The Boston Phoenix
April 27 - May 4, 2000

[Features]

Ghost town

Boston has too many memories, too few people

by Robert David Sullivan

Boston is a lot emptier than it used to be. That's hard to believe when the city has so many construction sites and so few vacant apartments, but the numbers don't lie. Fifty years ago, Boston was the 10th-largest city in America, with 801,444 residents. According to 1998 estimates, we're now hovering around 20th place, with 555,447 residents -- a drop of more than 30 percent.

There's more at stake here than bragging rights. A smaller city means a smaller base of support for public transportation, public arts programs, and recreational facilities. It means less clout in the state legislature (which funds things like the MBTA) and in the US Congress (which includes only one Boston resident, Joe Moakley -- and his district extends well into the suburbs). On a more intimate level, Boston's smaller population has spelled doom for many independently owned stores, bars, and diners that depend on high customer turnover.

The population drop in Boston has been so severe that it's probably impossible to reverse it totally by the next mid-century point. Even with the current economic boom, the most we can hope for is to hang on at 20th place and avoid the fate of places such as Buffalo and Pittsburgh -- once mighty, now completely off the national radar. Given this context, it's odd to see current Boston residents look around at the cranes and jackhammers and worry that we'll become "another New York." The real question is whether we can get back some of the vitality and diversity we once took for granted.




The signs of population decline were all over Boston when I was growing up, though I failed to realize it at the time. For example, in the late 1970s, I'd often escape the tedium of suburbia by going to the movies in Boston. There were plenty of theaters in the city at that time, most of them wedged into odd-shaped blocks and bearing fussy old names: the Paris, the Pi Alley, and the Saxon. I almost never had to wait in line for a ticket, and I could usually snag three seats in the middle of the theater for myself and my elbows. I couldn't understand why other kids put up with the mob scenes at shopping-mall cinemas, but I figured it wasn't in my best interest to let them in on my secret.

Within a decade, almost all of Boston's downtown movie theaters had closed, and I was genuinely puzzled. Didn't every major city have movie theaters where you could stretch out and try to catch popcorn in your mouth without bothering any other patrons?

A few years later, I was a student on a tight budget at Boston University. To get away from the crowded dining halls on campus, I'd have dinner in Kenmore Square -- at Charlie's Cafeteria, or at the cavernous Pizza Pad, where the booths were like picnic tables at a state park. But eventually the cheap eateries where nobody seemed to be in a hurry closed their doors -- at their own leisurely pace, of course -- and I wondered what corporate cartel was responsible for rubbing out one of the necessities of urban life.

And only a few months ago, I could spend an afternoon browsing at my favorite bookstore: Waterstone's, in the Back Bay. The great thing about Waterstone's was that I hardly ever encountered someone standing in the way of a book I wanted to grab. And on the rare occasions when I actually decided to buy something, I could choose from two or three cashiers waving to get my attention. Now Waterstone's is gone, and there are rumors that it will be replaced by something as utilitarian as an office-supplies store. How can we survive without a quiet oasis between the club kids chatting on cell phones on Newbury Street and the dog walkers glaring at motorists on Comm Ave?

Some people blame the process of gentrification for all these losses. It's true that as the city has become more affluent and youth-oriented, rising rents have forced out some of its funkier businesses. But many of their customers left town years ago, long before anyone heard of the term "yuppie."




Boston was one of the first major American cities to suffer huge population losses in the middle of the 20th century. (Only St. Louis fell as sharply in the 1950s.) But the problems that caused this drop-off would eventually show up in almost every Frost Belt metropolis: rising crime rates, lost factory jobs, bad public schools and racial tensions (two issues that would be inextricably linked), and misguided "urban renewal" projects that replaced busy neighborhoods with superhighways and windswept parks. Between 1950 and the mid 1970s, the flight from Boston amounted to roughly a quarter of a million people -- the present-day equivalent of two Cambridges, a Revere, and half a Winthrop. Not that those cities have done any better. Since 1950, Cambridge's population, for example, has dipped from 120,740 to 93,352, and next-door Somerville's has fallen from 102,351 to 74,100.

Boston's population density in 1950 was 16,980 people per square mile. That's about what's found today in San Francisco, which covers almost exactly the same area as Boston (46.7 square miles for them, 48.6 square miles for us). But spend any length of time in San Francisco, with its vibrant street life and late-night activity, and you'll know that the two cities aren't in the same league anymore. Now Boston has 11,768 people per square mile -- about the same as Newark or Yonkers, two drab satellites of New York City. (With Macy's setting up in Downtown Crossing and the New York Times taking over our biggest paper, Boston may soon become a satellite of New York City itself.) If our population were to drop by another 30 percent, we'd have 8238 people per square mile, comparable to present-day Hartford. But we'd still have a long way to fall before becoming as sparsely settled as the disaster area called Detroit (6785 people per square mile). Manhattan, on the other hand, has a density of 64,819 per square mile. Looking at these figures, it's hard to get behind the campaign for more open space in Boston.

