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Old Boston, new Boston: a work in progress
The tale of South Boston
South Boston - Irish, proud, and insular - has proved more stubborn. Like the area around the Big Dig, "Southie" has seen massive redevelopment and construction, and the first signs of gentrification. Residents complain of a half-dozen new coffee and pizza shops, banks, and dollar stores popping up where they live.
To Dave Errico and Jessica Chandler, standing outside the P.S. Deli on Broadway Street on a recent Sunday, it's nothing less than a disgrace. "They're making condos out of churches," says Ms. Chandler. "It used to be a family neighborhood, but it's lost it."
Yet a fresh start for this historic enclave appeals to those whose emotions are still raw after decades of attempted racial integration. Even after forced school busing began more than 30 years ago, residents deeply resent "Southie's" reputation as a redoubt of white, Irish prejudice, an image born in part of years of intimidation of the black students who attended school here.
"These communities are doing everything they can to help alleviate that stereotype," says Richard Finnegan, a political science protfessor at Stonyhill College in Easton, Mass.
New spotlight on the Catholic Church
Yet Boston is also a city that prides itself on being socially progressive, always infused with a sense of anguished intellectualism. There are 3,000 nonprofit groups and more cultural organizations per capita than both Chicago and New York. But still, after 30 years, experts say the schools remain segregated, and relations between whites and blacks are strained at best.
In recent years, though, the problem of race has not dominated media coverage. Instead, the most recent spotlight has fallen on another fundamental Boston presence: the Catholic Church.
The clergy sexual-abuse scandal and the archdiocese's decision to shutter nearly one quarter of its parishes here have marked a low point in the history of Irish Catholicism in Boston, and perhaps in America.
But like so many other American institutions, the Church is receiving new life from immigrants. Even as French Canadian, German, Irish, and Italian Catholics move to the suburbs, a surge of Latinos is renewing the Church's mission, and parishes have grown far more flexible than in years past.
"A century ago, when immigrants like Italians came, the Church would say: 'They should learn to speak English and follow established customs,' " says Boston College history professor James O'Toole. "Now, priests are taking language classes to minister to their new members. It's quite a shift."
An Irish ascent
Boston's Irish, meanwhile, have achieved a new standard of success after dominating city politics for more than a century. Guys named Finneran and Flaherty still occupy the city's political thrones. Catholics make up more than half of the state legislature.
But it's the Irish population's newly won financial power and its historic symbolism that seems to put a smile on the face of so many. Several prominent Irish Catholics, many of them graduates of the Jesuit school Boston College (BC), now lead a stable of major Boston companies. Among them: the financial services firm Fidelity, the advertising firm Hill Holiday, and until a few months ago, Fleet Bank.
BC grads recently took pride in occupying their new alumni club in Fleet's neck-craning downtown headquarters. For an ethnic group long excluded from the waspy business culture here, the club is a potent symbol of Irish achievement. And according to one alumnus, there's a special pleasure in looking down at the Harvard alumni club across the street.
The Red Sox as a unifying force
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.
'All politics is local'
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.
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