Searching for Boston's normal side

And so after nearly one week in Boson I at last located one of the city's ghettos. (For some reason they are not advertised in tourist brochures.) This is Dudley in Roxbury, which I believe to be near the area that Malcolm X lived in as a teenager. I stumbled into it trying to find Malcolm X Park. A white barmaid warned me to stay out of this neighborhood, prompting my decision to explore it immediately. I had an interesting time people-watching there. The locals were suspicious of a white dude with a camera strolling around, but I managed to get a few decent pictures.

The above photo is a vacant lot that several homeless had established camps in. They had garbage bags full of belongings and tarps layed over some sticks for tents. Teenagers across the street were yelling at me as I took that picture.





This is awesome mural on Malcolm X Boulevard in Dudley. It features notable local and national black leaders as well as local history.













This intersection is home to the Boston Urban League, an African-themed carryout, a police station, and a sub and bbq shop. The tall building in the background, center, is gutted and vacant.











Some shops in Dudley Square. The usual run of wig shops, check-cashing outfits, liquor stores, etc. A plywood fence in front of a huge gutted edifice across the street invokes the words of Malcolm, King, and Garvey and pleads with Bostonians to invest in neighborhoods.







As I walked around Dudley I thought of Malcolm's evocative description of Jim Crow-era Harlem. The sights and smells of an urban ghetto are so much the same today. We have changed, and yet we have not. In comparison with the ghetto in Cincinnati, I was struck by the density of people and buildings. There seemed to be a lot less, or at least more sporadic, blight. In the Rustbelt whole blocks lay wasted, but in Boston only a single building here or there is vacant and derelict. The other thing that was amazing was the compact size of everything in the city. Boston is a town where density means that driving is a farce and high-rises sprout unexpectedly out of three-story apartment building neighborhoods. I walked all over Dudley and found that a mere two blocks off of Dudley Square landed me in a totally different neighborhood, indeed one that looked to be middle-class. The urban geography of Boston was confusing to me. The whole city has uniquely retained the land-use density of the streetcar era and activities and demographic shifts that would occupy a large area in the Midwest are squeezed into the smallest areas there.

I looked out all week for the racial tension I was warned about. In the end I simply didn't know enough about the city to really talk about it. I did notice that the city has a strongly traditional identity as being Irish. I saw a Boston Red Sox commercial that prominently featured an entire family with bright red hair. I asked my Geocat companions what they thought about the local racial clime and Thomas mentioned that he hadn't seen much integregation, and that he noticed having been the only black person in many of the places we were.

Boston reminded me a lot of San Francisco: expensive, dense, good public transit/snarling traffic congestion, affordable housing crisis, trendy, overwhelmed with hipsters, very ethnically diverse, economically vibrant and expanding, largely gentrified, and on the coast. The difference was that Boston is on the Atlantic, has more history, and has a lot of traditionally working-class white ethnic groups (Irish, Italian, etc.) We stayed in Everett, which had a lot of Brazilians and Latinos. I actually needed my Spanish a few times to eat in Mexican restaurants, which I had not counted on when traveling to Massachusetts.

Boston is an interesting place to visit, but I don't know if I'd like to live there. Although they do have 83 (?) colleges.