Why is it that even Hollywood’s best actors cannot get the Boston accent straight? Mimicry, after all, is their job, yet the slaughter goes on. What is so tricky anyway about saying “hahd knwocks”? – it’s just a drawl here and a diphthong there.
One supposes that Boston appears so often in the movies because of its unique character – it’s a true location scout’s dream. Yet cinematic Boston, like the on-screen Boston accent, is quite unrecognisable to Bostonians.
I spent one febrile year on Huntington Avenue as a collegestudent, living in a former flute repair shop near Jordan Hall, a concert venue. I would rise very early and drink coffee in the cafe downstairs, eager to get started on my work (translation) and trading chatter with a group of girls who were just finishing theirs (prostitution). In the late afternoons, walking everywhere, I got a sense of the city’s contradictions, notably that it lacked distinguished architecture yet on many days looked dreamily poetic, especially when lit up by “sunsets more gorgeous”, as the poet George Santayana put it, “than . . . anywhere else in the world”.
Dowdy, high-minded, puritanical – those are the adjectives often used to describe Boston. The bluestocking city has nurtured too many fireside poets and society painters, and her culture has seldom descended beneath a distinctly upturned nose, eschewing the physical, tending towards the intellectual, the moral, the elevating. For proper Bostonians, ideal beauty lay in the past and craved to be regenerated, usually from Georgian or Italian Renaissance models, the most signal success story being “Mrs Gardner’s Palace” on the Fenway, now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a version of a Florentine palazzo holding the lady’s splendid collection of paintings.
Boston’s important modern buildings can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The City Hall, which by 1968 had replaced historic Scollay Square, looked first-rate in architects’ models but feels drab and over-scaled when encountered in the flesh. There is I.M. Pei’s 60-storey Hancock Tower, of 1975, much maligned at the time because of a glazing problem – its windowpanes tended to fall out – but beguiling in colour and form (if something so protean can be said to have a form, since it seems to change shape depending on your position). Philip Johnson’s 1973 Boston Public Library extension, with its vast, skylighted, granite-clad atrium, is surely worth a peep for any visitor. And there is the just-opened Institute of Contemporary Art, on the Harborwalk, a remarkable creation of Diller Scofidio & Renfro, with walls that appear transparent from some angles and opaque from others. But that is nearly all of modernist Boston.
However, Boston is rich in old, rather uniform neighbourhoods packed with pretty terraced houses of red brick set off by slate or limestone trim and guarded by iron railings. The roughest of these districts painfully emphasise the city’s contradictions: while its patrician class was linked with important English families, the hard-working Irish element often loathed Britain with a passion exceeding any felt in Ireland itself. And though Boston has plumed itself on its abolitionist heritage, it has sometimes seethed with racial tension.
Resentment came to a boil in the school-busing crisis of the 1970s, during Mayor Kevin White’s tenure. “When he took office,” a former White aide recently recalled, “most of the black people in this city thought the white people were being better treated by the government. But by the end of the first year, he got equality – he had equal unhappiness. And that was a starting point.”
Two cheers, then, for equal unhappiness. The city of gentility can also be a city of angry crowds. But not only over school buses. Also over snow. Only recently has the jolly custom of moving one’s furniture outdoors to stake out a desirable parking space on a snow day been banned, to vociferous public ire, by City Hall. One misses those vainglorious displays of armchairs and patio tables. For Boston has vital – at times too vital – neighbourhoods, which I suspect is what fascinates Hollywood. Beacon Hill still marinates in moneyed charm, Back Bay makes for lovely, quiet walks and the North End is a dead ringer for an Italian village, not excluding the requisite mammas lined up on chairs along the pavement in the hot months, fanning themselves. Many another neighbourhoods also handsomely reward the curious stroller.
One such is Charlestown, a very old district lying to the north, across Boston Inner Harbor. Originally a stronghold of the “blue-nosed” Yankees, Charlestown’s two tall hills, Bunker and Breed’s, were conquered in the 19th century by the “lace-curtain Irish”, whose less fortunate Celtic brethren claimed the turf along the water. By now many ethnicities inhabit Charlestown, which, with its mix of Victorian, Federal-style and some ancient post-and-beam houses, has acquired an unmistakable elegance. The heights also offer good views of the city and it is hard today, as you contemplate the many fine residences surrounding Monument Square – all those mansard roofs and bow windows and eyebrow arches – to remember that much of Common Ground, an account of the racial turmoil of the 1970s by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author J. Anthony Lukas , took place right around here.
One of Boston’s most beautiful and harmonious neighbourhoods is the South End, a formerly seedy zone restored rather than destroyed (as was usually the case) by the urban renewal movement of the 1960s. It is here, in shaded streets lined by pleasant, bowfront row houses built for the Victorian bourgeoisie, that Boston puts one most in mind of certain parts of London. The delightful precincts of Union Park and Rutland Square seem to have remained as they always were, though in fact this area was upgraded only by means of protracted community effort.
If Chicago, which invented the skyscraper, is America’s most intentionally beautiful city, Boston may be her most accidentally beautiful, an accretion of villages looking good by dumb luck. Though surely a little more than luck was enlisted by the many generations of migrants who created such a varied and enchanting – and at times paradoxical – cityscape.
Dan Hofstadter is the author of ‘Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples’
