Get outta town is exactly what former Dig editor and BoMag contributor Joe Keohane decided to do a while ago, making the unthinkable move to our near-neighbor, New York. When Keohane made up his mind to leave the city, he was surprised by how quickly Boston turned a cold shoulder. He tried to conjure up moments of nostalgia:
I strolled over the Mass. Ave. bridge from Cambridge in late afternoon, when the city's skyline turns to gold... I walked through the Common and the Haffenreffer Walk in the Public Garden, along Charles Street, and up and down the side streets of the Back Bay. I hit Southie, Dorchester, and the bars in Central and Harvard, listening to the Bosstones, or the Lemonheads, or Jonathan Richman on my headphones... If I had expected one last go-round with the city, a teary farewell from an old friend, I got the equivalent of "I'm not going to give you the satisfaction, you prick," topped off with not one but three grisly bicycle near-accidents in a two-day span, and 12 hours of torrential rain on moving day.
Sounds like a pretty Boston reaction to us. But is that how the city should be? Is that how it has to be?
Keohane reminisces, of his last days in town,
When I found myself feeling especially warm toward Boston, my mind never stayed in the present. It inevitably went back to Morphine at the Plough & Stars, waiting in line for a new record at midnight at the old Tower Records, drinking coffee and staring at the State House from the frozen windows of Curious Liquids on Beacon Hill (today a shiny Fox 25 studio), or late-night beers and BLTs at the long-defunct Deli Haus in once-wonderful Kenmore Square, now locked in an epic battle with Boylston Street to see which can host Boston's ghastliest hotel structure.
Is Boston on the decline? Are we now a House of Blues city instead of an Avalon city? Are the Red Sox and Celtics the new Yankees or Lakers? Has whatever character we had given way to consumerism? Or has incessant MBTA rudeness finally driven us to despair?
Keohane expects "a future of feeling like Pigpen in Peanuts, carrying a visible dust cloud of Boston around me, hoping that the wind doesn't blow it away." Is there any way to prevent a Boston that residents once knew from fading away?
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