, lu d u d .’ ,-nu-n! a n .r I'rr.'h iften eee Jn Cah'mi.Pea ,d,>-u‘ A l rfiitiu m c.it A l J.'iru/mt, prater!.m e rr/natde de retlr m i hart. I. re de:t,r Ptaieene sr.ii ae.rtprr.i _ nu\nt-r. !\i:drc par lee . huit'apU-’Uj I > Par! eel rnhirde n?«-~.v J/- metHeur ,(e ta i'.dexi, kuu lee anJ J J tu u e r a ia e e/ja>\/ee de d e A ,ru t' ,,-y j 1,- /X -./ dp'fer.-r., tv. ,A- P K a r r p e ( W.v -/ ///-r* rX /,r r,-et,/e/i,-e ,ia Getm enn-ur d i Slrv.r, /-Xv Boston in the American Imagination James Carroll

Born in Chicago, raised in Washington, D.C., I came to Boston late, Even a transplanted native like me has to ask, What do people see when secure in the knowledge of what I would find. That was thirty years ago, they come to Boston? Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that a European arrives at an and I knew nothing. American city feeling wary of being taken in, that a European leaves an The Boston of the American imagination exists only on the poster­ American city feeling slightly depressed. But I wonder. It is surely true sized map of the mind, with its border of oval-framed faces o f patriots, that the clang o f cash registers— or should I say the beep?— competes politicians, preachers, and poets. The map is entitled, variously, Athens of with the trolley bell in Boston, and that Boston, with nary a nod to America, Brimstone Corner, City on a Hill, All Politics Is Local, Ireland Hooker, can tart herself up for- tourists: Think of the traffic jam of doo­ West, Berkeley East, Race War North, Birthplace of Bio-Tech, and dad carts at once-authentic Quincy Market. But the visitors we see, Banned-in-Boston. The features of the map include painted brick foot­ Europeans included, seemed disarmed and interested, uplifted even. By paths through early America; prickly botdets of tribal neighborhoods; the what exactly? There are, of course, the charms of the well-kept downtown squared-off glass steeples of faith in financial services; a yawning harbor residential districts, the relics of history, the minuet of land and sea, the through which ever fewer fish and a constant current of immigrants fun­ jitterbug o f skyscrapers and three-deckers. But charm and history and the nel; stars marking the desks and workbenches of Nobel laureates; tidal scales of juxtaposition do not, of themselves, account for the fascination charts of a seasonally shifting student population; the white needles of old and respect one senses in the faces of all those visitors, for charm, history, churches; the compass rose of politics; and notations for the bus stops of and scale could define the made city of a theme park. If mere quaintness the tourist trolleys. were the draw, then visitors would better seek out the re-created “heritage That Boston retains a mythic vibrancy in the American imagination villages” of bygone days, those oases in time that are staffed by costumed is never more clear than when one of those blue or red tourist buses chugs actors— bonnetted schoolmarms, Pilgrim-hatted millers— who say by. Its bell clangs, as if in homage to the San Francisco cable car to which they've never seen a camera, but smile for you anyway. it pays kitsch tribute. I have seen visitors to Boston craning from under The map of mythic Boston is clearly drawn and familiar enough. the rolled-up vinyl windows of those quaint conveyances with expressions Tourists arrive with it firmly in mind. The Kennedys cross its face like a of awe on their faces. And what did they behold? The wonder of what, to presidential range, never mind that old Joe made his mark— and for­ us, was an ordinary city street. W ho’d have thought that ordinary city tune— elsewhere, or that none of his progeny was raised here. Boston is streets would themselves become exotic in America? Waiting at a corner the cradle of liberty, never mind that the wealthy merchants who chal­ in my car, I have been blinded by the simultaneous flashes o f two dozen lenged London over taxes had made their fortunes in the slave trade. Instamatics, as trolley riders pushed their blue-dot buttons on the driver’s Contemporary Boston is famous for the Red Sox feud with the New York cue— photographing what? A bow-fronted town house on Beacon Street; Yankees, yet even that touches the subliminal nerve of antiestablishment an equestrian statue at the foot of Commonwealth Avenue; a narrow lane newcomer resentment that took root here, where the name “Yankee” first laid with cobblestones; the gray bent tablets of a colonial graveyard; the referred to pinstripes on gray flannel. home of Parker House tolls. I have caught snatches of the driver-guide’s Here is the joke; At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Boston routine: a Beacon Hill Garden Club president, at work in a flower bed on lives most vividly in the American imagination not because of the Mount Vernon Street, pointed out as a typical Irish serving girl; a store­ Nobelists in literature who