Culturally it's a candy-store – theatre, film, bookshops, libraries (including the great 19th-century private library, the Athenaeum, now happily forced to admit hoi polloi...). It's a mix of intelligentsia, attracted by the universities (not just Harvard and MIT but BU, BC and several others) and a large ethnic working class (Irish, Italian, Portuguese, Latino in many varieties, etc.), each with their predictable problems.
Two films that give a good picture of non-academic Boston – specifically the Dorchester section, which is roughly to downtown Boston what Brooklyn was to Manhattan a generation ago and on a smaller scale -- are Clint Eastwood's “Mystic River” (the first house I owned is visible in one shot) and Ben Affleck's “Gone Baby Gone” (for which my nephew wrote the screenplay).
From my present perspective Boston seems crowded and dirty (but not to NY levels) with expensive housing. Winters are cold and wet (black show can stay on the streets for weeks); summers are short and hot, and there is no spring, only mud season. But autumn is lovely (befitting the academic new year): I've thought that I'd really like to spend spring in Virginia (where I grew up) and fall in New England...
The class struggle is in the streets, but it's conducted in automobiles. Boston driving is difficult (the cow-path street scheme, and no street signs) and combative: they really are out to get you, and you have to drive accordingly, but that attitude is actually less dangerous than the massive inattention of Midwest drivers, used to checkerboard grids and 4-way stops.
Returning to Boston after a year or so away, I've considered living in the city without a car, New York style. It's doable – public transportation is generally good, tho' depressingly redolent of urine and failure – but strangely, for all the tightness of neighborhoods, Boston isn't really yet a thousand villages, like New York.
Those are some of my prejudices. I have plenty of others, dated as they are, and am happy to share them. Friends and family still live there, and I get back regularly, but since there over time I was both
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies...
-- there's no way I can be objective. Regards, CGE
shag wrote:
> considering a job there. pros? cons?
>
> i'm getting lots of inquiries from the bay area, l.a. area, and silly
> valley. alas, the ball 'n' chain doesn't want to live in the people's
> republic. :)
>
>
> shag
>
> http://cleandraws.com
> Wear Clean Draws
> ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)
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