Post by telegonus on Jul 5, 2018 18:44:00 GMT
Penn station? 
Shows you the size of the rock I've been living under all these years. How f could they let that happen? In Boston we lost an entire neighborhood! It was famous only locally, but everyone knew it: the West End. It was more or less between what was then Scollay Square (also gone, and actually more famous) and Mass. General Hospital. North Station was a part of the West End.
It was very low income but not a bad place to live, always had strong ethnic vibes, it was more or less the Lower East Side of Boston, dominated by Irish immigrants early on, then Jewish ones, for a very long time, it had become predominantly Italian by mid-20th century. There was also a large Polish and East European contingent. I had a friend, whose parents came from Poland, who was my age, who spent his early years there.
My mother loved the West End for its antique shops (actually more like junk stores, a lot of them sold valuable items that it took a sharp eye to notice, including rare books). There's a great book about it called The Urban Villagers, whose author, Herbert Gans, deconstructed. accurately and correctly, every myth, canard,--call them what you will--that led to that neighborhood's demolition.
I love old cities and hate to see those wonderful, funky places, not necessarily, from an historian's perspective, of great value, as in no Revolutionary war battles were fought there, George Washington never slept there (etc.), destroyed, and yet so many of them are as integral to the city's character as any more famous place that tourists flock to. Oh well. Had to share...
Shows you the size of the rock I've been living under all these years. How f could they let that happen? In Boston we lost an entire neighborhood! It was famous only locally, but everyone knew it: the West End. It was more or less between what was then Scollay Square (also gone, and actually more famous) and Mass. General Hospital. North Station was a part of the West End. It was very low income but not a bad place to live, always had strong ethnic vibes, it was more or less the Lower East Side of Boston, dominated by Irish immigrants early on, then Jewish ones, for a very long time, it had become predominantly Italian by mid-20th century. There was also a large Polish and East European contingent. I had a friend, whose parents came from Poland, who was my age, who spent his early years there.
My mother loved the West End for its antique shops (actually more like junk stores, a lot of them sold valuable items that it took a sharp eye to notice, including rare books). There's a great book about it called The Urban Villagers, whose author, Herbert Gans, deconstructed. accurately and correctly, every myth, canard,--call them what you will--that led to that neighborhood's demolition.
I love old cities and hate to see those wonderful, funky places, not necessarily, from an historian's perspective, of great value, as in no Revolutionary war battles were fought there, George Washington never slept there (etc.), destroyed, and yet so many of them are as integral to the city's character as any more famous place that tourists flock to. Oh well. Had to share...