Old Boston, new Boston: a work in progress
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If Boston remains a somewhat divided city, the Red Sox have become a vital force in bringing people together, infusing the city with a passion that's almost unfathomable for other teams.
Bostonians obsess over the Sox for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that they play in America's oldest ballpark in baseball - a fitting icon for the oldest city in the country.
The team hasn't won a World Series since 1918, a legacy exacerbated by Gotham (and the Yankees) looming just four hours to the south.
"If Boston was the city of the 19th century, New York was the city of the 20th, and there are all sorts of economic and social rivalries mixed in," says Gleen Stout, author of "Red Sox Century."
The team's losing streak, say historians, has somehow become a means by which fans relive the Puritan tradition of always seeking salvation, while still finding familiarity and masochistic comfort in the status of the eternally doomed.
"It's most interesting when they lose," says Mr. Stout. "Since loss has been such a part of their experience, when a fan first experiences a loss that seems on par with losses of the past, that's sort of the membership card."
Even at the holy Fenway, Boston's contradictions are stark. A soda costs $4. Tickets are the priciest in baseball. Games have become an affair for suburban families and fat-cat professionals. The devotion of working-class fans made Red Sox nation what it is - but along with the rest of the city, that could easily change.
What seems eternal, however, is the city's political bent. Neighborhoods are split into hundreds of fiefdoms, allowing local powerbrokers to concentrate loyalty.
With all of these pols fighting for a slice of the political pie, and their deputies hungry for patronage and advancement, it's fertile ground for the rivalries and turf battles that endure.
That's the Tip O'Neil "all politics is local" kind of maneuvering that can hoist a man like Menino to a seat of enormous power.
And then there are the wonks and policymakers - the graduates of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who prefer reading a policy paper to pressing flesh. That's the Michael Dukakis "cleaning up government" sort of politics that gives Massachusetts its reputation as a bastion of liberalism.
The two sides of the party, one parochial, the other intellectual, are simply Boston's two-sided character reflected in the public square.
"We are a one-party, two-ideology city," says Michael Goldman, a Democratic political strategist.
Both philosophies have their own flaws. The Big Dig, which had equal amounts patronage and pie-in-the-sky planning, is example enough.
Still, almost like a Boston version of checks-and-balances, the city's political dynamic has pushed it forward to a position of enviable prominence.
The Big Dig and new Greenway clearly mark another opportunity for advancement. Industrial Boston is coming down, and the New Boston is going up.
That will at least mean that residents can walk to the harbor without having to navigate around a fleet of traffic. They'll also see their city as it was, at leat to a degree, almost 400 years ago.
Boston will reconnect with its past. What it does with its future is an answer yet unbuilt.
