Robert Campbell had an article in today's Boston Globe Arts Section on the old West End in Boston. The neighborhood's destruction is the classic story of the stupid tragedy of urban renewal. The land occupied by the neighborhood is a pointless arrangement of high-rise residential buildings, parking lots and miserably designed circulation. At least, that is the opinion I have formed after attempting to take walks in the area. Anything resembling human architecture has been thoroughly repressed by the madness of a modernist ideology rendered in its most dismal perfection.
But, we can't be sure what the original West End was actually like. Campbell, along with the dwindling core of people who were ejected from the neighborhood, has woven a gently fading mythology about the place that I do not regard as entirely reliable. But, I can respect that, for I have never lost an architectural setting in the way that they did. As James Kunstler has opined frequently, the homogenized desert of strip malls and suburban sprawl that we are creating doesn't quite grab the memory in the way that old cities can.
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