I'm sure at some point during our UEP tenure we've all read at least an excerpt from Herbert Gans' Urban Villagers, so we share some understanding of the history of the West End.
A quick overview would read a little something like this...
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Thriving, ethnic community, occupying prime downtown real estate.
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Deemed blighted, skid row and targeted for 1960s-style urban renewal program.
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Redeveloped to house a hospital and high rise apartment complexes.
The project displaced thousands and quickly came to represent the ill-conceived vision of the city's (nascent) planning authority.
50 years later, most don't even know where the "West End" is or what it once was. Its history has been left to the review of policy and planning students.
Yet, as one article mentions, there are those who, in recent decades, have been fighting against further development in an effort to preserve the sense of community that persists.
And so it is through this lens that many view the recent renaming of a Green Line T stop as a small victory. The Museum of Science stop has been renamed Science Park/West End in homage to the historic area.
Certainly it is a nice gesture, albeit belated, but one wonders what such a nominal honor means to most of the people who will ride the train to and from the stop. The generations brought up since its demolition most likely have no memory of the West End as it once existed. And, given the construction that has taken place since, many passers-by would be hard pressed to visualize what the area looked like in the middle of the last century. Even redevelopment of the North End has reduced what used to be the most accurate point of reference to a generic yuppie playground.
Standing on the Blue Line platform at Government Center, one can see a faded remnant of the Scollay Square marker on the wall, but even I have a hard time conceiving where a train to Scollay Square might have taken me. While grabbing a morning coffee at the local Dunkin Donuts, or a post-work beer at the Red Hat, is one really able to picture the variety clubs and taverns that once dotted Bowdoin Street, home to barroom brawls and burlesque shows, staples of a once-notorious nightlife. It was Times Square before Times Square (and pre-Guiliani).
In the end, I appreciate the signage for the gesture that it is, but wonder what it is gesturing towards. A nameplate marking a lost past hardly does justice to the cost incurred by those who renewal displaced. For the rest of us, I wonder…is the sign indicative of where we are, or where we’re going?
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