To follow up on yesterday’s screed about city planning here, I’d like to back up a bit and address the overarching issue at hand. The question of what kind of city we want to be - Florence or Milan, in Robert Campbell’s dichotomy - taps into underlying anxiety we have about where an economic and housing boom has taken the city.
It occured to me when sitting around with friends this weekend talking about how cultural life in Boston has changed since the 1990s; we were almost universal in our assessment that the city has gotten worse. The gay scene has petered out; nightlife in general has lost its energy; Harvard Square rapidly lost its bookstores, its small businesses and perhaps now its cinemas; the culture industries have deserted the city; and high rents and hypergentrification have dispersed our friends further around the city.
And this is only the cultural and social life. The 2005 city election started to show after-effects of economic boom and bust. The murder rate has climbed up astonishingly. An infrastructure boom heralded by the Big Dig and the DNC has brought a corresponding expansion of the timeline for better roads or public transit. Property taxes have reached the straining point of popular legitimation. Major issues, like the declining water table, still face us ahead.
Now, of course, other things lie behind my and others’ pessimism. People like to complain, especially in New England. The economy is not exactly roaring, and a housing boom does little to make nonowners feel better. The giddy rush of sports team success (for fans) or gay marriage (for the lesbian and gay community) have faded with time. Finally, it’s worth noting that my friends and I are in our 30s (at least) and inclined toward nostalgia to the time of our mid-20s.
But, oddly, I don’t seem to encounter much excitement or optimism about the city among anyone else I meet. So my question is, what is your general mood? Is it just me? Or maybe the SAD speaking?
POSTSCRIPT: Already there are a number of comments (keep them coming!), most cheerier than my post. To be clear, I didn’t have any other city in mind as comparison - nor was I trying to say that Boston has nothing going for it, because it has a lot. Rather, I was trying to daignose a collective mood that cuts across the cultural and political life of the city. Another way of phrasing it would be to ask, do you think Boston will be a better place five years from now? Obviously, it will be for some, not for others. But is there such thing as an identifiable public sentiment?
Jay responds, calling us Edinburgh to New York’s London. Jon Keller bemoans the transformation of Harvard Square into "just another high-end mall."
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