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Magnetic Fields New Album - Realism
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Bite Size News, November 10: Cuts That Hurt Edition
Zooming in on the South End/Roxbury in Google Maps something interesting showed up: the gentrification line. The high resolution images are in their satellite database for all of Downtown and Back Bay. Most of the South End is included, but once you cross over Mass Ave, into what we generally accept as Roxbury, things aren't quite as clear, they aren't as green either. Back in January the Globe ran a piece called "Breaching Mass Ave: Gentrification that touched the east side of Boston's South End is finally expanding across an imaginary dividing line towards a once neglected neighborhood." While they seemed to neglect large portions of Roxbury and Mission Hill and even adjacent Dorchester in that article they did make a fair point about the run-down shape of the area right across Mass Ave from some of the recently renovated brownstone neighborhoods of the South End.
The Google Maps put together images taken at different times of the year. The South End, Back Bay, and the rest of Downtown Boston appears sunny with healthy looking trees, the rest of the city is brown and fuzzy. We're not 100% sure, but we've only noticed gentrification of neighborhoods taking hold, and not The Nothing sweeping through. Coincidence? Perhaps, but it's an interesting look at the city.
Bonus – A clip with Atreyu talking to the Rock Biter about The Nothing.
Bonus 2 - the music video for The NeverEnding Story's theme song
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OK this is something that really annoys me about the Bostonist attitude. You guys are real estate suckers who think a good neighborhood has to be paved over and covered with condos. In fact another picture from Google Maps can illustrate how this has not played out in our own city.
I invite you to go to google maps and copy in Presentation Rd, Brighton MA. (I can't include the link here). You will see two neighborhoods. The right is the Presentation Hill neighborhood of Brighton. Part of Boston. To the left is Newton. At one time both of these neighborhoods were part of Boston. When the Turnpike was built, Boston ceded the neighborhood to the left to the City of Newton. In that time, the permissive and corrupt zoning practices of Boston filled in the yards of the Brighton neighborhood while the Newton side maintained its larger lots and lower population.
For their trouble, the Boston residents have seen lower property values, poorer services, fewer parks and open spaces, and dramatically awful schools (57% graduation rate).
Building did not make for better property and better quality of life for the Boston residents. So if we look at your map, what are we hoping for? That the area on the off-side of your gentrification line look like the roofs on the "good" side? Please take a walk down that street, and see what is on the good side. I can tell you that gentrification on the street level in Roxbury means a whole lot of institutional nothing.
You are making cause with the sleaziest people in the world, city-connected real estate developers who use their money to buy off the politicians and zoning board. The strip-mining of open space in Boston is a sign of a declining city which is living off its irreplacable natural resources.
Boy, that's not at all what I was trying to get across. It's a funny thing that the line between what real estate folks/the globe tell you is "good" and "bad" neighborhoods just so happens to show up on the google map as "high res" and "low res" - coincidentally. I think I've made my thoughts clear about the beauty of a diverse and wonderful boston, esp. Roxbury which I love.
OK I didn't mean to slam you. I just recently had to walk along some of those streets, and development in these areas means big institutional buildings with very little for the public to do in them. Maybe a few chain stores that close down at 5 p.m., and of course all the parking is wiped off the city streets when a big builder wants everything to look like their architectural elevation.
As for real estate, the Globe is totally in the bag.