reside here— Derek Walcott, Saul Bellow, front on Charles Street honored as the original 7-Eleven; General Hooker Seamus Heaney for part o f each year; not because o f Henry James, J. P. on his horse in the shadow of the State House credited with the invention Marquand, or Edwin O’Connor; not because of Sylvia Plath or Anne of prostitution. Sexton; not because of the great universities that draw the most brilliant minds from the world over; not because, in national election after nation­ ference between myth and reality could be nowhere sharper than at that al election, its politics produce serious contenders for the country’s high­ spot: Ask the homeless men and women who stuff newspapers into their est offices. Far more humbly, yet more powerfully, perhaps, than ever clothing and curl up on benches in the park across the street. Such cheer­ before, Boston grips the American imagination from the Hollywood set of lessness is as much a part o f the human condition here as anywhere, even a long-running television program about a bar. The show’s appeal, even in if television invites us to think otherwise. And, finally, no Bostonian the eternal return o f reruns, rests on the image of a place where, as its would think of going to the famous bar because in such a place, natural­ theme song says, everybody knows your name. That idea points to the ly, no one knows anyone’s name, except the movie star’s. most treasured part of Boston’s mythic identity, as a place that, despite its And yet. There is no need here to condescend to those who, coming character as a true city with all the outsized problems that go with urban­ from away, show us what matters in Boston by the photographs they take. ization, has preserved an intangible but real quality of intimacy. To talk of the purely imagined elements of the mental map Americans The friendly accessibility of old Boston, especially, is one of its most carry o f this city is the farthest thing from debunking these fondly held striking qualities— the way the narrow streets embrace a person strolling, ideas as “mere myth," as if there were anything “mere” about mythology. the way low buildings keep the sky a canopy. A regular surprise of lanes What we dream of, whether a lost past or a longed-for future, does, in fact, and cul-de-sacs that lead only into living rooms, and then windows to tell us something quite real about ourselves. Thus, the sentimental fog look in, make even strangers want to sit. The very geography of the brick that wraps even Boston’s hard-edged actualities can lift to reveal some­ city, nearly encircled by a river, harbor and swath of green at a muddy thing deeply authentic. Having wondered for a long time about those creek, makes it feel like a sprawling outdoor room. There is a wood city trolley riders and what they see, and having been moved by what we see— too, o f course— the clapboard structures of adjacent three-decker neigh­ namely, that fascination and respect illuminating their faces— I eventual­ borhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mission Hill, and the tidy capes ly recovered the memory of the time when I was one of them. It was a time and colonials of West Roxbury, Roslindale, and Hyde Park. Tourists see before trolleys, but I too, like so many citizens who claim the place, was little of these surrounding enclaves, which draw contours as much from an awed newcomer whose very ignorance of Boston opened me to the core diversity as similarity, but from their varied hilltops a like view o f the of its truth. Prudential Center and the Hancock Tower, which always seem close enough to touch, ties them together. Not for nothing is the literal heart For my first few years here, I was a solitary man who habitually spent o f Boston called the Common. days-off alone, and what I did with almost every day of leisure, at least In other words, the dreamworld of television builds on something once a week, was walk the streets of this city, inhaling it. The aromas of the nation already senses about Boston, and the nation has no need to ask, bread rising from the commercial bakery by North Station, and of fish off Is this real? But those of us who live here must ask that question, as trol­ the piers along Atlantic Avenue; the unsteady feel underfoot of Tremont ley riders gaze out at us, as if we were figures on the backlot of a Disney Street sidewalks cantilevered by the roots of long-gone trees; splinters of studio. The myth of paradise suggests that human beings are always look­ twilight flashing off the sterling white triangles o f sailboats on the river; ing back toward a lost golden age that never actually existed. Yet it seems the rattle of the elevated Orange Line on Washington Street, its screech of literally true, nonetheless, that a bond of intimacy once marked our iron where the track curved sharply at Holy Cross Cathedral; the sad sight national life in ways it no longer does, not only in the town