhood made it to the press but caused little visible rancor but recalled to me the town-gown friction of my youth, when the "reds" supposedly ensconced near Harvard Yard won the university its new nomenclature: "The Kremlin on the Charles." Shall we call this the Taj Mahal near the train tracks, I wonder.
But let us return to happier themes of history. Constancy endures amidst change. Pass through the Boston Public Library's superb McKim, Mead and White entry across from Copley Square, stop by its John Singer Sargent murals, visit the Gardner Museum or the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Boit Sisters, standing before the vase bequeathed by their heirs a year or so ago. Such Boston gestures pass for eternity in instantaneous America. Check out a book at the Boston Athenaeum, a private library, and, if you're lucky, you may find a card--yes, an actual cardboard card in an actual cardboard pocket--bearing the signature of a 1940 reader. Signed, gentle reader, a scant half century ago. Yes, again: A decade here a decade there and pretty soon you're talking real time.
Talking about time here in this old city...in this nation of the new...isn't just idle chatter. Talking about time is talking about topography, about heroic acts of build and re-build, construct and destruct that draws our eyes upwards to understand the rolling turf that was the geological manifest destiny of The City Upon a Hill. For, in fact, the first views penned of the so-called Shawmut Peninsula show what it was best known for: its three hills, Beacon, Copps and Fort. Its Puritan founder John Winthrop who had first landed the Arabella in Charlestown in 1630, moved his flock to the Shawmut Peninsula beneath their shadow, seeking water lacking in his first destination. Replicating the British intolerance he had fled, in short order, the founding cleric secured the Common as a shared public space for the shall-we-say democratic impulse to graze cows characterized, and celebrate holidays, but also to stage fetes for hanging those disbelievers. The most famous and notable exception to this grisly activity was Anne Hutchinson who was banished to (heaven help us) Providence and there met her end, butchered by "indians" or, by some accounts, Puritan agents-of -the Lord-in-red paint.
The same missionary zeal--if no environmental impact statement -- defined the way the new Americans decapitated the hills to fill the wetlands, making new land to stretch to the sea for trade with England and space to settle. Wharfing out and filling marsh as they would for centuries, they tripled Boston's land mass, from 843 acres (about the size of Central Park) to its current size. Filling the bays, creating docks and adding new land, they slowly decapitated the picturesque hills that overlooked the old city. The line in the paving stones outside Faneuil Hall, now traces where the water once lapped across the land before the dropping of dry soil on wet to expedite trade from the new colony to old England. Not the least bit bashful about such environmentally unfriendly activity, city patrons scored the pavement hard by Faneuil Hall where prosperous Peter Faneuil built his splendid structure in 1742 and prosperity reigned in the city of bell, book and candle.
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Boston became even less of a literal city upon a hill as downtown's Fort Hill began to see its last. By the late mid-19th century, the 80-foot high drumlin had lost any Beacon Hill cache and was filled with tenements and hovels of immigrant arrivals. The rest is de-construction history, or, more specifically, today's Atlantic Avenue. Some things being sacred even to the agents of the Lord, and their heirs today, Copps Hill in the North End, wherein the dead were laid to rest, remained intact for us, the living, to meander, oversee the sea and admire the pricey tarted over condo-ized old wharves.
So it was that filling the marshes and building the city with wood, and brick, Bostonians prospered and turned to granite and limestone.. Like Caesar who found Rome in brick and left it in marble, the builders of the Shawmut Peninsula settled the town in baled straw huts, hardened it in wood, laid it in brick and carved symbols of granite and marble to reflect their power and glory over time. And the town was bouncing. A Southern visitor who surveyed the shall-we-say New Boston exulted in seeing "not one prude while I was there." His clerical counterparts were less elegiac recording "Shoe toes pointed to the heaven in imitation of the Laplanders , with buckles of a harness size,." one sniffed. And the rap and the contradictions still linger here in the squabbles over political and architectural proprieties.
