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Lenny from the West End remembers the old neighborhood
By adamg on Tue, 05/22/2012 - 8:24am
WBUR talks to Leonard Nimoy about being forced to leave his boyhood neighborhood:
I wish I could go back to my roots. I can't. They’re gone. The buildings are all torn down. I try walking with my wife to show her where I lived, but it's so difficult because the street configuration has changed so much that I feel it’s gone. I feel my roots are gone.
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Comments
Horatio Caine's take
"Looks like the old neighborhood never did...live long and prosper."
I damn near broke up when he
I damn near broke up when he said that.
It really was the biggest
It really was the biggest disaster for the Boston skyline to tear down the West End. On one end the neighborhood was a mess when they did it, but what they replaced it with is 10x worse and is ridiculously out of place today. It makes me wonder if we'll look back in 20 years and think the same thing about the new monstrosities that NEU and Wentworth call dorms.
Obviously architectural tastes change but it seems what replaced the West End and what some of these new towers look like are not "timeless" designs.
Peterborough
http://www.bostontipster.com
The neighborhood was not "a
The neighborhood was not "a mess."
One difference with the dorms
is that the NEU/Wenteworth/MassArt buildings are all close to the street and pedestrian friendly. We've at least learned that much from the days of redevelopment mania. Architecture is a different question, and every building is going to be judged by varying criteria. But it would be impossible to make a credible case that these colleges are destroying the neighborhood by building dorm towers.
I'm not saying they're
I'm not saying they're destroying the neighborhood but as a matter of personal preference they just look terrible. It all comes down to what each individual likes themselves but I think that skyscrapers like One International, 111 Huntington, or the West Village dorms for Northeastern are more timeless designs that add to the visual design of Boston now and in the future.
It just feels like International Village for NEU and the new Wentworth building will be seen as visual disasters in 10 years compared to other new designs.
I'm all for new taller buildings and love the mix that Boston has of traditional brownstones and newer skyscrapers.
Peterborough
http://www.bostontipster.com
Density too
The issue with the west end is really made apparent if you've ever tried to walk around it. While the towers themselves are dense, there's lots of underused land, and none of it is pedestrian or neighborhood friendly.
It's like walking around "under the clouds" in some futuristic, dystopian mega city.
It really conforms to the old idea that you work there, you play there, and you live here... and you use your car (or in the future jet pack!) to get around. And it's lethal to vibrant cities and communities.
Better that universities
Better that universities build up rather than sprawl out.
Illogical
This is a man who has lived much of his life in Los Angeles, a sentinel city for constant architectural and personal reinvention.
And he now laments that, eighty years later, his childhood spaces should remain the same?
Illogical.
(not that what happened to the West End isn't both a crime and a touchstone of filtered nostalgia for a place that did have some intractible infrastructural issues - like endemic polio ... but this doesn't make any sense)
Yeah! Doesn't everyone
Yeah! Doesn't everyone remember how the BRA was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for discovering that the polio vaccine was created by bulldozing the West End?
Polio cured by changing address?
That's news to me. By most historical reckonings, the West End was not particularly crime or disease ridden. It was rarely if ever described as a slum or ghetto - until the campaign was launched to redevelop the area (thank you BRA!)
And btw, Mr. Nemoy has always lamented the destruction of the West End. I remember, as a young sci-fi fan in the 70s, listening to him talk about the fact that he had no 'home-land' to return to - it had been torn down.
Endemic polio?
How is polio endemic to a neighborhood? Did everyone drink out of the same water fountain or something?
I don't think that anyone expects their neighborhood to stay completely the same, but the West End was almost entirely wiped off the map and replaced with something woefully...uninteresting. Especially compared to what was there (and I admit that my impressions of it all come from photographs and stories) the whole area is shockingly sterile and sad, disconnected, fruitless.
Ever talk to a doc who worked the iron lung wards?
No?
The West End had some problems with polio epidemics - apparently more so than other areas of the city according to the emeretus med professors and retired docs I've met who worked the wards as young doctors.
The problems that led to those epidemics should have been fixed ... but let us not pretend that the West End was some sort of Eden (yeah, brother).
North End
I haven't seen the numbers for the West End, but don't forget that the North End was accused of being a disease-ridden slum as well.
Of course, the real numbers showed that the North End had a very low mortality rate. But that didn't stop the "experts" from believing otherwise; after all it was a "slum" and therefore must be filled with terrible things!
It's not much of a leap to presume that the West End was receiving a similar slander.
Um, no.
I'm not denying the existence of polio--before my time but I've known people who survived it. But the labeling of a certain neighborhood as disease-ridden as a precursor to bulldozing it for entirely different motives seems pretty well-established. And no--no Eden either, but clearly a lively and beloved place, given the stories of the people who lived there and the number of residents who turned out at the time to fight the demolition. It wasn't like one of those towns that have been hopelessly contaminated by lead mining or anything. It's interesting to imagine what it would be like now--I'm guessing North Endish, boutiques and restaurants, students, tourists. Maybe a little funkier. Still, we'll never know.
jeez cut the guy some slack,
jeez cut the guy some slack, he can't wish to visit his old stomping grounds? Had he been from any other neighborhood in the city he'd be guaranteed to have plenty of nostalgic infrastructure left...
and for the record, for all its reinvention, one can make a whole vacation out of visiting pre-WWII filming locations in LA: Laurel and Hardy's stairs, the Olvera Street buildings of Chaplin's "The Kid", and others. Granted its not the North End, but there are few neighborhoods out there that are as drastically changed within one lifetime as the West End.
I feel for Mr. Nimoy
and all the other old West-Enders, but I feel even worse for Mr. Spock whose entire home planet and his Mom were pulverized by Romulan thugs.
Alternate timelines don't
Alternate timelines don't count.
Damnit
So you mean when he goes through the Portal in the Neighborhood on the Edge of Forever, he and Jerry Rappaport still have to hold back the doctor and let Edith Keeler die so that the If You Lived Here buildings can be built?
My god, I've been out-nerded.
My god, I've been out-nerded. Who am I?
Do you have a goatee?
Are you evil Adam?
No, but ...
Half my face is black and the other side is white. It's my arch-nemesis, the guy whose face is white with the other side black who's the real troublemaker.
Now that was....
... a pretty dumb episode.
Besides, if they don't,
Mr. Potter will take over Bedford Falls and turn it into a hellhole.
It would have been worth saving Edith Keeler
if the result were a restored West End.