before the age of old ladies sitting on porches in the self-made nursing homes on of the strip mall, but in the urban village called the neighborhood before Rockview Street in Jamaica Plain; kids playing stickball against the ply- the era of police locks. Hollywood’s choice of Boston for this famous sit­ wood-boarded door of an abandoned apartment in the D Street projects, com would not have clicked but for that idea America already had of the how they stopped to glare at me until I kept walking. I remember two place. That one could walk in off the anonymous street o f an otherwise trees on Castle Island that, when seen as one shape from back across typical city and be hailed by name may indeed have once been true— no Pleasure Bay, formed the perfect silhouette of a horse. I remember seeking fantasy— even o f the Beacon Hill pub that inspired the television series. out and finding the dilapidated clapboard house on a weather-beaten My wife and I had our wedding party there more than two decades ago, street in Southie, the number telling me it was where Cardinal Cushing before Peoria had ever heard of the place. That pub was where we went in was born. I tracked down the site of the original Perkins Institute on Pill the early years o f our marriage, now and then to be at home away from Hill, also in Southie, because I so loved the idea o f a half-blind Irish girl home. Today, of course, the bar is swamped with dismounted trolley rid­ named Annie Sullivan giving Helen Keller to the world. ers from Peoria, Seattle, and Baton Rouge. They want a T-shirt more than In my first few years, I was an itinerant dweller. I lived in the a beer, but what they really want is a photo by the sign outside. The dif­ Fenway, around the corner from Symphony Road, which was an open-air

JAMES CARROLL 232 arson factory in the late sixties, as well-insured landlords pursued a slum but o f class. Busing ruined the educational experience of a generation, and clearance of their own. The smell o f charred wood hardly ever left the air. drove middle class whites to the suburbs. The truth of that assessment has Across the street was a second story window to which neighbors pointed, become part of the city’s conventional wisdom, but it is far from the whole almost proudly, with a rough tale o f the Boston Strangler. It was an edgy story. Court-ordered integration through busing, by forcing the hand o f a neighborhood, but always there were potbellied men and waiflike women recalcitrant, Irish-dominated (as it happened) School Committee, undid carrying fiddle cases to nearby Symphony Hall or the New England the scandal of government-sponsored segregation. In fact, it was the Conservatory. It amazed me that some of the best musicians in the world School Committee that had initiated busing-—busing black children to wore shoes as poorly heeled as mine. predominantly black schools. The court only extended busing to whites. On the back side o f Mission Hill, I lived on the second floor of a ten­ The sacrosanct “neighborhood school” was an ideal for whites, not blacks, ement across the hall from a man who told me he was the king of the who were overwhelmingly assigned to the ritywide high schools, while Gypsies, which I did not believe. Then I saw, on certain days, a train of whites were overwhelmingly assigned to “district” high schools. The young women arriving, each with her plucked chicken. Gypsies! I won­ School Committee rejected every "moderate” remedy, leaving no alterna­ dered anew about my neighbor, but also about ignorance and stereotype— tive to busing. By ordering it, the court restored the possibility of civic mine, not his. I lived at various times in Beacon Hill, and in J. P., and in honor to a community that was in danger of losing its soul. South Boston. My one foray out of town was to a leased apartment on the Busing remains the code-word for the modem tragedy o f Boston, shore of Nahant— but only because I could look across the harbor at the tragedy defined as the clash of mortally opposed antagonists neither of city I had come to love. whom will surrender— “Never!” was scrawled on the blank walls of But I could feel hate for Boston, too. My flat in Southie was on Boston for most of a decade— and each of whom is in some way right. It Fourth Street, just up from M. Its gracious bay window looked out on the was true what my neighbors in Southie believed— that they were being Tuckerman School to which the flashing blue lights of police cars came unfairly forced to bear the burden of a whole society’s failure. But at stake every morning, an escort for half a dozen African-American second and in that crisis was nothing less than the answer to the question, Can Boston, third graders for whom the simple act of going to school was heroic. I which opened its heart to newcomers in the past, do so in the future? learned an awful truth about my kind when, while serving as a court- Busing was a tragedy— but