A Tale of Two Cities

By KURT ANDERSEN

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."

It is youths who carry out most of the racial attacks. An incident two weeks ago was all too typical. Delvine Okereke, 32, a black city planner,'was driving through white, middle-class West Roxbury. When she asked some white youngsters for directions, they threatened to kill her if she moved into the neighborhood. They then painted racist graffiti on the house where

Okereke was headed. Last week a judge issued an extraordinary injunction to curb one squad of racist punks in the Hyde Park section. The eight white men, ages 18 to 24, have for several years terrorized the few neighborhood blacks, taunting and menacing them and vandalizing their cars. The gang members now face immediate jailing if caught at such hooliganism again, or if they even gather near the black families' homes.

According to City Councilman Ray Flynn, a South Boston native, "class discrimination is far greater than racial discrimination." In fact, white South Boston and black Roxbury are almost identically impoverished, with median household incomes of $7,300 and $7,500 respectively. (For the Back Bay-Beacon Hill area the figure is $16,000.) "One neighborhood thinks the other is getting a larger piece of the pie," Flynn says. "In reality, nobody is getting any pie. The upshot is great frustration and animosity." He and Camayd-Freixas agree that none of Boston's poor--white, black and Hispanic--are fairly sharing in the prosperity of downtown redevelopment.

A recent study by Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., found Boston to be among the nine U.S. cities most seriously in decline.* Brookings cited Boston's crime and unemployment, decaying housing stock, entrenched poverty and mounting municipal debt. "Nevertheless," the report said, "many people consider Boston a very attractive city with excellent cultural, educational and environmental amenities." But for neighborhoods full of less blessed Bostonians, angry or hopeless or both, those Athenian amenities are merely reminders of their own distress.

-- By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Joelle Attinger/ Boston

* The others are Cambridge, Mass., Cleveland, Dayton, Hartford, Las Vegas and three New Jersey cities: Jersey City, Paterson and Trenton.

With reporting by Joelle Attinger

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