Brighton, MA--12/16/2005
I moved back to Boston in June 2004 to attend Graduate School and in it feels smaller than in the 1990's. I lived, in the late '90's, in a one bedroom off Mass Ave. a few blocks from Mission Hill. When friends came to visit me in the evenings, they refused to walk "that way up the street", even when it was a clear shortcut. In a collection of essays about "New" Boston called The Good City (Emily Hierstand and Ande Zillman eds.), Michael Patrick MacDonald notes the similarities between formerly warring neighborhoods:
"Not long ago, whites wouldn't even drive through Roxbury. For at least two decades
following busing violence, my relatives would devise long, convoluted ways to get from
one point in Boston to the other without passing through the most convenient cross-town
streets of the city's black neighborhood. And of course, blacks--an outsider of any
complexion--wouldn't drive through my own Irish neighborhood of South Boston. Now,
sitting on a Dudley bus years later, passing the vibrant sights and sounds of a neighborhood
alive with kids, street games, arguments and thumping music, I wondered once again at the
similarities between Roxbury and old Southie. Just then I overheard a conversation that
also sounded familiar: one about long time residents having to move out "
A booming real estate economy began to revitalize many of the low-income and working class neighborhoods. The South End is nearly one of the most expensive neighborhoods now, and prices are soaring in Jamaica Plain, South Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury and across the river in Somerville. Many of these properties are being bought at Section 8 rates and being torn down and replaced with luxury condominiums. This is an effect of what MacDonald notices in: "from the Chicano neighborhoods of California to the multiethnic tapestries of Brooklyn, young, often progressive professionals are killing community." These neighborhoods are markedly 'safer' now, if at least in appearance, not statistics. The South End is 'restored' to the point of sterility with upscale boutiques and restaurants. Green St. in JP is undergoing many of the similar transformations as the South End as a new hotspot for the Gay and Lesbian communities. Currently, the area between Green St. and Jamaica Pond is one of the most beautiful and lively in the city. This is one of the great success stories of the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
The underlying historical continuum of Urban Re-development and racial/social inequality are present in Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead". The poem begins in the state of urban decay:
"The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry."
Which leads to the process of renewal that Lowell geniously sets against the backdrop of the War of Secession. The machinery of restructuring is a return the beginning--chaos--formlessness that begins the reshaping of the world in the poem:
"One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston."
Boston's racist history is brought into question in sections of the poem as well. This is 1964, 11 years before the South Boston busing crisis, at the height of the civil rights movement. The African-American soldiers are the only people portrayed heroically in the poem even though "[t]wo months after marching through Boston, / half the regiment was dead". The reaction of the regiment Colonel, Robert Gould Shaw's father is meant to be a shock, ye it stands in for the bureaucratic voice of "Civil" Boston:
"Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."
Lowell then surveys that sentiment one-hundred years later:
"The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons."
*
These neighborhoods' redevelopment and change of character is great for business, tourism, and the 'new' residents but what about for those that are there and have been there for many generations? Large swaths of the population are being forced out of homes in nearly every neighborhood of the city. Since many of these residents work in the cities of Boston or Cambridge, the only places they can afford to go are a.)deeper into the 'inner cities' to the disconnected by public transportation areas of Mattapan and Dorchester or b.) outside of the city to often worse and less public transportation accessible areas such as Chelsea, Revere Beach or Brockton. The T is undergoing massive renovations to their transit system: the Lechmere branch was just re-opened, the Green Line is planning to be extended to Medford via Lechmere connecting Winter Hill and Union Sq. to the Subway Lines fpr the first time. They have also introduced the Charlie Card to make for simpler and quicker T service which operate much the same as NYC's Metro card. The Silver Line is making drastic improvements, taking cues from European Models of Rapid Transit and creating extended buses that will run through underground tunnels. According the MBTA website:
"The Silver Line will offer a seamless link between the communities of Roxbury, the
South End, Chinatown, Downtown, and South Boston. This new BRT line will con-
nect passengers quickly and easily to the T's other rapid transit lines-the Orange, Green,
and Red; to South Station, where they can board the T's south side commuter rail lines
and Amtrak trains; and to Logan Airport."
So the city is really 'opening up'. While it is great that fair and rapid access is being made available to neighborhoods that should have received it more than twenty years ago, the dubious question arises: "who benefits"? For the short term, certainly the current residents of neighborhoods that are in the process of identity crisis, but as rapid transit makes the neighborhoods more convenient to the Downtown area it opens the market to development and gentrification. The same thing happened in my hometown of East Hampton, NY: the summer people beat out the locals both financially and politically. 75% of the families I knew growing up, and the people I went to school with have moved out of town, or sold their houses to move into smaller 'planned' communities. Under the guise of a beautiful neighborhood, the people are being priced out. They are writing their eviction notices with rose gardens.
I can honestly say that I venture into all of the neighborhoods of Boston that I was told to "stay away from" during Freshman Orientation at Berklee. I spend little time Downtown, but countless hours walking Mission Hill, Jamaica Plain and Somerville. I walked through Franklin Park for the first time. I spent a weekend around Andrew Sq. in South Boston. I find something new and enriching every day in this city. It is an amazing place to live, and somewhere I am hoping that I can afford to stay. When I moved back on a two-week notice, the only affordable place I could find during that short time was in Brighton. Aside from the allergen-infested heating ducts and my (finally fixed) collapsing deck, it is fine, bug free and inhabitable.
Far from the old Meat Packing district, Brighton is overrun with wealthy and loud college students, mostlu from Boston College or Boston University. Colleges are buying up real estate like a diabetic stocks up on needles and insulin. More students are living in off campus housing, driving up the prices in any neighborhood within a 45 minute T ride from any of the nearly 40 colleges in the Boston/Cambridge area. And then there were the Red Sox and Patriots riots a few years back. The problems that students bring to neighborhoods go far beyond drunkeness and damage of property. The cost of living in Boston is extremely inflated because of the influx of students. Many neighborhood economies have built themselves to be dependent on this aspect of the population. In the last few years, with a decrease in the value of United States currency compared to World currency, rising unemployment and increasing energy and food prices murder, robbery, armed violence and rape on the rise in Boston. This is due to a multiplicity of underlying social causes, but economic instability and the want for real estate expansion are a partial blame. However. for every person that initiates a negative impact on their surrounding neighborhoods and communities, there are thousands of people that are working extremely hard to stay in Boston and make it a viable and progressive city. There efforts are being ruined by a barrage of arrogant people.
* *
Cambridge, MA 11/25/2005
Allston and Kenmore Sq. are not as cool as they used to be: Deli Haus and Burrito Max are gone; Piebald, Big Wheel and Hydrahead moved out LA. There are still shows and $2 beers at O'Brien's and three new tattoo shops in a four block vicinity. But it is quiet in Brighton. I do much of my writing in this quiet, on the edge of the city where there is barely a pulse. I write in the radiant light pollution. The occasional screeching halt of the Green Line streetcar. The things I once found in Punk Rock, an engagement and quarrel with the world around me, I mostly find in books and poems now. The records have long since stopped skipping. When that quarrel becomes silence and silence becomes life, the individual turns to their inner dialogue. But one that inner dialogue is exhausted, the individual speaks outward in order to reclaim and re-inhabit their original self, which is the original silence. Tonight, I am silent. I will say nothing else.