Seventeenth in a series

Writing this series about Boston’s mayoral history, I have been struck by how many of the issues that the city has grappled with in its past find a new resonance in our time. How we manage to deal with immigration, race relations, job creation, and economic growth – these issues are always with us, in different permutations and with varying degrees of urgency, but they persist as critical challenges to the success of a large urban enterprise.

The very nature of a city – a place that attracts a variety of people from different backgrounds, people of different means, people who can trace their lineage back decades or centuries ago, and others who have joined our community recently, entering through the automatic doors of Terminal E at Logan Airport – is one of a vibrant, sometimes cacophonous collection of citizens who seek urban life because of the one thing it offers, or promises to offer: opportunity. Most people live in cities because cities typically offer the best opportunities for education and employment, proximity to quality health care, availability of arts and culture and big league sports, and a sense of community where they can find people of like mind or background. A city is rarely a calm or quiet place, and while Boston (unlike New York) is not a city that never sleeps, it nevertheless exudes a constant energy that engages people as participants in something larger than themselves.

What makes Boston unique is its rich history, first as a place of refuge for Puritan religious separatists, and then as a colonial hotbed of revolutionary fervor. That history will forever and indelibly mark Boston as a special place that embodies the founding spirit of America – not always something fully understandable or even appealing in an age where patriotism is too often linked with retrograde thinking, but what that founding spirit really embodies is an independent spirit, a can-do attitude, a belief that a community of like-minded people can come together and collaborate on something larger than themselves. That is what Boston did when it reclaimed the murky swamp of the marsh flats along the old Mill Dam and created the elegant Back Bay; it’s what we did when we built a port that for a brief time was second to none in North America; it’s what we did when we reclaimed the Charles River embankment and built one of the nation’s most elegant and attractive urban open space amenities; it’s what we did when we changed the face of the city by building the Prudential Center and Government Center at a time when the city’s economy was on life support and its viability uncertain; and it’s what we did by rejecting the failed thinking of mid-20th century transportation planners and rerouting the ugly, inefficient Central Artery underground, replacing it with the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, improving urban mobility and urban quality of life in one grand civic commitment to citizen-friendly growth. That spirit, that quality of determined optimism about the future, was also demonstrated when Boston citizens joined with political and civic leaders to build understanding and rebuild trust, deciding not to allow the corrosive experience of forced busing to irreparably destroy the city.

As we have seen, Boston’s political history is also a rich and colorful story of citizens vying for power and prestige in bruising battles that did not always provide the people of Boston with the best leadership. Politics in Boston was, and remains, an activity that brings out the best and worst in people. At its best, it is bold and courageous and forward looking, the kind of politics that brought Boston from the brink in 1949 to a place prepared to meet the needs of the 21st century. At its worst, Boston’s politics can be mean-spirited and unforgiving, a world of chicanery and broken promises and betrayal where we too often take pleasure in tearing people down simply for the sport of it.

We tend not to embrace our successes in Boston, preferring instead to offer grudging praise (or cynical opposition) for even our most important civic improvements, whether they be 1968’s New City Hall or 2008’s Rose Kennedy Greenway. Perhaps there is nothing to be done about it – we are a city whose thought leaders are often drawn to behaving as curmudgeons, wallowing in the negative. This trait can be deflating after a while, and I think it discourages potentially civic-minded people from participating in pubic matters. Thankfully it has not deterred everyone, and many capable people have entered the fray to make a positive difference. Without those dedicated people, Boston would not have recovered from its decline, and we would be a backwater today.

Italo Calvino, in his book Invisible Cities, remarks that “the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.” This series was meant to trigger introspection about Boston’s future by looking at its past. As we look back on Boston’s history, it is clear that the exercise is about more than a nostalgic reverie – it teaches us and guides us in our own time.

Fitzgerald’s call for a “Bigger, Better, Busier Boston” is a call we pay heed to today. Curley’s empathy for the poor and the downtrodden and his investments in health care and neighborhood services reflect sensibilities that are critically important today. The determination of Hynes and Collins to push the city forward despite its stubborn adherence to a nostalgic past is something we continue to embrace today as we find ways to grow the city while maintaining a strong sense of place and scale. So, too, citizens today can take a lesson from the push-back that citizens of another time gave to city hall when insensitive urban renewal and transportation planning threatened to destroy the integrity and the very soul of our neighborhoods. Finally, Kevin White’s ability to attract some of the best and brightest men and women of his time to work in city government, and his knack for bringing out the best in people when crisis knocked on the city’s door, are traits we all should hope our next mayor adopts as his own. And while this series has purposefully avoided a discussion of the two most recent mayors – specifically Flynn and Menino – it must be said that their respective tenures have kept Boston on a generally positive course, one that offers the new mayor as strong a platform for growth as any mayor before him has had.

Boston is indeed a place rich in its history, but it is more than that. Boston is more than its infrastructure, more than its great civic gathering places and skyscrapers and sports arenas. Boston is more than its peerless hospitals and academic institutions (although its future appears to rest in large part on the continued growth and innovation that will come from those sectors). And Boston is more than Boston Strong. In the aftermath of the senseless Marathon bombing, and the noble and courageous efforts of the city’s first responders and magnificent medical teams, we have been lulled by a sound bite – Boston Strong – that threatens to distract us from the important work that must be done to place and maintain Boston within the ranks of important, viable and successful 21st century cities. A truly strong Boston is a less economically stratified Boston, a more inclusive Boston, a better educated and innovative Boston, a Boston with a more sustainable multi-modal transportation network. A truly strong Boston won’t accept second rate architecture and design from developers interested in profiting from the city’s economic resurgence. And a truly strong Boston won’t tolerate inequitable and unreliable bus service, or massive underemployment, or a culture of inner-city gun violence, and will find creative approaches to resolving these chronic problems.

Boston is a combination of the tangible and intangible, for many of us an idea, for others a memory, for still others an aspiration or a refuge – or all of the above. How we come together as one people who can collaborate on our future, and build a newer, more innovative city that responds to the rapidly changing imperatives of our time – that is the question that is easy to ask, and harder to resolve. But it is a question that must be answered, and answered smartly and well, if Boston is to continue an upward trajectory. Strong leadership may help us get there, but we as citizens also have our own obligations to meet. T.S. Eliot wrote, “What we call the beginning is often the end, and to make an end is to make a beginning.” A thoughtful introspection that comes from a mindfulness of our past is, perhaps, a way to make a beginning of the end of the current era.

Jim Aloisi is a former state secretary of transportation. His most recent book is The Vidal Lecture.