Twenty, thirty years later, a generation later, there has been a radical transformation of the city. We have a big elevated steel highway coursing through the downtown, chopping off the waterfront from the rest of the city. We have a bunch of high-rise luxury apartment buildings, built from some suburban diagram, where we once had a wonderful old neighborhood that was demolished. We have an expensive windswept government center. But we retain a very compact and dense downtown.

We made a lot of mistakes in the 50’s and 60’s. We learned in the 70’s and the 80’s about how to fix those mistakes and how to go about making Boston look like Boston rather than other cities around America. We’ve been through the time when the mega-city looked the same everywhere. Now we are on to something better.

There’s a long history to this. In the first era after World War II, everybody fled Boston for the suburbs, the way they did in every other American city. They left the merchants and the shopkeepers and the restaurateurs, stores, and movie theater operators wondering what to do. The population had declined and cities were much weaker. In response, the federal government stepped up to the table with a very large pile of money and a very big vision. Unfortunately, when you put the two of these things together you have a sure recipe for cataclysmic failure. At least that’s been our experience in Boston, and I think it has been the experience throughout America.

They designed a six-lane elevated steel highway to cut right through the heart of the downtown and made it easy for the suburbanites to come in and shop. They put seven above-ground parking garages at the end of seven exits, very close together, so that it could be convenient for them to park and to shop, and entertain themselves and enjoy the city. Also, as the city began to grow, that highway became an important access route for people who were living in the suburbs and working downtown to come in, very conveniently, and go to work and leave. But the damage done to the downtown — that is, a sort of evisceration of the downtown — was cataclysmic. Well intentioned, but cataclysmic.

Shortly, thereafter — the artery was built in ‘55 — and sometime around 1960, the city planners drew up a scheme where they decided that Boston was too dense and the neighborhoods were too congested. The planners were undoubtedly white middle class suburban males who walked around the dense Boston neighborhoods and saw laundry hanging out the window, and laundry hanging out the window, of course, is an immediate symbol of a slum, so they identified ten downtown neighborhoods for demolition.

The people who lived in those neighborhoods were typically Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants or Jewish refugees from the war. Very few of them spoke English. Obviously, very few had political connections. So, the vast clearance of the Boston neighborhoods was underway. Mercifully, only one of these neighborhoods was demolished, the West End, a wonderful dense enclave of Italians, Americans and, as I mentioned, Jewish refugees.

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