Doing nothing at sea

When Hampshire House owner Tom Kershaw invited me to join him on the square-rigged, 122-foot schooner Lynx, based in Nantucket and St. Petersburg, Florida, at Saturday’s Parade of Sail, I immediately said yes. Journalists often get to do something special—once I walked the entire Big Dig tunnel while it was under construction, and I’m still jealous of my colleague who explored the part of Hanover Street still extant under City Hall Plaza.

Tom was able to invite about 40 guests to join him in the parade because he has been a long-time board member of Sail Boston. He has a special relationship with the Lynx, built in 2001 based on a privateer of the same name that participated in the War of 1812. His charity, Cheers for Children, has supported the Lynx’s sailing instruction and history programs, but are really providing kids a potentially life-changing experience. Three members of the Peacock family, who run the programs, were on board. Donald Peacock said sailors in his family go back to the early 1800s.

We arrived at the ship about 6 a.m. It was a good thing we got there early. Fan Pier no longer looks like the old Fan Pier, and without Anthony’s, Pier Four no longer looks like Pier Four. But we found the ship, climbed aboard and enjoyed a leisurely day, starting with coffee as we watched the crew ready the ship for a sail.

Most of the guests were long-time friends of Tom. A television crew led by meteorologist Cindy Fitzgibbon of Channel Five set up their equipment to broadcast all day, but no beauty shots were to be had.

The water was glassy, but fog enclosed the ship so tightly that we could only hear the airplanes taking off above our heads. We never did see them. About 8 a.m. the ship left the dock and joined a line headed for the outer harbor. When we passed the large Navy ship anchored near the Reserved Channel, a crew member stuffed the small cannon with a ball of explosives and bread—why the bread I never understood—and fired it at the Navy ship. It was a salute, but it also could have been a hostile act. The Navy, thankfully, did not return fire.

During most of our journey we could barely see the ship ahead of us or the one behind. A fine mist pelted our faces. Tom’s friend Lindy distributed thin plastic rain ponchos adorned with the Cheers logo.

The sea became rambunctious, making it difficult to maintain footing unless you were holding on. But the fog lifted somewhat, and the sea took on that glassy look again. The crew raised the sails, with one female crew member climbing to the top of the mast to do some adjusting and all the others heaving and hauling the lines to secure the unfurled sails in their rightful places.

We were sitting on wet wood, but it was not cold. The sea was not emitting that wonderful briney, fishy, kelpy fragrance that northern seas can achieve. Police boats flew through the water, slapping the waves as they bounced. There were few bird sounds, few clanks on what was mostly a wooden ship, and a low drone of motors. The major noise continued to be that of airplanes landing and taking off.

At one point, a Boston Whaler, the Annie Laurie, roared up to our ship. We paid no attention until a police boat roared even faster and megaphoned the Annie Laurie to get away from the Lynx. Oh. Security.

Land came into view as the fog lifted more, and we saw we were lingering, waiting for the delayed parade to begin, with all the other ships spread out between Nahant and south of Boston Light.

Gradually most of the ships began to raise their sails. About 10:30 a.m. our ship’s guests started to delve into big coolers, bringing out sandwiches and hummus dip. Soon we heard the parade had begun. We hung around for an hour or so though because we were in the ninth flotilla. Our lead ship would be the three-masted Gulden Leeuw, or Golden Lion when translated from the Dutch. We would sail in tandem with the smaller Ardelle.

The sail into the inner harbor, the turn-around and the return to our dock were accompanied by a few more cannon firings and the remarkable sight of sailors in uniform standing on the yards of the barque Guayas.
We docked and shed our sea legs as we walked into the crowds along the Harbor Walk, all the while thinking of the talk we’d heard on board.

This spectacle is expensive. Ships pay for crews, food, gasoline and all else that enables them to sail across oceans. Such groups as Sail Boston give ships “honorariums” so they can afford to participate.

It was reported, unverified, that Mayor Walsh has said this is the last time Boston will put on this extravaganza. The security costs are too high. Given the many police officers we encountered on land and the many police boats on patrol, we could see why this would worry a mayor who has housing to build and schools to support.

So maybe you should get yourself down to the harbor to enjoy a free boarding of these ships. It isn’t certain that they’re coming back.

Questions you’ve wanted answered

Why does the Hurley Building on Cambridge Street have chain link fence pieces around it?

A person from the state Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance who said not to use his name told me that there is a drop between the plaza and the sidewalk and his department is concerned that people could fall over the side. He said DCAM is looking into a solution, but there is no timeline.

The problem with that answer is that the fence is deployed around the whole building, even in places where there is no drop. The fence is not strong enough to stop a terrorist truck. It’s sort of thrown up against the building. It’s strange.