it was also an answer, and the answer is yes. appointed bus monitor during the Boston integration struggle of the mid- Not that the hearts of cities open easily. Except for those native 1970s, a black child said to me, “You’re with the FBI, right?" Americans who’d named the place Shawmut before the English came, “Why do you think that?” I asked. Boston’s successive dominators have, in truth, been slow to open up to “Because they’ re the only white folks on our side.” The only white others. Thus you could write the history of the place as a chronicle of its folks, the child meant, in Boston. I could see why a child thought so in antagonisms: Brahmin versus Irish, Irish versus Jews, Italians versus that terrible season— riding to school sprawled on the floor of a bus for Hispanics, whites perennially versus blacks. There was even the wounding fear of stones or worse— but it wasn't true. The federal judge was on their conflict of children versus parents during the generational battle that side, and he was nor only white, but Irish. Boston itself had been on their shocked America in the 1960s, and that took such jagged shape here. That side, having, for example, sent James J. Reeb to die in Selma, Alabama. A conflict was joined, especially, at Boston area universities by the Pentagon- Massachusetts governor’s mother, Mrs. Peabody, had famously traveled sponsored scientists whose work underwrote the war in Vietnam, and their from Boston to join an early civil rights demonstration in Florida, where very own students who repudiated the war with a fervor that caught the she was arrested. Boston had trained Martin Luther King, Jr., in theology, nation’s attention. At the Arlington Street Church, an organizing center and had remained a source o f his strongest support. And why not? A court of the Abolition movement in the nineteenth century, young men turned sitting in Boston had made slavery illegal in Massachusetts nearly three in their draft cards at a ceremony presided over by William Sloane Coffin decades before Lincoln. But it is also true that the same court first put for­ and Dr. Benjamin Spock, and after that the Selective Service System was a ward the impossible idea o f two school systems for the races, “separate but battleground. For a time, the famous sign at Charles River Park, referred equal,” a notion with a fuse attached to it. Why shouldn't Boston have to earlier in this volume, was altered by protester-vandals to read, “If you been the site of the explosion? lived in Hanoi, you’d be dead now.” . On the Southeast Expressway, the The busing crisis, of course, overlays the contemporary story of Boston Gas Company commissioned the late artist Corita Kent, a former Boston like a meridian grid overlays a globe, enabling every Bostonian to nun and permanent peace activist, to splash its looming gas storage tank locate himself or herself in the geography of a city's self-hatred. Busing with her trademark rainbow. When she finished— her work remains a destroyed the schools, we’re told, and laid bare not only the divide of race, landmark on the map of Boston today— drivers whipping by in their cars

f O MAP OF GOOD HOP! 233 could spy what some swore was a profile of the North Vietnamese leader first there was abolition. Yes, there were Sacco and Vanzetti, but later Ho Chi Minh. And why not? Hadn't Ho Chi Minh worked in Boston there was Michael Dukakis, whose principled opposition to the death years before as a waiter? I witnessed Boston police officers roughly carting penalty was the undoing of his presidential campaign. Yes, there was the off student protesters with a rebuttal chant of their own; “Ho! Ho! Ho! Brink’s Robbery, but there is also Rosie’s Place, a shelter for women run Chi! Minh!— my ass!” There is a stout young oak tree growing on the hill­ by modest idealists who embrace voluntary poverty out of spiritual side in the Boston Common. It was planted discreetly by a group of long­ wealth. What else is America but all of this? time peace activists, marking the end of the war. The tree is on no map The idea of the nation, like the idea of the universal, remains elu­ that I know of, but it should be. A stone tablet at its base reads, “For Hai sive. It comes alive for us only in a vivid instance of particularity. Boston, and Sacha, Age 9. For all Vietnamese children who died in the war. And exactly because it is not a Hollywood fantasy or a heritage theme park, is for ourselves. 