Northeastern University - Cauldron Yearbook (Boston, MA)

Page 27 text:

owner, chairman of the Fenway Project Area Committee (FenPAC), says he wouldn ' t live anywhere else. I think many of us in this area think the city ' s making a comeback, says E. Vaughn Gulo, who grew up on Sym- phony Road and has lived on St. Ste- phen Street the past 12 years. I ' m really more upbeat about what ' s going to happen in Boston than I ' ve ever been in the past. We see improvements, we ' ve been involved in improvements and we ' re planning improvements, continues Gulo, a professor of psychology in edu- cation at Northeastern. There ' s a very definite upbeat. I think it ' s much more exciting now than before. Yet, for all Gulo ' s optimism, there ' s

Page 26 text:

arrived at Northeastern. Many stu- dents were seeing the city for the first time and had no idea of what to expect. And it was a frightening, depressing time. One month earlier, Richard M. Nixon had ended six years of shame by resigning his presidency to the first unelected chief executive in history, Gerald R. Ford. The Vietnam debacle was still front- page news every day. American troops were gone, but the carnage they had helped create would not come to its chaotic conclusion for another eight months. And there was busing. Day after day, public school students — the ones that bothered to go to class, anyway — pulled knives on classmates because they were of a different color. Grown men hurled bricks at buses filled with little children. Politicians such as John Kerrigan, Louise Day Hicks and Elvira Pixie Palladino railed against inte- gration and promised to run Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, the man who ordered integration, out of town. One Friday night in October, a motorcade of South Boston mothers drove up Huntington Avenue, honking their horns and hollering racial epithets. That ' s as close as racial violence ever came to Northeastern. As far as most students were concerned, that was close enough. Many today would argue that the cynicism and bitterness of five years ago is still here. But there is little doubt that much of the fear is gone. To most people, that is reason enough to rejoice. It ' s a cold, rainy Saturday morning, but inside it is warm. Opera music plays in the background of the elegant St. Stephen Street townhouse, while a grand piano commands the living room. It ' s not the sort of place you ' d expect to find in the inner city, but the

Page 28 text:

WWy . l- L.-lUUMAm a sense that, if certain things don ' t hap- pen, Boston isn ' t going to be able to make it financially. Could Boston go the way of New York and Cleveland? White believes it could unless the city can change the way in which it collects its revenue. Boston, like many older cities, depends exclusively on property taxes for revenue. Despite the current influx of younger people who are buying property in Boston to take advantage of depressed land values, White believes that will be only a minor tem- porary high in raising property tax revenue. White ' s assessment is correct, according to the Office of Economic Research of the Massachusetts Depart- ment of Commerce and Development. Its statistics show that Boston ' s popula- tion grew from 616,000 in 1965 to 638,000 in 1975. However, the same statistics show that the population is expected to drop to 620,000 by 1980, 616,000 by 1990 and 608,000 by 2000. A city that depends as heavily on property taxes as Boston cannot afford to see its tax base dwindling. If you depend on property value, you ' re in trouble, said White, claiming that Boston ' s tax base is lower today