The plaza on the Merrimac and Staniford Street corner of the building has been turned into a permanent parking lot, rather than just a plaza entrance to the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center. A couple of horse chestnut trees along Cambridge Street are thriving, but the building is dirty, forbidding and poorly maintained, at least on the outside.

Parking lots degrade spaces. Scraggly trees should have been watered. Windows can be washed and concrete can be cleaned, sort of. Why can’t the state take better care of its property? Why is such a building allowed to denigrate the neighborhood? And, again, why do those chain link fences exist?

Maybe we’ll never know.

 

 

During spring snowstorms, limbs fall off Boston’s street trees because snow weighs them down, especially if their leaves are emerging. Why doesn’t the city’s Parks and Recreation Department pollard our trees, as they do in France, so their branches are thinner and less susceptible to breaking off?

 

Gregory Mosman, the tree warden and arborist for the City of Boston, said in an email that the drawbacks of pollarding outweigh the benefits. “Pollarding works only on certain species,” he said. “It is time consuming and labor intensive and if not done regularly creates weak branch unions that can fail. It also defeats the purpose of having canopy cover that is home to birds and insects and provides shade and all the other benefits of large shade trees.”

 

 

Why has Massachusetts tax revenue recently been coming in below the forecast? Are we citizens not spending enough or making enough?

 

Revenue forecasting is an art, not a science, said Andrew Bagley, vice president of policy and research for the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. Bagley does revenue forecasting himself, so he should know.

Part of the problem, he said, is that forecasters depend on data about how revenues have behaved in the past. Then they look at such factors as wages, personal income, current economic conditions, employment rate and sales figures. “We sit and stare at it and think if it is overly optimistic,” he said.

But there are problems in coming up with a sound prediction. First, they are forecasting the revenues six to 18 months ahead. Things could change drastically over that period of time. Then there is tax planning. Some people, anticipating that Trump’s budget will cut the federal capital gains tax, may wait longer than usual to sell stock, depriving Massachusetts’ coffers of the tax expected to be collected.

If people buy fewer cars or go out for dinner fewer times, their behavior reduces the tax collected on those items. If, instead of going to a local retail shop, they buy something on the internet from a company with no location in the state, Massachusetts loses sales tax on that purchase.

It’s hard to predict those behaviors, Bagley said. Then there may be long-term changes afoot that are hard to account for. Are Millennials not spending as much as we might expect because they are paying off student debt? How long will that continue? Are people having to pay more for health care, thereby not buying as many goods? Forecasters try to ferret out these structural changes in consumptive patterns ahead of time, but their findings can be incomplete.

Other states face the same problem as Massachusetts in accurately predicting tax revenue, Bagley said. For example, car sales are down in every state. People are staying in their houses longer so those sales are down, and a new house often drives purchasing of furniture or appliances. That behavior is somewhat countered by an increase in home renovations. Despite cranes on the horizon in Boston and a soaring stock market, “something is slowing down,” he said. But it is unclear what that is.

We’re dealing with small percentages here, but they have significant implications, Bagley points out. In a $40 billion budget, if the forecast is only one percent more than the actual revenue, that leaves about a $400 million shortfall. The fiscal year begins July 1 every year. “If you don’t find out until May or June, that leaves little leeway in balancing the budget,” said Bagley.

The Filene’s block

I’m sitting in the sun at a corporate event on Summer Street. Newspaper people often get invited to occasions like this. Millennium Partners are the hosts. They redeveloped the Filene’s block, restoring the 1912 Daniel Burnham Building, named after its architect, and adding the new residential tower built on the hole in the ground that Vornado Realty Trust left when they demolished the 1950s addition to Filene’s. Millennium is rededicating a bronze tablet commemorating the nearby site of the first and second Trinity churches.

About 100 people are here. I’m prepared to be satisfyingly bored. Speeches take place in four versions of Boston accents. The ground shivers as a subway train passes underneath. A police whistle blows. Birds flitter past. Planes climb overhead. Then a vicar says a final prayer. Two children run up to hug one of the speakers, obviously their grandfather, because they are so proud of watching him give a speech. He must be important.

I think I might cry. This is the way things should be. Children delighted with a grandfather. The hubbub of a city street contrasted with a program designed by a buttoned-up corporation. Unlike what might be held by Wells Fargo or United Airlines or America’s other corporate criminals, this program features a vicar from one of Boston’s wealthiest churches praying for justice, fairness and sharing with those who need a hand. I trust his words because Trinity puts its money where the reverend’s mouth is through the Trinity Boston Foundation. I’m proud of these fellow Bostonians and want the world to change so that generosity like Trinity’s is America’s norm, not the cruel, punitive meanness of the US House of Representatives.

