Why Boston Sucks

    While my friends from the right-field bleachers speak the truth, do we ever stop to consider the source of their wisdom?  I mean, there is no question that they sit deeply rooted in universal knowledge, but, still, have we deeply reconnected with that knowledge lately?

    In short, I feel compelled to ask:  Why does Boston suck?

    Well, there are many ways in which Boston sucks.  There is the impossible-to-remember street layout.  There is the old and unreliable transit system.  There is the mediocrity of its restaurants.  There is, obviously, the hated Red Sox.  But underlying it all is, I think, a deeper problem.

    The very definition of a thriving city is one that continually renews itself.  In order to renew itself, a city has to tear things down that are old and replace them with things that are new.  In most cities, doing that isn't even much of a question... it's a matter of course.  In some cities, though, the cling to that which is old, just for the sake of it being old, takes precedence over the drive to rebuild and renew.  Tim Harford argues that New Orleans will not recover precisely because of this mentality there.  From his column:

That may be why disasters rarely interrupt growth in a thriving city, while disaster reconstruction rarely prevents decay in a stagnant one. According to George Horwich, an economist at Purdue University who studied the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, manufacturing in greater Kobe was back to 98 percent of pre-earthquake levels within just 15 months, despite the fact that six months after the tragedy rebuilding had scarcely started. Seventeen-thousand buildings in Chicago's central business district were utterly destroyed by fire in October 1871, but the city's recovery was astonishing, and its population trebled in 20 years. Chicago was on the way up, and the fire simply cleared the way for a more modern city assembled chiefly by the chaotic genius of individual entrepreneurs.

For New Orleans, a charming place for tourists but a desperate clump of poverty and poor schooling, the question is not whether the current reconstruction plans will create a thriving city - they will not. It is whether there are any that could.

    With this in mind, I must ask: by what standard can Boston be considered a thriving city?  It certainly turns over a significant portion of its population with amazing frequency, but much of that can be explained by the presence of so much post-secondary education.  The Big Dig removed an elevated highway that cut through a small portion of the city.  Beyond that... well, there's not much going on.

     Boston City Hall is, according to James Howard Kunstler in his lecture The Tragedy of Suburbia, such an awful place that "not even the winos want to hang out there".  The new TD Banknorth Garden (formerly the Fleet Center) is a soulless indoor arena, with seats colored for the Boston Bruins rather than the Celtics (duh).  The roads are so desperately in need of repaving and repair that I considered it an important part of my knowledge of where I lived that I knew how to drive like a slalom skier to avoid the worst, most damaging potholes and bumps.  But the worst offender of all is the perfect symbol of all that Boston holds dear, and which perfectly exemplifies everything that is wrong there.

    I am speaking, of course, about Fenway Park.

    Fenway Park is a fucking dump.  Period.  I'm sure it was wonderful in 1912 or whenever it was built, but now it's an awful structure, with uncomfortable and poorly-placed seats, many of which don't even face towards the infield.  To make up for how small it is, and therefore how limited the revenue is, the Red Sox add new seats and "luxury boxes" to it each offseason.  The new seats are in the most distant part of the park, with the worst view of the game... namely, the "Monster Seats".  And yet the Boston fans eat them up like they're wonderful.  The luxury boxes are literally trailers that have been secured onto the top of any load-bearing structure that could support them (more are being added as I type).  You know, when a redneck builds an addition onto a trailer in a trailer park, and therefore makes it a "permanent" home, we chuckle.  When the Red Sox do that at Fenway park, we call them "luxury boxes".  It really is as if Red Sox fans are abused wives, who don't understand that they deserve better.

    And I want to be clear: as much as I'm a Yankees fan, I have tremendous respect for the passion of Red Sox Nation.  And I want to say to Red Sox Nation: you deserve a good stadium to see a baseball game in.  Hell, as far as I'm concerned, you deserve the second-best stadium in baseball.  You certainly don't deserve to have the oldest, most cramped, most dumpy piece-of-shit in the game.

    Yet, whenever I say to a Red Sox fan that they should build a new stadium, the instant reaction, every time is: "But where would you build it?  We can't just put it out in the suburbs... and there's nowhere to build it here."  And I always have to ask: "Have you ever walked around the Fenway Park area?"  It's nothing but ugly one or two-story warehouses, for blocks around.  It would be incredibly simple to purchase as many of those warehouses as required, change the zoning, and build a new stadium right next to the old one, and then tear the old one down.  But, again, in Boston, the thought of tearing something down just doesn't even exist in the realm of what's possible.

    And that's the problem.  And Fenway is the ultimate symbol of how Boston thinks of everything.  And that's why there's almost no renewal there.  And that mentality just permeates everything and everyone.  That's why they just settle, instead of wanting improvement.  That's why the subway system is decrepit and the stations are an embarrassment.  That's why there's so little creativity.  That's why the restaurants are basically mediocre.  That's why there are so many areas that you wouldn't want to walk around at night.  That's why the towns around Boston do even less new construction than Boston does.  That's why it's so damn depressing to live there.

    And that's why Boston sucks, and why I'll never live there again.