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J.trr !rme r e a d - <ptf f.en d rea et e d * i^\ d r P a n e , d a hit eel d e j j ‘ J.? ’ Map of Good Hope: 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.

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