This columnist could write many despairing words over the sorrowful plight of our country due to Washington, but you probably think too much about that already.

Instead I’ll treat you to the story of the historic block bordered by Summer, Washington, Franklin and Hawley streets that is being celebrated in this event. You can refresh your sense of history by studying some artifacts Millennium has placed around its perimeter.

Before you start your perambulation, remember that in the first half of the 19th century Summer Street was lined with fashionable houses. By mid-century, commercial encroachment had begun. When the entire block and more was destroyed in Boston’s devastating 1872 fire, the burned-out smaller businesses and remaining residences were replaced by some of the city’s most beautifully decorated commercial buildings. This and the surrounding blocks were dubbed “the Commercial Palace district.”

That fire burned Trinity Church, whose rector decided it was time to move to the Back Bay, the up and coming neighborhood that replaced the stinking mud flats along the Charles River.

Start at the Trinity Church plaque, mounted behind a narrow window near the entrance at 10 Summer Street. The plaque is a bit odd, since it celebrates the founding of Trinity in 1734 with the 1829 Gothic Revival stone building. But the first building was a wood-framed structure. Oh well.

Nip into 10 Summer Street’s lobby to find brackets from the now-demolished 1905 building at 33 Franklin, which eventually became part of Filene’s store. You’ll also find decorative brickwork in a historic motif on the lobby’s back and side walls.

As you head toward Washington Street, you’ll come upon a window that commemorates the pottery firm of Jones, McDuffee & Stratton, founded in 1810. They worked with the Wedgwood and other fine ceramics manufacturers to turn out dinner services, calendar tiles and commemorative plates. The calendar tiles now sell on ebay for between $13 and $75 each, depending on the subject.

As you turn onto Washington Street look up at the old Filene’s building. A restored glass and iron canopy lies beneath green Deer Isle granite. Above is the decorative façade, including the dark green middle part that looks like iron and is as complex as a cathedral. All is made of terra cotta. You’ll now realize that other buildings in the neighborhood are clad in the same material.

As you walk along Washington Street, you’ll see into Primark through the windows. Burnham designed them in that open fashion, which died out in retailing during the 20th century. Roche Bros. market along Summer Street is now also on display through the windows.

At the corner of Washington Street and Franklin, named after Benjamin by Charles Bulfinch, you’ll find a subway entrance, a small amphitheater and the 1905 clock from now-demolished 33 Franklin Street.

Looking up, you’ll know you’re next to the 60-story Millennium Tower, finished last year. But a few old artifacts hang around. A short way down Franklin Street, near the tower’s driveway, you’ll find pieces of 33 Franklin repurposed as benches or space dividers. Around the corner, Hawley Street, originally called Bishop’s Alley, reportedly had on it a tavern frequented by Captain Kidd. Now it is lined with delivery bays.

It’s satisfying to live in a city old enough to have pieces to save.

Summer reading. With plots.

Have you kept up with contemporary authors? They get praise from reviewers, but some are challenging. Their books are admired for convoluted structure and no plot line. You search for the good writing the reviewers say they demonstrate, but you find it hard to determine what certain sentences mean. The authors can seem self-absorbed, forgetting they have readers. (I’ll not name those books. If you come upon them, you’ll know.)

I’m here to save summer reading. You can depend on the following books, written by Boston-area authors, for good story-telling. One is about a well-to-do Jewish-Yankee-ish family in Rhode Island, another written from the point of view of a child of Italian immigrants in the North End. The third is about a Jewish family in Boston’s suburbs. I guess that almost covers New England’s waterfront.

Let’s start with Eden, written by Beacon Hill resident Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg.

The action centers around Becca, now 72, who expects to lose the coastal summer house her father built in the 1920s because her late husband, a doctor, left her with debt. But debt is only part of the story, which involves four generations of family members, a local ice-cream seller, an institution in Kansas City and the after-effects of decisions made long ago.

There are many stories about New Englanders’ summer houses in jeopardy. But this story engages the reader through events in the year 2000 explained by events in the first half of the 20th century. The story is satisfyingly long, while broken up into digestible segments. Becca’s character is gratifyingly complex. Themes deal with efforts to gain control over events and other people, tradition played out against new attitudes and progress, tribalism and its breakdown, class, status and wealth.

A few characters are left by the wayside. I wanted to know more about the doctor who caused the debt. That’s hard to do with a high income and a modicum of attention. Did he have a gambling addiction? Something else?

But this complaint is small. The tale is original and well told.

The Saturday Evening Girls Club by Jane Healey takes place in Boston’s North End in the early 1900s. The club actually existed, but the characters are Healey’s creation. While the story of women trying to escape from conventional expectations is familiar, this book has a richer take on that theme. Not only must these women deal with the general society’s expectations, but they have the added burden of the “old” country’s culture that their immigrant parents can’t discard.

