Whatever. You have an agenda. I'm just talking cold, hard (yes, heartless) economics. Boston was a backwater and going downhill in 1950 - BEFORE the "attempted murder". No amount of lipstick will turn 1950 Boston into something that looks better than it is now. You are romantacizing a fantasy. Urban Renewal was meatball surgery, but that's what they had in those days. The long-term effects saved Boston as an ecosystem that exists and thrives today with a far more diverse, equitable city than it was in the "paradise" of 1950.
I'll take the Mayor Walsh-Janey-Wu Boston of this era over the Mayor Curley-Hines era Boston. Today is a day the death Jerome Rappaport has been reported - a man who was responsible for some of the most eggregious acts of killing the West End and putting up a stupid and anti-urban mid-tower residential park. It WAS a horrific way to do urban planning, and hopefully, we will never see such ham-handed and insensitive bulldozing of peoples' lives ever again. But Boston could not survive by just preserving its past.
1970 to 2020 is the far more realistic measuring stick. 1950 was an entirely different urban planet.
My agenda is your agenda. I like today’s Boston much better as well. I want a bigger, stronger, more progressive city. I see that picture and I smell leaded gas, crappy air, and a scared, backward populace. Screw nostalgia.
I just wish we knew how to tax and spend like we used to. The last 50 years of fiscal conservative crap is so over. We have a lot of work to do and we need to get on it post haste! We’re not going to do that with old tools.
I was with Wu when she declared two years ago and I’m looking forward to her challenging all the naysayers.
If I have an agenda, it’s to mention the past travesties so we don’t kill our cities again. Most cities in 1950 were backwaters. Instead of fixing them, we paved our farmland and bled out the urban power/tax base and that was not a good thing.