1975.” precisely such an instance of particularity. That there is a well-known tragic side to life in Boston— that lost generation of school children, a The passions of Boston are quite plain to see. The word passion has two clinging air of racial mistrust, a slant toward tribalism— can by the odd senses and both apply. Passion means the intensely felt emotions that give transformation of truth be a consolation to those who face it. Because shape to public discourse, and prompt, say, the simple, useless gesture of Boston is tragic as well as charming, human as well as divine, we know it a tree planting. And passion means the suffering of a people who have cho­ is ours. We flawed citizens claim Boston as home not despite its flaws, but sen, in the phrase of an old Irish saying, contention over loneliness. Such because of them. Thus Boston’s local eccentricities, for better and worse— passion is at the heart of fabled Boston politics, which is nothing but the in its characters, but also in the odd turns its story takes— are so widely city in dialogue with itself—sometimes conversation, sometimes argu­ able to be recognized as intimations of the fate of the very nation, for bet­ ment. The reason Boston politicians climb onto the national stage with ter and worse. Even the massive, late twentieth century rearrangement of such regularity is that, as has been true since its first settlers faced west physical space— the depression of the Central Artery is the largest public and moved on, Boston cannot conceive of its fate apart from the nation’s. works project of the era— carries such a weight of intimation, as new Tip O ’Neill’s dictum, All Politics Is Local, only means that there is no buildings go up, and an obsolete highway goes down, and a long-lost nation apart from its neighborhoods. The nation is the neighborhood writ waterfront is reclaimed, and disparate ethnic and socioeconomic concen­ large— for better and for worse. And the converse is true: The neighbor­ trations are knit together by new means of transport, rapid exchange of hood is the nation small. In Washington, that is easy to forget, but in information, and, perhaps, unprecedented modes of municipal gover­ Boston impossible. nance— a Greater Boston?— that these new structures will make possible. It was in Boston that citizens first began to think of themselves as When visitors see the signals of this city’s reinvention— one by land, having a loyalty larger than to those whose names they knew. Citizenship twice by the sea— they glimpse what this nation is becoming next. 4n Boston, perhaps around the time of Sam Adams or Phillis Wheatley, began to mean more than one thing. Loyalty to the king became a prior What do visitors see when they see Boston? They see not the dream of loyalty to the people; loyalty to the slave master became a prior loyalty to America, but the human reality of it, which is better. One nation under the human truth of freedom. New England was famous as the home of God? In Boston, there are Christians and Jews, but also Muslims, Jains, what would come to be called rugged individualism, but somehow here, Buddhists, Hindus, and people for whom the creed is unimportant. a readiness to stand alone— a wish to be left alone— was tempered by a Religion is not a ticket here. Through the lens of this city’s past, one sees spacious interest in the broader world. Citizenship in Boston, in other that, generation in and generation out— from those first dissenting words, came to mean a simultaneous sense o f membership in— and Puritans, through the descendants o f those who crossed the Atlantic on responsibility for— the United States of America. Boston-owned slave ships, through the Irish, Italians, and Jews who fled The nation, in fact, is an abstraction, and we came to a full under­ a bleeding Europe, to the lately arrived refugees from Latin American and standing of its reach, both far and near, only gradually— indeed, only Asian wars, to a new geneation of Jews who’ve stepped out of Russia, and through the accidents and tragedies, detours and bonuses o f history. And the new Irish who’ve come for work— newcomers have always had to pos­ gradually we made our commitment, from the near to the far. All of this sess only one thing for rough acceptance here. They have had to possess a is quite apparent in those famous tourist walks through Boston. Those future. ambulatory stories tell it all— from Anne Hutchinson to Wendell Phillips This is Bostons secret— that its famously layered history points to the African-American soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th to the great beyond itself to all that has not happened yet. Why else have so many of Robert Lowell poem about their memorial. Yes, there was busing, but us come here in the flower of youth and refused to leave? Because we are