The story is told by Caprice, a member of a Sicilian family. She is a talented hat designer and dreams of opening a millinery shop. The decisions she and her friends make as they navigate jobs, boyfriends and their own friendship show the contradictions they struggle with and the slim perch on which their prospects rest. They help out in the club’s pottery studio and retail shop, named the Paul Revere Pottery, whose output is collectable today. There’s a cameo appearance by Isabella Stewart Gardner and a more sustained role for Helen Storrow, who financed club activities, and the North End librarian, Edith Guerrier, who started the book club out of which the more comprehensive group grew.

This is a sweet story of friendship and change. It reminds us that America’s history is and has always been filled with adult immigrants who can’t let go of old ways even as their children assimilate into the American mainstream.

Stuart Nadler’s third novel, The Inseparables, must have been called that because the story follows members of a Jewish family who have a hard time getting rid of something. Oona, a hard-hitting orthopedic surgeon, wants to get rid of her husband, Spencer, who suffers from an addiction to weed and a lack of ambition. Spencer doesn’t want to get rid of either of these afflictions.

Their high school daughter, Lydia, wants to get rid of the Internet photos of her naked body posted by a predatory boy whom she naively trusted. Oona’s mother, Henrietta, wants to get rid of the slutty reputation she acquired from a book she wrote long ago as well as the grief caused by the death of her beloved, but imprudent husband, a chef.

The men don’t come off well in this novel. In addition to the stoned Spencer, there is the scumbag boy and Henrietta’s husband, who turns out to have spent all their money in a futile, foolish attempt to save his dying restaurant.

Downtown Boston readers may have the same reaction I did in reading this book about a suburban family—they spend so much time driving.

Read all three of these books this summer. Novels usually tell you more about a culture than non-fiction does. Each of these books gives bits of insight into New England and its people.

Spring cooking

Our dinner last night was typical for us in the spring. We sat down to fava beans, fiddleheads and morel mushrooms sent for my birthday from my sister-in-law. Last week we had soft shell crabs two nights in a row because they are so good, and their season is short. I haven’t found ramps this year, but finally shad roe appeared at our small, local grocery store.

While these foods are touted in magazines and cookbooks as part of the local food movement, I am surprised at how many people are unfamiliar with them, don’t like their taste or find them too difficult to deal with.

So, dear readers, this column is about spring recipes.

My husband and I think we hunt down foods like this because we grew up on farms, foraged in the woods, knew at an early age where food comes from and got over any squeamishness that might have lurked about.

When I was a young, inexperienced cook, I served Julia Child’s braised tongue in madeira sauce to dinner guests who exclaimed how good it was. One person asked what we were eating.

When I answered, most stopped.

Later, my father-in-law packed up in dry ice several pheasants he had shot and shipped them to us. Having learned from the tongue experience, we invited only friends who we knew could handle wild birds.

One spring when that same father-in-law sent a mess of morels from his Midwestern woods, we invited a sophisticated couple who had never heard of them for brunch where they featured prominently. Our friends looked as if we were going to poison them, but they gamely tried them. They were as hooked on morels as we were. A couple of years later, when mushrooms sprang from new mulch they had had delivered to their courtyard a couple of weeks before, they recognized them, invited us over to pick, and we all had a morel feast.

One summer we spent a vacation with several friends in Westport, MA. At the beach my Midwestern husband and I picked a bucketful of blue-black mussels off the rocks, steamed them with lemon and herbs and served them to our New England city-raised friends, who had never heard of them. After that, everyone picked them off the rocks and we had them about every night until we left.

That was then – before eating local, seasonal and even historical food like tongue was trendy and popular. Even now it isn’t easy to find these foods. Whole Foods doesn’t regularly carry tongue. Soft shell crab makes it to some restaurants menus, but it is only at Boston’s private clubs that you can regularly find shad roe. Nobody serves fava beans. Like quinces, another historical food, they take too long to prepare, I guess.

You can find recipes for all these foods online easily so I won’t bore you. But I’ll give you a few tips.

Morels. They are easily the best tasting mushrooms in the world. Few shops carry them, and when they do they’re usually dried out and expensive. My sister, who still lives in the Midwest, finds them for free in the woods. My sister-in-law orders them from Wisconsin. When they arrive, split them in half, wash and clean them because you’ll find a few bugs. Use them in pasta, over toast or flour them lightly and cook them in butter until crisp.

