Today from the Globe, complaints that map makers, tour guides and tourist authorities are ignoring the city’s neighborhood outside the center, especially Dorchester:
Something must be done, said Earl Taylor, president of the Dorchester Historical Society.
‘’It’s been something of a dream of mine to put together a Dorchester tour map," said Taylor, who added that some of the neighborhood’s historic places draw as few as 10 visitors a month, in part because they’re not in street guides. ‘’I think there is a sense that downtown Boston is that inner core, and that we’re all separate."….
Dorchester is home to Franklin Park Zoo, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the nation’s first chocolate factory, and the Blake House, which is promoted as the city’s oldest house, built around 1648. Except for the zoo and JFK Library, most people who find these attractions live in Dorchester or have friends who do, Taylor said.
It’s an interesting point: the marketing, tourist promotion and mapping of a city becomes self-fulfilling. The way we map cities - literally and figuratively - serves as a filter, an overlay that guides what we see in an urban space. Our cultural maps are key to how we experience cities. In Boston, in particularly, that means a sometimes unfortunate bias for the central neighborhoods.
But you can only take the complaint so far. Have these people never traveled to another city as a tourist? Most people aren’t willing, especially on a first visit, to make a visit to residential neighborhoods, where attractions of historical and artistic interest are far more scattered, where transportation moves from easy-to-use rail lines to complex systems of poorly marked bus routes, where it’s not always clear to the outsider which streets are safe to walk down with foldout maps and fanny packs in display. It’s great to love one’s neighborhood and to extol its virtues, but have some empathy with the poor tourist: any guidebook that sent its readers trying to negotiate the Columbia Rd. intersection near JFK/UMass without some warning is being irresponsible.
And keep some perspective: people don’t fly here from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or Lincoln, Nebraska, to see the nation’s first chocolate factory.
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