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Vanishing Boston

MIKE MILIARD, ADAM REILLY, AND CHRIS FARAONE — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:11:43 GMT

A field guide to Boston's 'lasting' treasures — to be enjoyed before they're razed in favor of chain stores
The Boston we live in today will be gone someday, but there's still time to get to know it in all its uniqueness.

Cities change — it's always the way. Buildings rise and fall. Establishments open and close. Neighborhoods thrive, go to seed, and are transformed once more by influxes of new money. Ensconced ethnic groups lose their long-time hold on city blocks and are supplanted by new arrivals.

Weeks ago, when we first drew up our list of endangered vestiges of things that distinguish Boston from all other cities, Somerville's Abbey Lounge took pride of place near the top. Our premise — that even unique, beloved, iconic institutions are, unfortunately, vulnerable to the inexorable creep of gentrification and soul-killing urban sameness that infects 21st-century America — proved all too true. A few days later, as if on cue, that beloved 75-year-old dive, where old men drank cheap beer by day and garage rock shook the floorboards by night, announced it was closing for good on November 28. Scuttlebutt on the Web is that it may be replaced by "either an Irish pub or a fancy restaurant." Because certainly, if there's one thing this city needs, it's another of either of those.

Another bulletin from the changing cityscape arrived just this past week, when the Boston Globe reported, to much consternation, the imminent closure of Out of Town News, the venerable kiosk that's long epitomized Cambridge cosmopolitanism.

For more Vanishing Boston photos view our slideshow.

Fifty years ago, the wrecking balls of urban renewal leveled the poor but neighborly West End. Scollay Square — a grown-up's pleasure palace of tattoo parlors, penny vaudeville, and prostitutes — was steamrolled by the concrete brutalism of City Hall Plaza.

Of course, some change is good: consider the Institute of Contemporary Art's striking new waterfront digs. But the implications of urban change are different from what they used to be. In years past, there was at least a chance that unique new establishments might replace unique old ones. Today, flux tends to homogenize: hence, the Kenmore Square of the Rat and Mr. Butch (RIP) and Super Socks having given way, in less than a decade, to the Kenmore Square of Bertucci's and Kinko's and Qdoba. This dynamic is pernicious enough if you live in Houston or Phoenix. But it's especially galling here in Boston, where the streets carry the accumulated history of (almost) four centuries.

Once you've recognized this reality, there are basically two ways to go. You can accept it passively, dispassionately, maturely, and get on with your business. Or, you can recognize the slow death of urban uniqueness as the tragedy that it is — and then commit yourself to savoring every last exception to this rule while they still exist.

A couple years back, this paper interviewed Allston antiques dealer Don McBride as he packed up for good. Eventually, talk turned to his nights, back in the '50s, playing drums in the jazz haunts of the old Combat Zone.

As McBride reminisced, he seemed to step back in time, walking vanished sidewalks of the mind: "The clubs that they had back then! On Essex Street, they had Izzy Orts, the Golden Nugget, then you'd go down further, there was the Essex Deli, take a left, there was the Palace, which was the Silver Dollar Bar . . . "

The Boston we live in today will be gone someday, too. But there's still time to get to know it in all its uniqueness. (Maybe a bit more time than expected, actually, thanks to Wall Street's meltdown and the attendant drying-up of development capital.) So, before things change for good, here are a dozen and one spots to treasure.

Hooray for space!

BRIAN MCFADDEN — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:49:48 GMT

Big Fat Whale

Medicine men

JAMES PARKER — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:08:36 GMT

Two Boston poets use their art for the good of the tribe
What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness?

What if a poem were a social force? Forget for a moment everything you know about poetry: forget the marooned beatnik at the open mic, and the tiny thoughts tattooed on white space in the New Yorker, and the voice reading something nice about apples on NPR. What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness — to leap between people in a kind of curative, relational flash? Imagine. Your average Red Line car at 4 pm is a laboratory of human estrangement: what if poetry could do something about that?

Boston poets Rafael Campo and Franz Wright are divergent, even contrasting, poetic animals. One is a doctor; the other has been, for significant stretches of his life, a patient. One writes metrically, with an appetite for form; the other brings up chunks of almost-unphraseable psychic experience. One is a lapsed Catholic; the other is a Catholic convert.

But both of them, through their work and their relation to the world, have laid bare a live wire between poetry and isolation — physical isolation, social isolation, spiritual isolation. Campo practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, specializing in HIV-related conditions. As a gay man, he has trodden the stations of suffering from fearfulness to compassion, right through "the body's caves and slums."

"The AIDS ward where I worked was like a shipwreck," runs his poem "Night Has Fallen," "on some lost, quarantined island . . ."

Wright, a veteran of mental illness, delivered himself in part by mounting his own low-key ministry among the saddened and the lost. Who are, lest we forget, everywhere: "Someone in Hell is sitting beside you on the train./Somebody burning unnoticed walks past in the street" ("The Choice").

Tonally distinct, their poems are united in a common attempt to abolish separateness, to identify wholly and indivisibly with the other — be that other Jesus Christ, a homeless man with AIDS, or both. Campo, the physician, does it with expertise and quiet self-revelation; Wright, the patient, does it via a sort of reckless, illuminated hazarding of the ego. The un-heroic designation "local poet" is appropriate to neither of them — in our city, these two are a couple of medicine men.

The patient
Franz Wright buzzes me out to the Lincoln woods in his jaunty black Honda Civic Si, the car he bought with the Pulitzer money he won in 2004 for his collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard. "I don't do interviews anymore," he says. "Things always get distorted. But I like the Phoenix. I've always liked the Phoenix."

Scott Weiland | “Happy” in Galoshes

MIKAEL WOOD — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:38:54 GMT

Softdrive/New West (2008)
It might be one of the year’s worst albums, an underwritten, overarranged mess of factory-floor guitar fuzz, go-nowhere vocal melodies, limp electronic beats, and lyrical clunkers

Slideshow: Vanishing Boston

PHOENIX STAFF — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:06:49 GMT

Classic locations threatened
More photos of Vanishing Boston sites

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