In comparison to the increasingly polished neighbourhoods around it, Boston’s Chinatown is an oasis of grit, a place that actually feels comfortable and well-worn, like an old pair of jeans.
I’ve always associated manually-activated crosswalks with suburbia, where pedestrian traffic is light. Here in Montreal, they only exist at mid-block crosswalks; pedestrians have the priority at regular intersections, especially since the city started installing scramble crossings and advance walk signals at many corners.
When I was in Boston last month, my first visit to the city in eight years, I was surprised to find that you needed to push a button to cross legally at nearly every intersection. It seems terribly impractical in a city with such high levels of pedestrian traffic, especially one that prides itself on being so pedestrian-friendly. Since many pedestrians arrive at a light that is already green, they just ignore the “don’t walk” signal and cross against the light.
Cottage Avenue in Davis Square, Somerville, Boston
Two generations of advertisements in downtown Boston
The topic of old commercial signs is esoteric enough, but I’ve managed to find an even more obscure type of commercial signage: 1960s-era Chinatown signs that use Rickshaw or some other kind of orientalist typeface. Most of them have disappeared, for obvious reasons, but it’s still possible to find traces of them in cities around the continent.
These two examples are from Montreal and Boston. In Montreal, only the shadow — or rust stains, to be more precise — of Restaurant Leo Foo are visible on this aluminum-clad building on St. Laurent. In Boston, I was surprised to see this vintage sign for the See Sun Market (which sells Quality Oriental Food!) on a somewhat dilapidated building on Harrison Avenue.
North Street, North End, Boston
I just got back from Boston, where I spent the weekend riding the subway — known there as the T — with a CharlieCard, the reloadable, contactless smart card that was introduced at the beginning of the year. Montreal’s smart card will be introduced in January, with a full implementation in the spring, but its name still hasn’t been released. There really should have been a competition to determine what it will be called; now we will probably end up with a blandly-named card like Atlanta’s BreezeCard, Paris’ Navigo or Washington, DC’s SmarTrip.
Boston, though, was wise enough to avoid that perilous route. To outsiders, CharlieCard seems like an inexplicably goofy choice of name for an important piece of transportation infrastructure, but it actually has deep roots in the city’s transit heritage. The Charlie in question comes from the 1948 “The MTA Song,” which tells the story of a man named Charlie who was forced to ride the rails for eternity because he forgot to bring an extra five cents to pay for the new exit fare:
Let me tell you the story
Of a man named Charlie
On a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTACharlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
“One more nickel.”
Charlie could not get off that train.
Every day, his wife meets him at Scollay Square where she hands him a sandwich, but apparently she doesn’t mind him being away, because she never sees fit to give him a nickel.
Now all night long
Charlie rides through the tunnels
Saying, “What will become of me?
Crying
How can I afford to see
My sister in Chelsea
Or my cousin in Roxbury?”Charlie’s wife goes down
To the Scollay Square station
Every day at quarter past two
And through the open window
She hands Charlie a sandwich
As the train comes rumblin’ through.
“The MTA Song,” better known as “Charlie on the MTA,” became a hit in 1959 when it was recorded by the Kingston Trio, a California-based folk act. Over the next few decades, it worked its way into Boston’s popular culture well enough to become the winning nomination for the name of the new smart card that replaced the city’s antiquated token payment system last year. While I was using the card and staring at its cartoon rendition of a jubilant Charlie (happy, I guess, to have his fare pre-loaded on a smart card), I thought about whether it would be possible for something as simple as a smart card to work its way into a city’s public imagination.
Bromfield near Province, Downtown Crossing
Earlier this year on Spacing Montreal, Thomas-Bernard Kenniff wrote about “ghost buildings,” the traces of long-gone buildings visible on the surface of blank walls. I wasn’t a surprised when I spotted a few ghost buildings while wandering around downtown Boston on Saturday. Unlike ghost ads, whose raisons d’être are usually pretty obvious, ghost buildings are surrounded by mystery. What did they look like? When were they demolished? Why?
Oxford and Beach, Chinatown
Between Tyler and Harrison, Chinatown
