Back Bay: By the Mall, Just trying to connect.When Jane Holtz Kay was growing up in Brookline, the Back Bay was where you went to the dentists. It was the '50s, and the Back Bay's veneer of elegance had peeled a bit. "It was filled with rooming houses and dentists' offices," recalls Kay, architecture critic for The Nation and author of "Lost Boston" and "Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back." By the time I moved here, in 1990, the back Bay was back, beautiful and polished, she observes. Now, though, it seems not quite itself. Over the past decade I've seen it morph into "Back Bay-land," a theme park version of a quaint urban area along Newbury street with a salon for every finger and toenail. Kay remembers when the Pops played classical and semi-classical music on the Esplanade, and three bookstores thrived within a two-block stretch. Now, Newbury Street grows fat on stores owned from afar and staffed by people who don't know your name . Well, to be accurate, neither do the neighbors. In the book "Toward the Livable City," Kay contributed a chapter about what makes cities, as she puts it, "lived-in" The lived-in city, as she says, is a place of "impersonal connectionsŠCity life is the sharing of space with absent-minded courtesy." Unless you're walking a dog, the neighborhood culture calls for no fraternization. "The Back Bay lacks neighborhood connection," Kay agrees, "whether nodding or chatting acquaintances. Perhaps every one is in their cars in the back alley, versus, say, the South End where they meet around their street by street park-lets to prune and plant." Well, we do have the Commonwealth Mall, the best front yard in the city, Kay suggest. But maybe the things that are imposed on our neighborhood make us feel less connect to each other and the place itself: the groundwater to keep our buildings upright on wooden piling is blithely pumped away in construction projects, the (non-longer-local) corporations flexing their entitlement in road races that immobilize the neighborhood, Christmas lights (pardon, "holiday lights") on the Mall desecrating the stately trees from Halloween until St. Patrick's Day. Kay notes the French Library as an example of a local institution that once contributed to a feeling of community "but now is less intellectual in its offerings and less open to the neighborhood." Kay continues: "I miss delivery services, takeout, and other ancillary help to the carfree. Overall I always say that the Back Bay (and maybe Boston as a whole) is like a baby: if it weren't so beautiful you'd want to strangle it." For all its maddening short-comings, Kay still clearly loves living in the Back Bay. Sometimes, walking home at sunset in the glow of those brick buildings, she wonders at how lucky she is to be "one of its temporary custodians" for all its imperfections. "Is the city cacophonous? Irritating? Disrupted? Yes. Is the glass half-full? Half-empty? Yes, of course, both and at the same time," She put it in "Toward the Livable City." "Name it what you will, but add one thing: It is also this fragile planet's last, best hopeŠthe only alternative to settling on the ever-contracting fringes, consuming the last chance landscape, extinguishing resources and species. If we are ever to become ecofluent, as the green warriors put it, the strengthening of our lived-in cities is where it must take place." The above interview of Jane Holtz Kay appeared in the August 29, 2004 Boston Globe.
|