Boston ladies "still have their hats," as the saying goes---and their heroes, too: two and a half centuries later, you can see dignified figures like Harvard historian Samuel Morrison, author of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, nobly bronzed on Commonwealth Mall, along with coy copies of Mack, Quack, Lack and Zack, of Make Way for Ducklings fame, poor souls, beached in their bronze suits on the Public Garden where the swanboats celebrated their centennial a year or so ago. And John Singleton Copley, the great portraitist who went to London but remains in place, poor soul, on the splendid square that bares his name, besides the latest plop art deposit of the Hare and the Tortoise provided by partisans of the cute to decorate the latest reincarnation of Copley Square.
If location, location, location is the developer's credo; politics, politics, politics is and was equally important, then, as now. Boston's secular Chief of Selectman, architect Charles Bulfinch, practiced the art of development stunningly, framing the classic Commons with buildings, then creating the Tontine Crescent of curving brick rowhouses downtown--a far less painful project than scooping the State House site, shovel by shovel and horse wagon by wagon.
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Reclamation was never enough for the city in the surrounds of the golden dome and summertime took its elite to the likes of Roxbury Heights and Brookline. Soon, however, the enticement of waterworks, streetcars and modern facilities drew a new population to the new suburbs as the city brought Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, and Dorchester into its purview. Only Brookline refused the bid of annexation. "A dragon waiting to be slain," said their wealthy Waspy citizens and, indeed, as time passed, the town's solid schools, and Boston's floundering ones recall their foresight, along with their snobbery, along with the national indifference to funding city schools.
So, too, Brookline, the city called suburb, attracted the green prince of landscape, and indeed urban ecology to take up residence. Ecology was not even a four-syllable word in Boston's environmentally myopic makeover of the land. And in the flow of time, it bore the price in the stench and degradation of the waterways around. Design with Nature, the calling and title of Ian McHarg's classic, a century and a half away, was Olmsted's credo and the creator of Central Park was called to the aristocratic town by one of the nation's finest architects, again drawn to the city upon shall-we-say a religious and academic hill and builder of, most famous construct of its era: Trinity Church.
Richardson not only brought Frederick Law Olmsted to town to clean up the damage of the fetid leavings and heavings but to create an Emerald Necklace of green lawn and blue waters to restore the land corrupted by its heroic building. The task may never end. For, yet again, as summer arrives, the Corps of Engineers is hard at work to dredge and clean the splendid link of open space moving through the town...despoiled since his labors.
Will the legacy of planning vanish as politics and place make uneasy allies? Can Boston have a gold standard of planning in a nation that follows developer-gilded guides? Yes, the hub's landscape thrives. Neighborhoods revive, buildings rise. We have a boom. Yet, the close-packed plan that made Boston...Boston, a walkable gem of a city, is assaulted by today's developers---and politicians who derive most of their architectural agenda from notes in the deep pockets of the politically connected. Highrises overrun the heavenly city, churning winds, disrupting neighborhoods. Affordability is no criteria. The splendid park system lacks a commissioner and custodial care.
And worse, the public presence is excluded. As owners bolt off their lofty views to the sea, precious vistas are privatized by developer deals violating commitments from faceless corporate constructors. Marriott closes real access to the Custom House Tower balcony view; John Hancock's highrise chamber was closed with illegal noblesse oblige. And, more deeply, in the new outpost of new land on the city's South Boston seaport, a 125-acre site, stippled with briny air, funky buildings, and islands of handsome industrial architecture turn their back on the old hand-holding architecture of urbanity and cave to developers and authorities like Massport and Masspike whose majestic lack of concern with us groundlings is implicit in their name.
Is Boston living on its legacy. Yes, and splendidly but we need more.
"Is there enough to write a book on Lost Boston?" an editor asked me twenty years ago. Houghton Mifflin had just published Lost New York and Lost Chicago and, contemplating the riches in the city still visible from their Park Street rowhouse office, she was wondering if the late '70's had lost enough. "Why we've lost more than anyone," I boasted, and thereupon set out to show some 300 of the vanished buildings. Boston lost? how depressing, friends and colleagues repeated when the book appeared bulging with photos of the old city now gone. No, I responded, Boston isn't lost: it's old, it's here, it's ours: it's evolving, She was right, of course, as was I. For Boston as it went through its Era of Expansion and replacement in earlier centuries, managed to lose and gain, to plan and shape and make the new a proxy for the old in terms of aesthetics and the context of design. Boston in the late 20th and early 2lst centuries has done otherwise.
