Nothing sacred

by Robert David Sullivan

Recently I took the #1 bus home after a book-buying spree in Harvard Square. I sat near a group of college freshmen who had been living in Boston for about two weeks. "It feels like we've been here forever," one of the women marveled before reeling off a list of activities that included a school-sanctioned trip to Faneuil Hall and an extracurricular visit to Lansdowne Street. As we crossed the Charles River on the Mass Ave bridge, she interrupted herself to exclaim, "There's that big-ass Citgo sign!"

She was still having a near-orgasm over the oil-company logo when we returned to land and I spotted a sign that I had never noticed before. It hung outside a dry cleaner, and it included a silhouette of what appeared to be a customer in a heated argument with a woman who was playing keep-away with his shirts. If there can be just one 60-by-60-foot sign in this city, I thought, I'd junk the big red triangle and replace it with the Dry Cleaner Who's Grown Too Attached to Her Work.

As a symbol of Boston, the Citgo sign is as popular as just about anything else you'll find in the city, but I doubt that many residents in Charlestown or Dorchester would care if all that neon tubing vanished tomorrow. Faneuil Hall, too, could disappear, and few of us who actually live here would notice. On the bus, I tried to think of a single place that epitomizes Boston, but instead my list of expendable institutions grew rapidly: the Cheers bar (of course), the Kennedy Library, the USS Constitution, Fenway Park, Symphony Hall. . . . It wasn't until I started erasing places like the Allston Skirt Gallery and Bob the Chef's that I started getting worried about the quality of life here. But I decided that they could easily be replaced as well. Boston is known for its preservationist ethic, but we have the luxury of giving landmark status to an old house -- or a funky old sign -- not because it's one of our only reminders of the past, but because it adds a little something extra to the cityscape. Boston is full of things that can be thrown away, and even a few things that should be thrown away (the Central Artery and City Hall Plaza come to mind).

By way of contrast, think of Baltimore, where all the tourists are practically ordered to spend their entire stay at Harborplace -- which is not much more than Faneuil Hall with paddleboats. God help Cleveland if the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ever goes bankrupt, and pity the people of St. Louis if that big-ass arch ever falls down. But nothing in Boston is as dominant as, say, Seattle's Space Needle. In our skyline, the Hancock Tower duels with the Prudential; on the ground, Trinity Church faces off with the Boston Public Library.

It's true that other big cities have plenty of attractions to spare. But they can still be traumatized by loss. San Francisco suffered an identity crisis when the hippie enclave of Haight-Ashbury became yuppified, and it now has to worry about the Castro losing its status as the gayest neighborhood in America. New York is in agony over the transformation of Times Square into Disney World North, and it never really got over the destruction of Penn Station in the 1960s. The trouble with those cities is that they've become nationalized, and they constantly worry that the rest of America will lose interest in them. It doesn't help that every time a dive bar closes in Manhattan, someone eulogizes it in the New Yorker or one of a zillion other national publications. When a gin mill closes here, its customers can nurse the pain for decades, but nobody whines to the entire country that Boston has lost its soul.

In Boston (and in Cambridge), we can move on. We lost the Rat, so now we go hear music at the Middle East instead. We complained about the sightlines at the Boston Garden, and now we complain about the prices at the FleetCenter. We kicked Dapper O'Neil off the city council, but we can still listen to the tirades of James Kelly. Every place and everybody can be replaced.

To me, this is one city where better things always seem to be around the corner, and that feeling can do wondrous things for one's own psyche. (I wish I could look forward to a such a bright future at the age of 370.) Bostonians are now seriously talking about the construction of entire new neighborhoods, the restoration of a year-round theater district, and the revitalization of our waterfront, among other schemes. We've shaken off a lethargy that lasted for most of the 20th century -- certainly its second half. During that period -- which began with your garden-variety urban decay and ended with an explosion of racism over school busing -- Boston's claim to be the "Athens of America" was completely discredited. Actually, it may be more accurate to say that the city was freed of that pretentious nickname. ("The Hub" has the right touch of playful irony.) Now we don't have to be a model for the rest of the country; we can just build the kind of city that we want to live in.

Fortunately, we've maintained our stubborn sense of democracy. There are dozens of great restaurants here, but you can't make anyone jealous by saying you got into any of them. We have our share of celebrities, but they aren't known by their first names. (No one is going to be called "the Donald" here, no matter how much money they've made building office towers.)

Boston has two of almost everything that matters, which seems altogether appropriate for a city that once rebelled against centralized power. We don't have Central Park; we have the Public Garden and the Arnold Arboretum. You could blow up Harvard University, and there would still be MIT. Boycott the Globe, and you could still read the Herald. Shut down the nightclubs on Boylston Place, and Lansdowne Street would still be in business.

Everyone who lives in Boston has a different mental map of the city (more so than in Manhattan, where everyone works off the same street grid), but I doubt that any of them would be useful to tourism officials. In my mind, the dormitories at Boston University are taller than the Hancock Tower; the Fort Hill monument in Roxbury overshadows the Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown; Union Park is bigger than Boston Common; Charles Street is twice as long as Newbury Street; Fort Point Channel dwarfs the Charles River; the Pit in Harvard Square has a larger seating capacity than the Wang Center; and the plaza in front of the Boston Center for the Arts is 10 times larger than Fenway Park.

Your mental map may not include any of these places, and you may still think of Boston as the most livable city in America. I understand completely. I don't even take offense at anyone who fails to see that the flashing neon "YMCA" has it all over the Citgo sign. We can do without sacred cows here.

Robert David Sullivan has probably been replaced by now, but you can try to reach him at Robt555@aol.com.