Is Boston Being Modern Again?

I am posting an entry from my journal from 2008. It's a topic that I had posted on facebook just after I had finished writing the entry back in October. It's a topic that I always wished more people had discussed.

October 27, 2008

Walking home today after having spent the day running errands, a visit to the Athenaeum, and a short bite to eat downtown with a friend, I followed Washington Street all the way home. Walking past the Archstone I looked across the street to my right to see the very sleek and modern profile of the new W Hotel on Stuart Street. Currently to the right there is an empty lot that allows me to see the W project from Washington Street. There was once theaters on both sides of this block but have all since been razed. I have been living in Boston for nearly twenty years and can recall the Pilgrim Theater, Club 66, and the Naked I, all of which have been demolished and the land redeveloped as the Archstone (I think a wasted opportunity to redevelop precious Boston real estate. A decent but remarkably dull condominium tower now dominates that block). I'm not saying that it was better to have had the bars and peep shows than to have cleaned up the former combat zone, but we tore down something authentic and replaced it with mediocrity so as not to draw attention away from what we think Boston should be. We haven’t always been recalcitrant toward progress. Our ancestors were very modern people. They built Boston in the latest fashions and after the great fire of 1872 they continued to rebuild Boston in the new styles. Recently I have been reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Reading it has helped me to understand exactly how flawed the thinking of our mayors and city planners was from the times of Urban Renewal. What bothers me, and particularly with regards to Boston, is that we are largely still making banal choices with how we are expressing ourselves as Bostonians. Like I have said earlier, we have not always been how we think of ourselves today. Preserving the 19th century all together seems to say that we as contemporary people have nothing to say about our current time, save that maybe we all believe that there has been nothing worth fully expressing since Victorian times. Seeing the W there with all of its glass veneer made me feel proud of my city. My hope is that Bostonians are beginning to appreciate authentic modern concepts again. I hope we can continue to do so. It makes the fabric of our city beautiful and interesting and I believe that our 19th century ancestors would be just as excited to see what I was seeing as they too were being very modern in their own time.

-R