Northeastern University - Cauldron Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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A city of diverse interests The Museum of Fine Arts, lunch along Newbury Street, Beacon Hill or an evening at the Colonial The- ater mav be all that ' s right with Boston to some people who live there, those who call themselves Bostonians. But the real residents of the city do not live in the Harbor Towers. Tremont On the Common, the Hill, or in the student ghettoes around the universities. They do not answer Boston when an out-of-towner asks them where they live, even if it may be the inner city. There is still a lot of Boston beyond the Back Bay. Boston is the kind of city where a lot of students come to school for four or five or six years and then decide to stay. Boston as an international idea is not the real Boston; the Harvard accent is as foreign to most life long residents as the mumbling of the ' Ricans who are now taking the black ' s place in the city ' s slum areas. Boston as the center of Ameri- can liberalism is more an ideal, more imagination than fact. The city is a place where kids can grow up all right, where maybe one or two on the block will go to college and get a degree without actually becoming a priest or nun. It ' s a place where you might go to a museum (usually the Museum of Science) once or twice when you ' re a kid (and without your whole class); or go to Franklin Park (but only in the daytime on the weekend if you ' re white because that ' s when the most MDC cops are there and the park is, after all, in the middle of Rosbury); or go to the movies, or go in town and spend a Saturday wandering around the stores. It ' s a place where a guy has to get a car, a high school diploma, and married (if it ' s only two out of three, it ' s usually the middle on that ' s forfeited). For girls it ' s easier. School ' s easier because they ' re smarter than boys, their educations are sensible rather than vocational and all they have to do is get mar- ried. The rest, supposedly, comes easy. It ' s a place where the kid who lived downstairs may be in jail now, or unemployed, or was killed ' Nam or on a motorcycle, or have three kids of his own while you ' re not thinking seriously about anything, or be divorced or be a car sales- man. College is a luxury, a painful lux- ury. It removes you from the people you grew up with, the neighbor- hood, best friends. And so, Boston is like anywhere else, like any other city. But, it is still different in some way. What makes people leave oth- er parts of the country, other cities smaller and larger than Boston and stay here? Probably identity, an identity that cannot be found by natives who stay here to further their education. The university centers of the city are in many ways like small college towns themselves. Unlike the for- tress-like structures of a Columbia University or, more locally, a UMass-Boston, the BU, BCs (even Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops established a worldwide reputation tor himself and the Pops. Fiedler helped make Boston into the undisputed center of music in the country in the last 40 years.

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The bridge over the duck pond in the Public Garden is a miniature replica of the Brooklyn Bridge. NUs), or across the river, the Har- vards or MITs are centers in them- selves. The schools were not planned with the cold precision of a German blitzkrieg, but rather grew and ex- panded, taking large chunks of the community and chewing them up and digesting and excreting them, changed from their former selves, now new and foreign entities de- void of the old communities, now only blocks to be filled in as pleased. The students do not destroy the neightborhood, it is the people there, the ones who move out be- cause one of them moved in, or the small-time landlord who begins to buy and blockbust and hopes to cash in on the student ' s parents ' s rent-in-aid. The Savin Hill area of Dorchester and along the beach into Southie is littered with many such operators who saw a goldmine in UMass and ended up with just the shaft. But some areas, like Alls- ton Brighton or parts of the Back Bay did become student slums. It is in these areas out-of-towners come and live and mature among their own kind, sharing interests and ideals. These communities be- come a comfortable alternative to living in a small town or another part of the city. Students remain in these areas of Boston for the same reason gener- ation after generation of families remain in South or East Boston — they are with their own people, in this case, the academic (or at least educated) community — they are not faced with uncomfortable chal- The Public Garden as seen from the Boston Common in late fall.