At least we're not losing people anymore. Baltimore, Buffalo, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Washington, among other cities, are still losing residents by the thousands every year. Boston seems to have hit bottom around the time of the Bicentennial, when the public schools were still going to hell but the reopening of Quincy Market greatly improved the availability of fresh chocolate-chip cookies. In the past couple of decades, Boston has indeed become a more desirable place to live. The problem is that single people and childless couples have been moving in where large families once lived. And these residents have been pretty vocal (that's the nicest word I can think of) about keeping new development out of their newly calmed neighborhoods. (That's how Boston can have a housing shortage with 30 percent fewer people.)

But our streets, parks, libraries, and subways were actually designed to meet the needs of a city that was much more populous than it is now. Even as we build a giant convention center and fight over some new hotels on the waterfront, Boston isn't yet finished with the agonizingly slow process of downsizing. More of our favorite little bars and bookstores are bound to die in the next few years, and we can't expect many replacements.




Boston's shrunken population explains a lot. For instance, every time an old restaurant closes in this city, it's replaced by a bistro with higher prices. Well, if there are fewer customers to work with, you have to charge more. And if you charge more, you have to dress the place up (goodbye, wooden booths; hello, zebra-striped banquettes). And if the renovation is costlier than you expected, you have to charge even more for the food, and then you have to hire a celebrity chef to justify the $30 entrées, and then he gets a better offer from another new bistro. . . . There's also the expense of getting the right licenses, and fighting the neighborhood groups who want to keep their streets nice and deserted and don't understand why you can't serve $5 hamburgers and close at 9 p.m., when they believe most normal people have eaten.

The smaller customer base also makes it inevitable that supermarkets such as Stop & Shop will be replaced by pricier chains such as Bread & Circus. A neighborhood with enough people might support both (and the competition might lead to lower prices at both stores), but if there's going to be only one supermarket in, say, the Symphony Hall area, it's going to cater to the most affluent residents. (Here's a tip for business owners: don't bother opening in Boston if you plan to run a commercial in which a balding guy wearing a checkered suit shouts, "How do we keep prices so low? Volume, volume, volume!")

Then there's public transportation. Why does the MBTA keep cutting inner-city service? Perhaps because the inner city has a lot fewer people than it did when the Orange Line was east of Columbus Avenue and the Green Line snaked all the way through Jamaica Plain. I'm sure there are individual bus lines that need to be expanded, but the subway system is not overcrowded -- if you can squeeze past all the neurotics with death grips on the metal bars nearest the doors. Almost every time I take the T, I find myself next to someone who has never ridden a train before, a phenomenon that suggests there are not enough Bostonians to scare all the tourists into taking cabs.

True, the T is crowded at rush hours, but it's supposed to be, to make up for all that time when it's practically empty. If a subway line (or a highway) doesn't grind to a halt on the occasional Friday afternoon, it was a waste of public money to build. (Same thing with restaurants: if they don't have lines out the door for Sunday brunch, they're not going to survive the Tuesday nights.)

Last year, there was a serious campaign to get the MBTA to run all night. As someone who doesn't own a car, I couldn't be happier with the idea. But I suspect that the T is correct when it insists that there's not enough demand. Sure, there are plenty of students and artists who'd like to stay out all night, as well as working people with graveyard shifts, but how many of them can afford to live near a T stop these days? With more residents in central neighborhoods, an all-night subway might be feasible. Right now, it makes more sense for the T to make its subway cars available in the wee hours for candlepin bowling, make-out parties, and the shooting of music videos. A post-2 a.m. fare of $300 ought to cover expenses.




Living in Boston sometimes seems like having the run of the family house after all your siblings have bought their own places and your parents have moved to Florida. It's a great set-up, but it can't last forever.

As long as Boston is an attractive city with plenty of jobs and a relatively low crime rate -- that is, as long as any of us would really want to live here -- a large segment of the housing stock is going to be in the hands of people with a lot of money to spend. Limiting development, and keeping the population stagnant, is only going to keep out the artists, low-income families, and recent graduates looking for a place to start living like adults. And the remnants of a considerably larger and more diverse city are going to keep disappearing.

But it may not be too late to reverse our fortunes, especially as environmentalists come around to the view that high-density cities are the most effective weapon we have against suburban sprawl. Because Boston's economic base has shifted from manufacturing and seaport activities to high-tech and Internet-related businesses, we can fit more jobs on fewer acres, and that means more room for housing. The Big Dig and the sinking of the Central Artery will free up even more space. In figuring out how to handle development over the next few years, I propose a single, overriding rule for the city of Boston: the number of new trees must not exceed the number of new people.

I can always go out to the suburbs if I want to feel the grass between my toes. There are other pleasures that, I now realize, are possible only when a million or so people decide to live together. I long for the day when I can go out on a rainy Saturday afternoon and choose from among a dozen movie theaters in downtown Boston -- and there's a damn line at every one of them.

Robert David Sullivan can be reached at robt555@aol.com.