Fava beans. Remove them from the pod. Slip them into boiling water for a minute or two. Plunge them into ice to stop the cooking. When they are cool, slip off the skins to reveal bright green beans with a lovely taste. A bit of lemon juice, salt and pepper and a dash of olive oil is all they need. In English grocery stores, where they are sometimes called broad beans, you can get them already out of the pod. I don’t know why the American food-industrial complex hasn’t figured out how to do that here.

Shad roe. Cook bacon, drain most of the fat, then cook the roe in the same pan. This is easy.

Fiddleheads. Trim them, blanch them for a minute or two in boiling water and then sauté with garlic or shallots.

Soft shell crabs. Have the butcher trim them, roll them in corn meal and then sauté. I never do this as well as a couple of restaurants I know. So we usually order them at those restaurants.

Tongue. Go to Julia Child’s recipes. She’ll teach you everything you need to know. But I imagine you won’t bother.

 

Airbnb woes

Airbnb and its cohorts have been a lifesaver for some downtown residents. They say that renting out a room in their home has allowed them to afford Boston’s high rents or helped them pay for the costly mortgages they have to take on if they buy a place.

Travelers like the arrangement because living in a neighborhood rather than a hotel gives them a more authentic experience.

But it’s complicated. Public officials have received many complaints. Neighborhood leaders, through the Alliance of Downtown Civic Organizations (ADCO), are concerned. State Representative Aaron Michlewitz has filed legislation trying to rein in abuses. Mayor Walsh issued an executive order in early May that instructs city departments to find out what is going on.

Anecdotally, neighbors say that individual apartments, whole rental buildings and entire single-family houses are being rented to strangers, removing from the market scarce housing that could be rented long-term, violating occupancy or zoning regulations, or frightening occupants of multi-family buildings because strangers are always coming and going. Long-time residents are concerned that an influx of short-term occupants, who have no stake in the neighborhood, will further erode conditions that are already challenging when people live densely in small quarters.

“It’s about quality of life,” said Arturo Gossage, a Chinatown resident who participates in ADCO. “Communities are not being preserved because of this practice.”

Is the problem bad? How extensive is it? No one knows. Rumors persist that renters are living elsewhere and renting their apartment to short-term occupants without their landlord’s knowledge. Another rumor is that the new Ink Block in the South End is filled with Airbnb-ers. Chinatown has at least two entire buildings devoted to Airbnb, said Gossage.

“It’s hard to gauge because you don’t really know who’s renting Airbnb,” said Toni Gilardi, a long-time real estate agent in the North End.

The impetus for owners to rent by the night rather than by the year is big bucks. Let’s say a two-bedroom apartment rents for $3,000 a month. If an owner listed it on Airbnb for $200 a night, probably a low figure, he or she could come away with $6,000 in a 30–day month. Expenses are limited. Of course, not every night might be rented. But still.

Tourists may prefer to have a whole apartment to themselves rather than a room in a stranger’s house.

Here’s what we do know. On one day in early May, 211 entire home rentals were listed for two people wanting to stay on Beacon Hill. Four of these were at 112 Myrtle Street.

In Charlestown, 126 entire homes were available. In the North End, 159 homes were listed, but the site showed only 15 rooms in someone’s house or apartment. In the Back Bay a whopping 306 entire homes were available with only 46 listings for a room in someone’s home.

It looks as if there is a trend, and it is what residents have feared. A significant number of whole apartments and single houses are being rented through Airbnb and its copy cat sites, and it is rarely the nice hosts renting out their spare bedroom. It appears as if a whole support industry of management businesses and cleaning services have gotten into the act, although this column doesn’t have room to explore all that.

Some protections in some buildings exist. Condo associations often have clauses in their agreements that prevent owners from renting their entire apartment on a short-term basis. Depending on the size and configuration of the building and how well people know one another, however, a scofflaw can be difficult to find.

Cities all over America are grappling with this matter. As of early May, Airbnb agreed to register its San Francisco hosts, and the city will make it possible to obtain registrations electronically. New York has made it illegal to rent a home for fewer than 30 days, and can issue fines to people who advertise such a listing. Reportedly, an owner in Trump Tower paid a $1,000 fine for doing such a thing.

So in Boston there are data to be gathered, testimony to be heard and ultimately, probably, regulations to be imposed.

The irony, though, say some real estate brokers, is that those proverbial absentee landlords who have kept their rental apartments in bad shape probably won’t do much better with Airbnb than with long-term rentals. On Airbnb the visitors can rate them. Wouldn’t it be nice if long-term renters could do the same?

Competition might improve old rental buildings

Downtown residents are enjoying a certain satisfaction they didn’t expect. Those dreadful absentee landlords who suck all the rent money out of their buildings while keeping them in slum-like condition are now facing competition from such new luxury buildings as the Kensington in the Theatre District, the Avalon near North Station and the Watermark in the Seaport.

