Boston, a Bridge-Tunnel, Ballin', and a Bonus
This is the problem with waiting a month to post about two trips — by the time you’re actually writing, you feel like you should have something profound to say, and I really don’t. Ah well.
As for Boston:
- As I did in Paris last spring, we stayed with a friend of mine living in the suburbs (in this case, Brookline) and caught rail service into town. It’s a neat way to see a different part of the city than you’d get sticking to the usual tourist track… including oddities such as a kosher Chinese restaurant (no joke).
- Boston is one part of the country that has resisted the normalizing effect of national media on its distinctive local accent — which made it disappointing to jump on a Green Line train and find that the station announcements had been recorded and automated by someone with a neutral mid-American accent. No more “Ahhh-lington” and “Paaahhk” stops anymore — they found someone who has Rs and isn’t afraid to use them.
- One thing the city does really well is to blend franchised or chain businesses into the local architecture. You’ll find a Starbucks every three blocks and a Dunkin Donuts every two, but odds are you’ll have to look inside the window to catch the brand name, because the facade looks the same as that of the law firm on one side and the condo on the other.
- But one thing they don’t do well is the massive public works/civil engineering project. The Big Dig, a project to replace I-93’s above-ground section through downtown Boston with a tunnel, has been going on for nearly twenty years, with grotesque cost overruns, major contractor screwups, political chicanery by the environmental lobby, and just about every brand of fun you could think of. They claim it’s almost over, with merely surface street reconstruction to be completed by mid-2005, but don’t bet on it.