"The United States from 1930 to 1970--when most of us were youths--was a nation of big projects: high dams, soaring bridges, long canvas, Interstate Highways," the editor of Trains magazine summed it recently. And, you don't have to consult the Big Dig that has just about decapitated the old Green Monster Central Artery elevated highway that ravished the town to know it. Though not me and mine. The gem of Franklin Park remains my sentimental home ground as much as it did my father who took his camera, set me before the solid tree and notched my inches, year after year.
The green and verdant Charles River and its esplanade that made a verdant landscape was his playground from the West End where his mother ran a grocery store and his father studied the Good Book. The vital West End of Herbert Gans' Urban Villagers, before its flattening was where I trimmed poinsettias in a flower store one college Christmas and others stocked up with Joe & Nemo Hot Dogs. It was where bookbinders and book buyers shopped at one time and a cruel generation of developers with deep pockets and shallow values went to work to build a government-fed apartment complex, tearing down the neighborhood and destroying the lives of the shopkeepers whom my lawyer-father tried to defend.
We are building now, but building by politics without plan or promise to fill in the leftover land from the megaproject of all megaprojects. Once, we found or built Charles River, turning mudflats to the river of renown, gifted with an Esplanade. Today, the residue of the 14.5 billion excavation (up from 4.5) is the so-called Lost Charles, a glum place, overhung with Piranesian bridgework. Today, we have ...Soon we will have an open swath of road with no plan and no money and no public builders and an historic name Rose Kennedy Greenway, intended to coax the rest.
As for me, I have spent a generation enjoying and deploring Boston. "Boston," Boston, I like to says "is like a baby: if it weren't so beautiful, you'd kill it." Beautiful it is. And could be. And, before I write this, I have sent out an emissary (aka article) on the on the waterfront these days where a portion of the 35,000 delegates will find themselves ensconced. For all the Mayor's claim of the waterfront as "the next great place, as the Boston Harbor Association puts it, the repair, maintenance , walkability and vigor of the walkable photogenic, travelogue city is something less than visible there. Shaping New Land from old, and art from emptiness, Eastport Park. a splendid blend of art and landscape architecture in the midst of the hot property on the South Boston Waterfront is about to be flattened by the powerbroker plutocrat, Fidelity's Ned Johnson next door. Too much public access for his taste, thank you. This privatizing without planning flouts Boston's past and continues on the 125-acre site, an oddlot area, of aging industrial buildings, sometimes housing artists; sometimes offering seedy or stylish waterfront eateries, and institutions, is coming alive. Despite acres and acres of parking and a site stippled with aloof and remote structures from the Boston Design Center to the Children's Museum, it is on the uprise with the likes of artist live-work housing but still, an aloof island.
Despite such forthcoming structures as a convention hall, bus station, scattered offices, and the sealed-off Manulife Financial Corporation's office building, hallowed with a five million dollar lawn/cum/park, it remains a pedestrian unfriendly environment, lacking connectors and offering wide, and threatening roadways to walkers, courtesy the Bay State's Massport authority. A parallel to such agencies, it brings aid and comfort to the airport --including a new (ears wide closed) runway that offends neighbors on all sides grew up in politics, I wrote, as if politics were a place.
And so it is. And so are my friends and companions and countless activists who remain Boston's last best hope here, as they do across a nation which loses the health of its biological systems and the wealth of its cities day by day. One colleague keeps a "curmudgeon" file on all the downed, near-downed, not-downed buildings. I consult her for the correct aperture for the near-downed ..but not!!...category of the Northern Bridge. "How wide is a curmudgeon file," I ask. She spreads her be-ringed fingers to a hefty range. Another friend, irate about the post 9/11 blocked-off interior walks that kept Bostonians warm in the chill buildings graphed them for the Globe. We try. And we have neighborhood groups and citywide ones to do so.
