Boston Beyond the Souvenir Stands
I’ve always had a certain fondness for Boston. It was the first truly large city I visited, the first place that was effortlessly cosmopolitan, the first place that buzzed in an important-seeming way that was absent in the isolated and suburban city where I grew up. I was properly obsessed with it. I visited about once a year in the late 1990s, but even when I wasn’t there, I studied maps, poured over photos, read the Boston Globe and online discussion forums. Eventually, those regular visits stopped, and my fascination with Boston began to wane.
Last November, I sped down Vermont highways in a rented Toyota Matrix, on an impulsive road trip that brought me back to Boston for the first time in eight years. I was curious to see how the Boston of my memory stacked up to the Boston I would experience that late-autumn weekend. On a particularly chilly Friday evening, I wandered from Allston to Downtown Crossing and back again. Everything seemed vaguely familiar but strangely foreign. Maybe it was six years of living in Montreal, or maybe it was the rapid gentrification and upscaling that had occurred since 1999, but Boston seemed to have lost a certain big-city edge. It felt tame, relaxed, maybe even a little provincial.
My biggest problem was that nearly every inch of grime, disorder and unpredictability had been scrubbed out of large parts of the central city. There was some left around Chinatown, the edges of the South End, in Central Square, around Allston, but much of Boston seemed to have become similar to the park that replaced the old Central Artery: pretty but kind of a void.
It was a relief, then, to come across the Haymarket, which was as messy and lively as I remembered it. Here, just beyond the souvenir stands of Faneuil Hall and the Quincy Market, is a real street market — a wet market, as you’d call it in Hong Kong — selling fruit, vegetables and meat. It draws an eclectic and varied group of shoppers that stand in contrast to the more homogeneous tourist crowd nearby. It was here, more than anywhere else I visited on my brief return to Boston, that I got a feel of the city I remembered so fondly.
Tags: Boston, Exploring the City, Markets, Streetlife
Christopher Szabla says:
It’s true that, as we discussed when you came here, Boston has become something of a boutique city. San Francisco has experienced more or less the same phenomenon; it’s almost as if the wax and wane of the economic circumstances has been exported to satellite cities, while the center city absorbs all the regional prosperity it bearably can.
In many ways the phenomenon has even accelerated over the past year; projects reminiscent of pro-capitalist slum-clearing efforts in mainland China (as opposed to the social welfare motivations that resulted in Government Center and the West End) are displacing blocks of grimy early 20th century storefronts in Chinatown and Downtown Crossing for glitzy condoplexes.
Haymarket retains its vibe, but it’s somewhat unreal now, crammed up against the old Blackstone Block while the void of the empty, suburban landscaping on the euphemistically named “Greenway” stretch out beyond it. The Central Artery, for all its autocentricity, lent the city a certain crampedness that elevated its sense of importance: look how crowded this place is, it suggested, because it’s a place everyone wants to be.
The Greenway, by contrast, idealizes idleness, presents emptiness, purports to brim with life but sentences a large swathe of the central city to urban death.
November 15th, 2008 at 4:13 pm