Several months ago this column featured some readers’ descriptions of what they would do if they were mayor of Boston. As you might imagine, I too have a few ideas about managing the city. Here are some things I’d do if I were mayor:
• I’d plant Boston ivy to grow over selected sections of Boston City Hall. I will donate plants from my own city garden to make it cheap. The ivy would cover up the concrete—one of the worst and most dirt-collecting building materials ever invented—as well as giving the plaza a bit of green. The plantings would save city hall for the mid-century preservationists while covering up a good portion of it for the city hall haters. And Boston ivy is so lovely. It turns golden in the fall and leaves delicate trace lines in the winter. Continued…
Banks did us a disservice in the past decade as they lent money to people who couldn’t afford their mortgage payments. Then they foreclosed, leaving properties vacant and uncared for, degrading neighborhoods. At the end of it all, in many cases, the banks recouped less in the foreclosure than they would have if they had worked out payments the original borrowers could have actually afforded.
The brilliant minds at work in that scenario now have another predatory move up their sleeves. They’re out to destroy retail districts. The banks don’t see this as their aim, but this is the result if they infest our neighborhoods with their blank windows. Continued…
Those of us who live in downtown neighborhoods are a fractured bunch. We imagine we live in villages, but ours aren’t the classic New England kind with a town hall, a general store, a local school, a town green, a united church incorporating several previously antagonistic denominations and a town meeting once a year.
We fill in the gaps with neighborhood associations, book groups and other neighborhood clubs, and the sidewalk, restaurants and local businesses that offer places for us to greet one another and catch up.
One increasingly common community builder is web-based—it’s an email forum or networking group using LISTSERV, Majordomo, bigtent.com or Google Groups that connects subscribers who are interested in the same topic and want to discuss it online without having to take extra time to go a web site like Facebook or Twitter. Often that topic is the neighborhood. And it often emerges from a neighborhood’s mothers. That is the age group that knows about this sort of thing. Continued…
The news is always bad, people say. And it is true that conflicts, fires, murders and general mayhem are well covered. But there’s more to a year than its horrors and problems. In honor of the end of 2011, I’d like to direct your attention to some matters that turned out well.
• Hubway. Let’s give credit to Nicole Freedman, familiarly known as Boston’s bike czar, or czarina, as the case may be. The bike-sharing bikes and stands are good looking. Gradually they have been placed at more and more convenient spots. They’ve proven wildly popular. To those people who complain that Hubway doesn’t provide helmets, just go get your own. London’s bike-share program doesn’t provide helmets either. Continued…
According to the 2010 census, 50,888 people live in Charlestown, the downtown, Beacon Hill, the North End/Waterfront and the West End. This region has two supermarkets, Whole Foods at Charles River Plaza and Johnnie’s in Charlestown.
The same census showed 41,250 residents in Urbana, Illinois. I’ve seen with my own eyes the seven supermarkets within that city’s borders and about a dozen more in the neighboring city of Champaign.
What are we doing wrong?
Nothing, said Mike Tesler, a Bentley University retailing professor and a principal at Retail Concepts.
“The answer isn’t in the demographics or the consumers,” he said. “Supermarkets are large corporations, and it’s all about incremental dollars and expanding where they are going to get the most profits.” Continued…
Ladies and gentlemen. I’m here to tell you that if you are Christian no one is saying you can’t celebrate a Merry Christmas. In fact, if you’re something else you can celebrate Christmas too. Or celebrate Hanukkah or Kwanzaa. Or celebrate the “holidays.” Or celebrate nothing. We’ve got people trying to stir up ugliness over December 25, and it isn’t the people who use “holiday” instead of Christmas.
This is another one of those non-issues inflamed by the Fox News screamers, aided and abetted by half-brain people like Texas Governor Rick Perry. These people are the opposite of kind and tolerant, even if Perry muscularly claims to be “Christian,” a label that requires attributes that aren’t apparent in this man or his followers. And so what if Rhode Island’s governor, Lincoln Chaffee, used the term “holiday” tree. Trees aren’t religious. They’re pagan. Call them anything you want. (Did you know that Rhode Island got its name because the area reminded the explorer Giovanni Verrazano of Rhodes? I hadn’t known about Verrazano’s contribution to the state until I studied an older book called The Historical Atlas of the United States by Derek Hayes, which, by the way, would make a nice holiday gift for those who like maps. But I digress.) Continued…
Our guy Mitt has met trouble lately in his effort to become next year’s Republican presidential candidate. First Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain threatened his front-runner status. Because of ignorance, inarticulateness and womanizing these three are finished. Now Newt Gingrich is on an upswing. Everyone already knows how mean, hypocritical and unfaithful Newt is, so it‘s hard to imagine any new information that could rout him. Newt could wreck Mitt’s dream of becoming president.
That’s sad. Mitt seems like a good guy who has been running for public office since 1994, almost twice as long as he ran Bain Capital. We hate to see a man with a dream disappointed.
But Mitt made a regrettable decision about his affiliation early in his political career. He probably chose the Republican Party because both his parents had run for office admirably on that ticket. But children often reject their parents’ choices. When Mitt saw the direction his parents’ party was going, he should have become a Democrat. He might have had a lot more to show for his efforts than he has now. Continued…
My brother coined this word before others began using it. He identified it as a trap he falls into—he imagines the worst that can happen, and if he didn’t fight the feeling, his fears would immobilize him.
I bet you’re familiar with awfulization. It’s usually associated with change, it carries exaggerated predictions of calamity, and can have the same deleterious effect on a community that it does on a person. On the other hand, it elicits permanent skepticism in people who once heard that Chicken Little claimed the sky was falling.
Let’s take as an example the casinos destined for Massachusetts. The immorality! The crime! The addiction! The loss of business for small merchants and restaurateurs! Doomsday! Continued…
That’s what our streetside litter basket has required.
Some readers may remember that in June the city installed a mesh litter basket on the lamp post in front of our house at my request. It was an experiment. Would our sidewalk and tree pit be free of cups, crumpled paper and those little plastic bags of doggy-doo if an appropriate receptacle were available for passers-by?
The answer was a resounding yes. We provided the black trash bags that lined the litter basket and secured the bag with a big rubber band. My husband, not me, has generally emptied the bag every trash pick-up day because he is taller, and it is easier for a taller person to lift out the bag. We agreed it was a small price to pay for cleanliness. For 20 to 30 feet on either side of the litter basket, the sidewalk and the street were mercifully free of litter for the whole summer.
Neighbors became protective of the basket. They helped out, taking turns emptying the basket when we went away. A few times we went out to exchange the full bag for a fresh one and, to our surprise, some unidentified civic-minded neighbor had already done so.
As autumn began, though, things changed. Continued…
Once in awhile I try to do readers a favor, finding out the answers to random questions that may perplex people. Here are some answers to questions you might have wondered about.
What happened to the Gund Gallery designed by I. M. Pei at the Museum of Fine Arts now that it’s called the Linde Family Wing? Continued…