A Tale of Two Cities

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Both Boston, where it's the best of times and the worst of times

The streets of its rich residential heart, Back Bay and Beacon Hill, are shady and civilized, block after block of stately 19th century town houses. The symphony and principal museum are among the world's best. Fine colleges help make the city an enormous intellectual hot tub, at once invigorating and smug. Now Boston's boosters can brag about more than old-shoe gentility: over the past decade a decrepit waterfront district has been intelligently transformed into a swank commercial and residential quarter whose centerpiece, the Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market showplace, draws natives and tourists by the millions. At the other end of downtown, $400 million is going into the big Copley Place development, which will include hotels, shops and convention facilities.

But while some high-profile parts of the city are burgeoning, a lot of the rest is coming apart at the seams. A record-setting rampage of arson has beset Boston this summer, especially in its poor neighborhoods. The fires could not have come at a worse time: 469 of the city's 2,039 fire fighters (and 1,941 other municipal workers) have been laid off during a two-year fiscal crisis. Racism is singularly virulent and regularly violent. After eight years of court-ordered busing, the proportion of whites enrolled in the city's public schools has dropped from 57% to 32%. Shrewd, mercurial Kevin White, 52, mayor for the past 15 years, loves to say that Boston is "the livable city." But one thoughtful police force veteran says, "The poor neighborhoods are being forgotten. What city hall sees is downtown, period."

During the past five years, tens of thousands of new jobs were created in Boston; apparently most have gone to engineers, lawyers, computer technicians, managers and other upwardly mobile residents. The same sleek "gentry" have taken apartments and houses in once declasse areas, displacing poor and working-class Bostonians. In Jamaica Plain, one of the city's most integrated neighborhoods (53% white, 25% Hispanic), the influx of moneyed young professionals since 1979 has quintupled the price of some houses and pushed up rents as much as 70%. M.I.T. Urban Studies Assistant Professor Yohel Camayd-Freixas claims that more than a quarter of the area's Hispanic residents have thus been forced out. Residents of other traditionally ethnic neighborhoods, notably the South End (60% nonwhite), the North End and East Boston (Italian), worry about the same creeping dislocation. To Mayor White, however, it is unambiguously "a good thing that richer, professional people are moving in, buying condos. Most neighborhoods are whipped right now."

If ballooning housing costs do not drive out longtime residents, the arson epidemic may. Almost two buildings are being torched a night, on average, and one in five Boston fires is set deliberately, twice the 1979 rate. Since June 11, when 101 fires were reported in twelve hours, arsonists have caused $5 million in damage. Jim Coakley is one of 16 firemen on a special roving arson squad that includes police and federal agents. "It could be anything," he says. "Profit, vandalism, imitation... Some of it is because kids decide to set a fire and get some excitement."