Those absentee landlords, who are all over the North End, Beacon Hill and to some extent, the Back Bay, might have to spend real dollars on fixing up their apartments. Poetic justice? You bet.

“Those older units are a dying breed,” observed Toni Gilardi, a long-time real estate broker in the North End. “Having a dishwasher is no longer a luxury. Kids are so spoiled that they walk into these places they can afford, and say, ‘Mommy, I can’t live here.’ ”

Betsey Barrett, a broker with Brewster & Berkowitz on Beacon Hill and in the Back Bay and South End, agreed.

“The new high-rise rentals have had a big impact,” she said. “Landlords who used to charge a premium and not update their space are now having to update or take significantly less rent.”

Barrett said she started talking with her landlords a couple of years ago about upgrading. Those that haven’t or are still charging high rents have been stuck with empty apartments.

“There has been a lot of inventory sitting in September, which is atypical for our market,” she said.

Despite the clear trend that landlords have to fix up their units or else, the brokers see smaller trends and more nuanced activity.

The new buildings are pricey – two-bedrooms with about 1,000 square feet in the Watermark are listed for between about $4,500 and $6,600. But you get a lot for the money—a billiard room, views, a sunbathing roof, a dog washing spa and a dog run, fitness center, yoga space, bicycle storage and a charging station for your electric car, among other amenities.

What don’t you get? The charm of the older neighborhoods, and the proximity of the shops and restaurants the city’s older neighborhoods enjoy, although those conveniences will eventually come to the newer buildings.

But compared to a nicely renovated one-bedroom, 331 square foot apartment on Willow Street on Beacon Hill for $3,000, about twice as much per square foot as a luxury building, many young people would probably choose the Watermark and invite a roommate to share the cost.

A subtlety brokers have noticed is that with the sales market so tight, renters who otherwise might have bought a place and moved into it, thus freeing up their unit, are staying put.

As more new units have come on the market, there has been a slight dip in the average rent. That may be due in part to the old buildings’ neglectful landlords having to lower their rent. Gilardi has noticed that some new apartments offer free rent for a month or two to soften the blow of the high cost.

She expects to see a lot of churn because of high rents and possible vacancies in the new buildings. “Renters are going for the deals in high rises,” she explained. “When the rent goes up to what it is supposed to be, they may move back to the older units.”

If the new luxury rental buildings face vacancies, she expects the owners to turn them into condominiums and sell them. That will take rental units off the market.

She also said that with the high sales prices, individual landlords are selling their units as condominiums, also taking them off the rental market.

Another peculiarity she’s noticed—broken leases. “Prices are going up, but there is at the same time a significant number of lease breaks in the middle of the term in January, February and March,” she observed.

She said Boston might be losing talent to warmer climes, or that people have had changes in jobs or marital status, but she has no solid explanation for this trend.

Gilardi is philosophical about the changing rental market. “The market moves constantly,” she said. “If it didn’t, people would have no place to live because the people who are settled would never give up their apartments.”

Better skyscrapers

Consider Los Angeles. It’s enjoying an upgrade. With refurbished hotels, new residential buildings, a spruce-up of its gorgeous library and all the services and restaurants that come with a dense population, LA’s downtown is finally full of vitality.

It also looks good. One reason is the tops of some of its new buildings. In 2014, after much complaint from Angelenos about the city’s boring skyline, LA officials rescinded an ordinance that required its skyscrapers to have flat roofs to accommodate a rooftop helipad.

What’s Boston’s excuse?

Now consider Chicago. As much as Boston boosters brag about the many cranes dotting this city, Chicago is on steroids compared to Boston. Fifty-two high rises, such as the stacked Vista Tower, are under construction, and other gems —River Point and Aqua, for example—have recently opened.

The Second City has a reputation for gun violence. It is second, I’m told, not because New York is first, but because Chicago had to be built a second time after Old Ma Leary’s cow kicked over that lantern and burned the place to the ground.

But guns and its 19th-century rebirth are not its whole story. It’s the many beautiful new buildings, sculptural, reflective, light-filled that spread through the Loop and beyond. One building perches on a thin, horizontal line on the ground, with support beams rising at angle. It looks as if a toddler on a ladder could push it over. Even the Trump building, whose developer is not known for his aesthetic, is beautiful. Not all the buildings have interesting tops, but some do. I don’t know how Chicago seems so light and airy with all those tall buildings, but it does. From afar, part of the reason is its varied tops, some featuring steps, others points, some crowns.

Now consider Boston. Flat tops everywhere. Recently when I quizzed friends about a Boston high rise they liked, they came up with nothing.