JAMES CARROLL 234 drawn to an open-air museum? Because the statuary moves us? Because Boston’s purpose too, and so it remains. Ask the new immigrants. Ask the the legends teach us moral lessons? We love the provenance, but that does children, parents, and teachers o f a rededicated Boston Public School sys­ not account for our commitment. Boston is the grande dame and the tem. Ask the city planners whose lessons came the hard way. The ethnic young rebel both— provenance and prospect. The imaginative spacious­ and racial and class boundaries across which so many slings and arrows ness that accommodates such human range is what people live here for. have been hurled are also sutures that close a social wound. Boston can face And visitors glimpse the thing. Jean-Paul Sartre finally acknowledged a the western expanse of a great continent without turning its back on the grudging admiration for American cities precisely because of this quality. old world from which so many of its parents came. Boston can prize a “The cities ate open,” he wrote, “open to the world, and to the future. This parochial quality of life, bitterly cutting down to size every display of is what gives them their adventurous look and, even in their ugliness and worldliness, while also spawning a lettered sophistication that draws the disorder, a touching beauty.” still unbridled young. Opposites? In Boston the has-been and the not-yet Boston proves that what makes an American— and this is unique to are wrestling with each other, and always have. The outcome of the match our nation— is a shared future, not a common past. But the future is noth­ remains predictably uncertain. And why shouldn’t Americans love com­ ing if not open, and the past is nothing if it does not teach us that. The ing here to watch? lesson is dramatically enshrined in the very bones of the city, which is why we love those cobblestones, and Old Ironsides, and the hint of molasses in As this volume so elegantly shows, Boston forms the literal center of some the air above certain streets in the North End. To go from Paul Reveres of the New World’s earliest maps. But Boston itself functions as a map for house at North Square to Sarah Orne Jewett’s apartment on Charles Street those who see it now, a metaphoric sketching of the territory of a nation’s to the Bay State Road hotel room— now a Boston University dormitory inner life. A peninsula, a stretch of pasture, cow paths, a set of fingerlike room— in which Eugene O ’Neill died; from Fenway Park to Castle Island wharves clawing the sea, a constricting grid of streets, the telltale sign ofi to Jordan Hall; from Haymarket stalls to Hancock Tower office suites" to limits and human demands on the earth, demands that seem impossible. one often thousand classrooms; from Vilna Shul to Trinity Church to the The landfill history alone makes Boston a city that walks on water, a city African Meeting House to the Paulist Fathers’ Chapel on Park lStreet; that moves mountains— biblical images of the miraculous. For ourselves, from a Jain temple to an Orthodox cathedral to a Muslim mosque; from we citizens of Boston make more modest claims. We are proud to feel the Maison Robert in Old City Hall to Amrhein’s on Broadway to the gaze of Americans, and grateful to sense their fascination and respect. But Paramount Deli on the flat of Beacon Hill; from the Boston Globe to the what Americans find to love in Boston already belongs to them, as the Bay State Banner to Bay Windows-, from the people’s triumph of Tent City skilled drawing of a place already belongs to the portion of the earth it to the imported glitz o f Copley Place: from here to there, North End to represents. Whether the nation sees Boston from the window o f a chug­ Southie, West End to Coolidge Corner, Dudley to downtown, the world’s ging trolley, or on the unscrolled parchment o f a spiritual cartography, we great question has its answer. are humbled— a word coming from Latin for “of the earth,” which also How do people of diverse racial and ethnic and religious strains live gives us “human”— to be a particular mark of such universal longing. together— not without strain, not just in peace, but in the hope of har­ Human longing is for nothing less than the reconciliation of time and mony? Think of the poignant urgency with which that question is being place, of past and future, of the many and the one, of the living and the asked now from Belfast to Kosovo, from Kigali to Islamabad. That ques­ dead. Boston is precious because it lives in the national imagination, and tion is being asked in Jerusalem, which was the first city on a hill, but not increasingly the world’s, just so— as a tattered but still brilliant map of the last. And it is true: the eyes of Jerusalem can look this way. Boston is America’s good hope. not rid of conflict, and African-Americans in particular may have reason to step warily, but this city’s differences are openly faced, and increasing­ ly honored. The eyes of the world, represented by a steady stream o f inter­ national visitors who lift those vinyl window flaps, ask this question: How to draw unum but ofpluribus? We do it, Boston says, like this. Thus Boston not only lives in the American imagination; Boston embodies it. The imagination, Coleridge said, is the faculty whose pur­ pose is the reconciliation of opposites. Whether by a fluke of history, or by the deliberate choice o f its exemplary citizens, or by lessons painfully learned from dreadful mistakes, the reconciliation of opposites has been

SO MAP OF GOOD HOPE 235