callahan said:
He feels that Boston is trying to buy cool (if that makes sense.)...
He uses Fort Point, China Town, The Theater District and Landsdown St. as evidence that the city and the developers have half assed, unoriginal ideas to make these areas trendy and hip. He laughs at the notion of recreating a mini Time Square or a mini SoHo instead of allowing Bostonians to create a feeling of their own originality in these neighborhoods.
I keep running into this generalization, and never once has it been accompanied by any concrete prescription. Seems harder to identify the solution than the problem.
Stellarfun seems to agree that the author sidesteps concrete answers:
stellarfun said:
To borrow a phrase from Spiro Agnew, the author comes across as a 'nabob of negativism'. He recites what he doesn't like, but offers no specifics
Well since the author won?t do it, forgive me if I give it a try:
A BETTER BOSTON
Though after it?s implemented even the most meticulous plan evolves a bit, you could divide Boston?s successful places broadly into two categories:
1.
designed places that were master-planned formally, economically and socially, and built in a fairly short time, then largely preserved in amber. Examples include micro-regulated Back Bay, the highly-structured South End, and the Bulfinch vision for Beacon Hill.
Interest through regulation and control. Beauty of primary importance and achieved through homogeneity.
2.
natural places that evolved quite organically from social needs into an unforeseen form. This category includes heterogenous Harvard Square, the glorious chaos of the Financial District (skyscrapers and small buildings jostling willy-nilly on a medieval grid), the North End and Charlestown.
Interest through diversity, beauty optional.
Both methods have yielded much-loved places.
Boston Magazine?s author is groping only semi-coherently with the fact that we now look for the city?s salvation in a third and patently doomed method: grafting gee-whiz, carnival-barker notions onto the city. These have as much genuine urbanity and staying-power you?d expect from such a source.
There?s no substance to such notions; they?re a Coney Island of the mind -- but a Coney Island that?s been sanitized by prudes.
First problem might be that neither the author, nor the planners and developers --nor perhaps we enthusiasts-- are willing to acknowledge the inherent falsehood of ?creating? the city.
Las Vegas was ?created.? Disney World was ?created.? The new Times Square was ?created,? and locally Faneuil Hall Marketplace was ?created.?
The North End --at least yesterday?s North End, before the proposal to ?creatively? close Hanover to traffic-- was not so much a ?creation? as it was a
spontaneous manifestation, therefore
unplanned; even its present yuppification can be seen as that.
Also spontaneous are the gay cavalcades on Charles Street and the South End, the chic promenading on Newbury, the scene in Harvard Square (even today), the student bustle out Commonwealth Avenue and Allston, the yuppie throngs at Coolidge Corner and Davis Square, the hetero-ethnic mix in Jamaica Plain, even the thinning daytime throngs at Washington and Winter Streets (some time ago renamed ?Downtown Crossing? in a yucky attempt to ?create? something that spontaneity stubbornly resisted).
It?s clear these places are defined by
people more than by features of their buildings; if we want to bring back the Theatre District, we need to start by bringing back the people.
Another common thread in the above list: all are
gentrified, are headed towards gentrification, or wish they were (Downtown).
Contrast that with the districts that were slain by planners: Scollay Square, the West End, City Square, the Combat Zone, the rowdy old working Waterfront of sailors and fishermen, Washington Street with its El, and unsanitary Quincy Market in its meatpacking days: each in its own way represented something genuine and spontaneous and still grittily fascinating (because genuine) even in its death throes. They were defined not by the gentry but by the proletariat.
Those who remember them do so with nostalgia; they were real places.
But unless we?re hypocrites we need to recognize that what we lionize about Scollay Square is precisely what led to its zealous execution by the planners and reformers of the city: its low-class
sleaze.
Simultaneously vital and seamy, Scollay Square was frequented for its whiff of the naughty, its promise of sin. This was also true of the Combat Zone and the old rough-and-ready Waterfront of sailors? bars, the aptly-named City Square, and the shadowy netherworld that teemed beneath the Washington Street El.
It?s what we?re trying inexpertly to reference with all those proposed flashing signs. We want Hopper?s world noir, where those signs pointed atmospherically the way to flesh and sin. What do you think that neon referred to, anyway, when it flashed ?ROOMS?? You could rent those rooms by the hour.
When Quincy Market was ?created? (imagineered?) into Faneuil Hall Marketplace, its svengali Ben Thompson composed a weighty tome of shalls and shall-nots calculated to produce a fresh, tasteful, new look that would resonate with the upper middle class and the sharpies that would give his creation its success. Gentrification by the taste-meister.
Simultaneously, he saw to it that a sprinkling of the old meat market?s gamey butchers were subsidized into the re-imagined market, their role being to maintain a gloss of authenticity, grit and historical continuity. They?re all gone now, along with the meticulous stylebook Thompson authored to maintain the project?s initially non-plastic character; it?s now clearly a suburban mall with a few semi-urban frills.
Only suburbanites think it?s part of the city.
Yet a genuine market seems an essential urban component; though London may have lost Covent Garden to festival marketplacehood, Berwick Street and a dozen others soldier on and thrive. Just so, in Boston we still have Haymarket.
If you catalog urban components in New York, London, San Francisco and Boston, you find they all have a Chinatown, an Italian district, ghettoes, ritzy sectors, markets, bohemian districts, artists? quarters, student territory, music, theatre and nighttime entertainment zones --and places people go looking for a little sin.
Boston holds its own in all but the last two categories.
Time was, Boston held its own in these too. Into the blocks around Washington, Stuart, Tremont and Boylston were packed so many entertainment venues that the streets hopped till 2am nightly. The broadway stage productions were there then as now, but they were a small part of the huge nightly draw. Never shuttered, Ben Sack?s cinemas played movies round the clock, richly supplemented by the magnetic draw of the porno palaces, the peepshows, the flashing neon glory of the Naked Eye, the Pussy Galore Stag Bar and a dozen others.
Sure there were hookers (even cathouses!); but the market hasn?t vanished, it?s just moved to the escort services and the suburbs, where it contributes nothing to Boston?s urban vitality. Naive folks think we can retrieve the vitality by re-?creating? the electric signs that went along with all this.
Didn?t happen in Times Square --a place few New Yorkers frequent-- and it won?t happen here.
Meanwhile, conventioneers flock to South Boston, grateful they?re away from home and hoping for a little you-know-what. And you know what? There ain?t none.
All that vacant space in the Seaport District walking distance from the Convention Center ...and no one?s thought of zoning it into a reprise of the Combat Zone??
It doesn?t take creativity; it?s a natural.
Specific enough, stellarfun?