We can do little about the buildings already built. But we can insist that buildings now proposed do better at the top.

That’s why I want to bring up Millennium Partner’s Winthrop Square project. The controversy over this building has been all about its shadow. But now that the Boston City Council has sent a home rule petition to the legislature that would exchange this building’s shadow for the shadows in the shadow bank, it is one step closer to being built.

If the legislature changes the shadow law, we’ll have little time to consider what has been ignored so far—the design—a clunky, rectangular box with a flat top scored by vertical protrusions. Surely, there are no helicopters in its future, so why must it have a flat roof?

Millennium uses the same architects, who employ glass and slight angles on the tops, over and over again. Some of the vertical setbacks on the new, dark Millennium Tower are nice touches, but this third tallest building in the city does nothing for the skyline. If Winthrop Square is going to get built, it is time for Millennium to do better.

The Boston Planning and Development Agency is partly to blame for making Boston’s skyline so dreary. It has paid attention to the ground level. But it acts as if tops don’t exist. The BPDA could issue directives to encourage more interesting design at the top. Like New York City did in the 1920s and 1930s, it could require some buildings to taper to reduce the amount of shadow on surrounding buildings.

After all, whenever a skyscraper is deified, extolled, copied and featured in books, lectures or other programs, it’s almost always a building with a great top. The Mies van der Rohe boxes are typically mentioned only as a style of a particular time. But neither Boston’s Pru nor its John Hancock nor the tall, banal boxes lining the Avenue of the Americas get attention.

When New York’s skyline is featured, the focus is still typically on the old, pointy-topped Empire State and the Chrysler building, although One World Trade Center gets some recognition. Other pictures feature the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The flat-topped, bulbous Walkie-Talkie building in London gained notoriety for melting a car with its convex reflecting glass, but in 2015 it was also voted the UK’s worst new building. When London skyline is pictured, the focus is on the Scalpel, the Gherkin and the Shard, all with distinctive tops.

So what makes a successful skyscraper? Chicago’s skyscrapers demonstrate many of the qualities—using excellent materials, taking advantage of perspective, employing colorful glass, reflective glass, good lighting, interesting shapes, good ground level activity, often step-backs, a middle emphasizing verticality and interesting tops. Boston needs to up its game.

Being left out

Are you working hard? Paying attention? Being involved?

Some people apparently believe you aren’t. You are not worthy of their attention. They are leaving you out.

The Boston Water and Sewer Commission is one of the perpetrators. Its recent flyer listed the sites in each neighborhood to which Boston residents could go to meet a BWSC staff member and pay a bill or get answers to questions. The problem? There were no sites listed for the Downtown and Waterfront, Bay Village, Beacon Hill or the Back Bay. Do residents of those neighborhoods have no needs? You could probably traipse over to the North End branch library or Chinatown’s Benevolent Association on Tyler Street to do business with water and sewer, but still.

This brings up a strange way the city has of lumping neighborhoods together. For example, city officials usually speak of Beacon Hill and the Back Bay in one breath. It’s true they lie next to one another and sort of share a demographic. But life in these two neighborhoods is completely different.

With long blocks, large buildings, back alleys and parking spaces in those alleys, Back Bay residents have more in common with the South End than with Beacon Hill. Beacon Hill, with its narrow streets, narrow sidewalks, trash out on those sidewalks twice a week and nowhere but the street for cars to park, is more like the North End than it is like the Back Bay.

And then there’s Bernie. Say it isn’t so, Bernie. You don’t want some of us anymore. When you were in Boston in early April you and Senator Elizabeth Warren had a great rally. Then you dropped the bombshell: you “proposed a restructuring of the Democratic Party, one [that] would be made up of the working class, rather than the ‘liberal elite,’ ” the newspapers reported.

Who do you think was there cheering you on in downtown Boston? A large percentage of the 1,600-plus college-educated crowd were members of that liberal elite.

That reminds me of the years I spent long ago in the National Writers Union. As a member, I was also a non-paying member of the United Auto Workers. (Bernie, would that get me back in your good graces?) I liked the NWU. I participated in workshops and a writers’ group and made many friends who have had success with their writing. One member came up with the title of my first book. I demonstrated with the NWU in front of a Back Bay bookseller when that fearful chain decided not to carry Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses because of threats from the haters. The National Writers Union was a good organization.

But I noticed something: some members seemed more interested in being in a union, especially one in which your job did not require you to shower off the grime at the end of every day, than they were in writing. They were incurable romantics in love with the labor movement, and the only way they could become part of that labor movement was to do it with writers.

But back to Bernie. I wondered. Who is he referring to when he rejects the liberal elite? Is it people who live in Boston who have been to college? Is it National Writers Union members who actually write for a living? Isn’t he one of the members of the liberal elite?

