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Years ago, I had a friend who lived in the North End of Boston. She lived there when it was still a charming little ethnic neighborhood of Italian families and the grocerias, restaurants, bakeries, and cafes they owned.
Then, something awful happened. The movie "Moonstruck" came out. Don't get me wrong, it was a great movie... very realistic, and very seductive. The Brooklyn depicted in that movie so resembled the North End, that all of a sudden, every "Yuppie" who worked in Boston wanted to live there. Within a year, the rent on an apartment there tripled. The little family businesses began to "upscale" to suit the newer, more affluent, people who had moved there. The price for an espresso, a cannoli, a plate of ravioli, or an after-work Limoncello doubled. The charming little neighborhood changed as the family vendors became used to all that new money. The market bore what it could, and a lot of the families there expanded and remodeled. The narrow and cracked pavement was repaved. Some buildings were torn down just to make parking lots for the Beemers and Volvos of the new tenants. Life got fat and good. But, the plcae had become unrecognizeable. It no longer resembeled the North End my friend had lived in since her childhood. She would cry as she talked to me about it on the phone. She mourned the loss because it had become a part of who she was as a person, and it was gone. She finally gave up and moved out when she was so disgusted with the rents and the rest of it that she couldn't stand it any longer.
Then, something happened... it is euphemistically called here, "The Big Dig". The Big Dig was a highway reconstruction project that could only happen in Massachusetts. It would take too long to explain, but years into it, it is still unfinished, way over-budget, and making everyone involved in it rich. The Big Dig went right through the North End. As the bulldozers dug and dug, and the traffic was re-routed, masses of inner-city vermin were unleashed on the neighborhood. Since affluent people paying astronomical rents and prices for goods don't usually appreciate things that normally live in the city along with them... like rats and roaches and mice, there was a bit of a mass exodus from that neighborhood almost overnight. All the upscale "Trattorias", "Espresso Houses" and the like were left changed forever by what turned out to be a transitory visitation by an outside influence. The families that owned their apartments and stayed were, once again, needed and desired customers. They saved the neighborhood businesses from bankruptcy, and they are once again, making a living.
Think of The North End as the Democratic Party, "Moonstruck" was the Clinton Administration, The "Yuppies" as the DLC, and The Big Dig is the devastation of the Bush Administration and the Neo-Cons who come with it. If you do, the moral of the story becomes clear: resist influences that come into a beloved area, flashing money, changing the culture, and promising affluence to those who are willing to sell-out or remodel, leaving the little guys to fend for themselves. When the going gets tough, they will leave you high and dry without a second thought, and it will be the little guys, who stayed and fought for their place in your "new" neighborhood that will your salvation, and return the charm and the soul to the area.
Just a little something to think about, and the gentlest way to say it I could think of to say it...
TC
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