Boston: Unchanging Evil Spinster

Boston, contrary to what you have probably been told, is no dessicated spinster. Although it still obeys the Blue Laws to the extent that it goes to bed at midnight on Saturdays and will permit no theatricals, gaming or drunken roistering on Sundays, it still allows (as anyone who enjoys walking Washington Street after 10 p.m. will know) a surreptitious kind of evil.

Nor is there anything new about this. Boston, despite the fact that it used to be a hilly peninsula almost completely surrounded by water, has survived countless faceliftings without changing much. As Cotton Mather wrote: "This town of Boston is become almost a Hell upon Earth, a City full of Lies and Murders and Blasphemies; a dismal picture and Emblem of Hell. Satan seems to take a strange possession of it."

Its best-known flophouse, the Crawford, has burned down, and the Old Howard is dead, which leaves nothing but two unappealing (and expensive) "nightclubs", sundry pinball arcades, and an all night movie house called the Rialto.

Nonetheless, Boston is not all evil, being, at the least, free from the "three great annoyances of Woolves, Rattle-snakes and Musketoes." William Wood divulged this attraction in 1634 as a bait for future settlers. They came: they pushed their cows about to create Boston's streets, and later died, filling an astoundingly large number of graveyards.

Walk All Over

That is not all they did, as a walk from Copley Square to the docks will show you. The Museum of Natural History has become Bonwit Teller, and the S.S. Pierce Building at Copley is now a parking lot, but Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market, and the granite warehouses of North and South Market streets survive among less austere surroundings.

The North End, which in 1630 was half island because of the waves that used to lap between Copp's Hill and the

Trimountain, has once again been isolated by overhead highways bisecting Hanover Street and leading to the Mystic River Bridge. Now the Health Board has drawn a sinister blue line to separate it from the rest of Boston. Beyond the line, the North End contains an Italian village which is in many places very pretty. You can't drive there conveniently--the myriad one way streets are difficult to navigate--but it is the place to go to look for monuments.

All that remains of the Trimountain is Beacon Hill, which is now a curious mixture of artists' colonies and famous houses with distinguished residents. Another peak of the Trimountain, Mount Vernon, disappeared; it used to be just above Louisburg Square (where the carollers go on Christmas Eve) and, according to Walter Muir Whitehill, appeared on most maps "quite unequivocally. . . as Mount Whoredom." To compensate for its disappearance, Scollay Square, also just beyond aristocratic Louisburg, has acquired a new sort of outdoor night life.

Cranes, Politics

The Back Bay is as sedate as ever, although most of it belongs to dentists. Whitehill remembers that "the railway tracks at Back Bay Station formed a sharp line of demarcation between two worlds. Elsewhere buildings on the 'wrong side of the tracks' were usually of wood and in a tumble-down condition, but. . . the blocks around the Latin School were of red brick or brown stone, symmetrically and even handsomely designed. There was no doubt, even to a schoolboy, that the South End was the wrong side. . ."

Now Prudential has the old Boston and Albany train yards, and the completion of its project will make it hard to say who has the right side. Hopefully, the project will redeem much of the confusion around Huntington Avenue at the same time. The long stretch between Huntington and the Fenway houses as dreary a set of structures as you are likely to see outside East Berlin.

There is always the chance, of course, that you won't see it at all. An astoundingly large number of undergraduates have lived near Boston for the best part of four years without seeing much more of it than Logan Airport and the signs along Storrow Drive. It is hard to believe that they search for truth in Cambridge, for what is not residential in Cambridge is most unattractively industrial.

The Right Side

There are plenty of harmless--not to say innocuous--but still pleasant aspects to the evil old lady. A ride on the MTA will take you to most of them at 20 cents a shot; cars are not cows and therefore virtually useless; Boston was not made for them.

If you like to see cranes knocking down buildings, you can do so almost anywhere across the river. (Admittedly, you can see the same thing at the site of the new Harvard Health Center, but unless you are sentimental about what Cronin's used to be, you are unlikely to find it so interesting.)

Aside from the Pops, the Red Sox, and the frigate Constitution, Boston has brought forth many little rooms where you can buy very expensive coffees to the music of Hindemith and Mozart, a god-domed State Capital, Public Gardens (watery home of the famed Swanboats), and as intricate a political machine as you will ever find.

Cambridge, by contrast, is cleaner, quieter, and usually a more pleasant place to live. But in spite of all the little diversions of the summer, it can get pretty dull. Even if it only to see a movie or to ramble around Scollay, you should travel those eight minutes to Park Street and take a look at Hell.The lovely banks of the Charles.