So “The Town” is in town, introduced by the hoopla at Fenway Park. I haven’t yet seen the movie. Sounds good. Sounds hackneyed.
It seems that every film made about Boston or located in Boston is based on a cliché. Our history is great and the Red Sox are always photogenic. But this city is so much more interesting than its clichés. “The Town” is reportedly about Charlestown bank robbers. Nostalgia buffs like to conflate bank robbers and Charlestown, and countless books have been published combining the two, but if you look at Charlestown now, it’s not what you see.
Instead, you see kids. Families with kids. Lots of kids everywhere living in renovated houses with a fresh coat of paint on the window sills. It’s city living with more space than on Beacon Hill or the North End, and with more affordability than on Beacon Hill or in the Back Bay. Perhaps Ben Affleck could make his next film about Charlestown kids and the nice houses they live in. Surely he could find a story there.
Other downtown neighborhoods also have to make do with tiresome clichés. The North End, for example, can’t possibly be the stronghold of the Mafia that it once was—if it actually was. It no longer has enough Italians of a certain age or inclination. Only 30 percent of its residents identified themselves as Italian in the last census. Since then, the cosmopolitan trend has only strengthened for the North End (and its waterfront), attracting young professionals of all stripes who find the walk to their downtown offices quite convenient. Another growing cohort are singles and couples in their later years. They like the scale of the neighborhood and its neighborly feel, the harbor and the views, and the growing number of shops serving locals. They also like the restaurants and bars, maybe more than the old timers do, since the convenience of having restaurants nearby is one of the reasons the North End attracted them.
Beacon Hill and the Back Bay suffer from the cliché “tony.” These neighborhoods are still associated with Brahmins, the 19th-century magnates who built railroads, dug Midwestern coal mines and founded factories. But Brahmin fortunes are not what they once were, having been divided among too many descendants. And precious few Brahmins live downtown anyway, having dispersed to the suburbs and the rest of America just as any other group has done.
These neighborhoods certainly do have titans of industry, financial giants and a football player or two living along their streets. But they are also home to lawyers, professors, doctors, business owners, social workers, politicians, hairdressers, school teachers, carpenters and office workers with more usual income levels who want the convenience of city living and are able to afford it by putting up with smaller quarters, no car and the free recreation provided by the Public Garden and the Esplanade.
The characteristics of downtown Boston neighborhoods today in fact appear to be the exact opposite of some of the clichés about Boston, and that’s a good thing for all of us. Boston once was known as a racist city. But racism and other kinds of discrimination aren’t acceptable in downtown Boston today. For one thing, the downtown neighborhoods welcome diversity—any color, national origin, or sexual orientation is fine, as long as you set your trash bag out responsibly and pick up after your dog.
Sometime within the next few months we’ll have the results of the 2010 census. Some tea-baggers objected to the census last spring, pointing out that illegal aliens would be counted. And so they were—just as the whole population has always been counted except for the nation’s first 70 years when we counted slaves as three-fifths of a person and we couldn’t figure out what to do with Indians.
For the rest of us, who love the census and what it tells us about ourselves, we’ll eagerly await the news about our neighborhoods and our city. I imagine we won’t have a lot of Charlestown residents who list their occupation as bank robbers.