So there it is: I grew up in politics, I always say, as if it were a place. And place it is, besieged or not. its enchantments and imbroglios engage me much the same as in my childhood when its politicians had a colorful cast, as they sifted through my house and life. My memories of Boston politicians are embedded in place. The ladies-in-hats have their attire in my memory and on my wall in a photograph, lined up in West Roxbury before a "Holtz for Congress" poster drawn to the event by m their native son: John Kennedy, here to help my father, who had aided his own senatorial campaign, and acknowledged, he always said, beyond his due. My mother still recalls--actually and perversely boasts--of the gas station where she (probably alone of that affluent, well-connected crowd) changed into her party dress for the Newport wedding.
An architectural critic, I find still other political memories embodied in Boston's buildings, among them James Michael Curley In what might have truly been his last hurrah, this charming boss, made relatively famous as Frank Skeffington (ohhh strange waspy name!) in The Last Hurrah waved from a balcony in the old Armory building, a glorious turreted bit of 19th century architecture but also a political irony. Built as an urban fortress in a time of turn-of-the-century agitation; it was intended to serve as a bulkhead to house soldiers fending off the new immigrant rabble in the unrest of this fractious turn-of-the-century town. The ground floor was moated, the roof filled with urns for water and stoked with food: the whole ensemble constructed here as elsewhere to stave off the much-feared New American immigrants. And now, two generations later, there stood the aged Irish Mayor waving to the crowds, as likely to start an insurrection as the current craft-buyers and suburbanites browsing its annual art shows.
To grow up in this politics of place was not only to inhabit a landscape, but a state of mind. To be a child of a sometime-politician on Boston's rocky soil (and look-under-the-rocks politics), was not merely to appropriate one's own porch for bubble-blowing, or to visit family in that most artful and urban of housing types, the triple decker: owned by one family, housing two others, it provided intimacy and financial easement of the owner-renters lot. To stand straight and proper before a tree in Franklin Park for the birthday photo, year by year, was to have a sense of permanence. Even to witness, the wards and shifting politicians manipulating and appropriating the place had permanence in the election eve rallies at the G&G where politicians, my father among them, mounted the wooden chairs to the acclamation of the feasters on pastrami sandwiches and gefulte fish.
Three-deckers, three-families, two families, apartments, in a close packed city, your neighbor was your elected official. My father was one before my birth, a U.S. attorney and state rep, too, but one who was given marching orders to hang up his walking shoes and stick to the law when his daughters or wife--were of an age to need an amenable dinner at an orderly hour. And so, his career was on hold, even before the time when he re-soled his shoes, so to speak, and went to war, or at any rate the Boston Army Base, and the fear of his exodus sent us from Supple Road and American Legion Highway to my grandmother's Brookline digs for the duration.
But politics was never far behind. And always the buzz of who was up for what and how the victors would behave. No tv (not yet), no newspaper ads (too pricey) but ahh the doorbells, the lawns blossoming with poles for posters, the windows bearing stickers. Still, campaigns for this one and that always figured in his after-hours and, the photos of the photos still hang on my wall, next to the images of great (now semi-knowns like Adlai Stevenson) but less great unknowns (now stowed elsewhere who knows where).
"Canvas" means "a work of art" but "canvas" was the word for Boston's political style and politicians, among them my father who earned his first stripes as a state rep before I was born. But canvas was also the word of choice for my politically partisan high school years with its door-to-door ...climb the steps...look in the windows.... ring the bell ...waft the paper, folder, brochure cheek-to-jowl handshake in houses holding would-be voters for not-so-deep pocket Democrats in my father's campaign. And canvas is what this city is to me.
 (Photo by Jane Holtz Kay) |
In the end, Harriet founded the Audubon Society and she is, I confess, my heroine. Just this winter, Audubon sounded its own alarm for the state of our region, releasing the news that forth acres are dying daily in the Bay State, that land is being deprived of its biological diversity by highway-based development is driving and driven to extinction by sprawl. "Sprawl," that word of dubious etymology and recent birth, is the enemy as we try to create civilized cities. And, however else we deal with our political lives, those who relish this still livable city and care to steward their own space on this fragile, battered planet, might retain Boston's new/old model of location... where good politics and a good sense of planning embrace to create an everlasting union of the bygone and the still beginning.
All photos by Jane Holtz Kay.
A condensed version of this was included in The Good City book, published by Beacon Press for the Democratic National Committee convention July 2004.