I HAVE an office in Kenmore Square, and I spend most of my writinghours out on the roof. I work at an old picnic table amid a landscapeof Dickensian rooftops with clusters of stubby, tilted chimneys, andI can see the lights of Fenway, the top of the Sears & Roebuckbuilding where my father worked for more than 30 years, and the Citgosign. Directly in front of me is what was once the Shelton Hotel,where Eugene O'Neill died in 1953. It's an inspiring view; thebuilding where my father worked, in particular, is a constantreminder that I should be working harder and without complaint.
The Sears & Roebuck building is now Landmark Center. The SheltonHotel has become a BU dorm, and I can also see the copper roof of thenew Hotel Commonwealth which is part of the recent complex ofbuildings that replaced a shaggier complex of buildings alongCommonwealth Avenue where once Kenmore Square flaunted its particularbrand of blithe seediness, nowhere so perfectly embodied as in TheRatskeller.
Urban renewal makes me nervous because it gave this cityGovernment Center and wiped out Scollay Square and the West End inthe process, and Government Center is to architecture what VanillaIce was to hip-hop, which is to say a glaring embarrassment we'd allbe best served deporting to Uzbekistan on the next freighter out. Butas a child of this city, I can remember the PM (Pre-Menino) Bostonall too well, and while it had its pluses, it was also shabby withoutthe chic, and it was listless in a way things without a true sense ofidentity tend to get.
But then OM (Of-Menino) Boston began with the abdication of RayFlynn to fill the pressing need for an ambassador to the Vatican, andOM Boston began to flourish. First there was the drop in crime, thenthere was the real estate explosion, then Robert Kraft bought thePatriots, and the Big Dig hit second gear (of a 10-speed semi asopposed to the six-speed sports car we'd expected, but, hey, Ihaven't heard anyone complaining about the Callahan Tunnel in over ayear, so it was worth it), and the neighborhoods, long forgotten,fairly flourished, and New Balance plunked its headquarters down inBrighton, and the Central Artery came down, and the sun shone on thepavement of Atlantic Avenue for the first time since God was young.
And now - the arrival of the Democratic National Convention. Yes,the city will be locked up from Kenmore Square to Rowes Wharf (with ano-parking perimeter that, I believe, extends from somewhere in Hullto somewhere in the Berkshires). But as these Democratic pols descendon our bright, new, gift-wrapped city (and isn't it a much moreenjoyable prospect to envision the garrulous and gregarious TomMenino leading John Edwards over to, say, the Littlest Pub than itwould be to picture dour, perplexed Mitt Romney leading Dick Cheneyto The Country Club in Brookline?), we've rolled out the welcome matand rolled away the homeless (I don't know where they went either;maybe to a Bruins game). We've tidied the streets and planted andpainted and got all the streetlights working and paved over thepotholes. And our city is ready to show itself off as something new.Not the Boston it was 20 or even 15 years ago. OM Boston is farfeistier and paradoxically less rough around the edges.
Losing edges is always to be mourned on some level. I'd trade theentire Hotel Commonwealth, for example, for one more night at theRat, and the last time I saw an authentic Townie in Charlestown hewas on his rooftop waiting for an airlift. But you always lose gritwhen you sweep a floor, and maybe the price of so much rebirth isthat we no longer need suffer the idea of PM Boston, of being thoughtof as that 'hopeless backwater' to New York. New York's got the RNC,and to that I say, it's yours, all yours. Because we've got the SouthEnd and the North End, the Lenny and the Williams, Gillette and theFleet. We are - how strange - not yet fully defined. We've traded theSullivans for the Krafts, Buddy LaRoux for Theo Epstein, Ben & Mattfor John Malkovich, Cornel West for Sven Birkerts, Fieldler andOzawa for Keith Lockhart, and in most cases, we seem to have gottenthe better of the deal.
The lesson of progress is as it's always been - that nothing goldcan stay. Or nothing silver or nothing Rat. But I can see from myrooftop that Fenway is still there and the Citgo sign lights up, ifonly until midnight. This is still Boston, after all, where the barsclose at 2 and you can't get a restaurant to keep its kitchen openmuch past lunch. But until oh so recently, you couldn't buy liquor onSunday either, so give us time. Rome wasn't built in a day, even whenthey had Ambassador Flynn pitching in, but OM Boston, it seems, iscoming along nicely.