So many questions. So many prejudices. So much name calling. So much partitioning off everyone from everyone else.

There is another insidious way of being left-out. The victims are those who can’t stay up late. How are we early-to-bedders going to enjoy Saturday Night Live and Stephen Colbert, which everyone is talking about? Why can’t these programs be on at 9 p.m. or even 10 p.m.? Record them, you say. Play them at other times. I know. I’m just complaining that they’re leaving lots of people out of that great communal feeling that we’re all laughing at the same time.

Boston’s future mobility

The city published its Go Boston 2030 report in mid-March. It is 223 pages long. I read it so you don’t have to. It’s taken me awhile.

It is available electronically at http://goboston2030.org/en/. Suggestions are accompanied by a note explaining how other cities have fared with such changes, a nice touch.

After I read the report, I checked in with a few people familiar with the project. The complaints were consistent. The solutions are small ideas. Many of them won’t address big problems. And the period of time the report predicts it will take to implement the solutions seems far too long. 2030? We need many of these solutions now.

But there’s much to like in Go Boston 2030. It involved many citizens. One overwhelming theme emerged: Bostonians want fewer cars on the roads and many more options for walking, biking and transit riding. Everyone wanted the ways we get around to be safer, better, faster, more reliable and less congested. “Every home should be within a 10-minute walk of a rail station, a key bus route stop, a Hubway station or a car share,” the report urged.

The principles the city employed were that plans must work for ALL Bostonians, they must foster economic opportunity, and they must respond to climate change by reducing emissions and enabling Bostonians to get around despite severe weather. Aren’t you proud of a city with those principles?

The project illuminated interesting facts: Of the people who both live and work in Boston, 36 percent ride public transit, 27 percent walk to work, and 38 percent drive alone or in a carpool. In the North End, Beacon Hill and downtown more than 40 percent walk to work.

The report’s biggest surprise was about commuting times from homes to jobs. Mattapan residents are screwed big-time. It takes them twice as long to get to work as it does the average of people in every neighborhood. Some other outlying neighborhoods have long travel times too. Downtown neighborhoods fare well in such measures. The report noted that higher housing costs mean lower transportation costs.

Achieving equality is challenging because of past history. Lower income neighborhoods rely more on slow buses while higher income neighborhoods have better access to rapid transit. Is their aversion to helping poor people why Congress finds it so hard to fund public transit? Another reason to be grateful that Boston is beginning to address this inequity.

Some suggested solutions seemed to exacerbate the problems. If you consolidate bus stops so the bus won’t have to stop as much the bus will go faster, but some stops will be farther from many riders’ homes. Running a bus from North Station to the Seaport district won’t sit well with North End and Waterfront residents, who think Atlantic Avenue and the Greenway roads are already impassible.

Many routes labeled “Bus Rapid Transit’ are not rapid since they share lanes with cars. Yet installing such lanes is estimated to take more than five years. Why so long?

“It has to be done the right way,” said Vineet Gupta, director of policy and planning for the Boston Transportation Department. “It requires us to work with the local community.”

When such lanes are created it usually requires the city to eliminate driving and parking lanes, he said.

But this report shows that the Boston residents want such things to occur. Meanwhile I’m feeling pretty bad about our Mattapan neighbors who are sitting in those slow buses.

Some pieces are missing in the report. Wayfinding isn’t mentioned much, especially the problem that newcomers might not know where they are because Boston does not install street signs on such thoroughfares as Commonwealth or Massachusetts Avenue. Several people have pointed out that taxis not mentioned anywhere. Have we decided that taxis play no part in transportation?

The North South Rail Link is not mentioned either, even though estimates predict it would take 55,000 cars off Boston-area roads. That clearly addresses the climate change and emissions goal. The rail link would also enable residents in the north to get to jobs in the south and vice versa, which addresses the economic opportunity piece. I’ve been clear before in this column that I’m an advocate for seriously studying the NSRL to judge if its promise lives up to scrutiny.

The report does mention the South Station expansion, which some predict will be out of date and at capacity as soon as it is completed.

A turf war is going on between those two projects. That is not good for the city. Minds need to open so that both projects get fully and fairly vetted.

One interesting matter regarding Go Boston 2030 is the way things are structured here.

This was the city’s effort to understand what Bostonians want in mobility but, except for streets and sidewalks, the city does not control Boston’s transportation. The MBTA does.

Gupta says his department works closely with the MBTA, and I believe him.

It would have been nice, however, to have some indication of how the city and the MBTA will work together to achieve residents’ goals.

And then there is the money problem. We’re not going to have an excellent transportation system with economic opportunity, equality and reliability without a lot of dollars to make it happen.