How Lagrange Street in Chinatown got its name

By on Thu, 01/03/2019 - 9:39am

Aline Kaplan explains its link to the Marquis de Lafayette and takes a look at its later descent into a key part of the Combat Zone.

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not a ZZ top fan?

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Shouldn't it be "A-how-how-how-how LaGrange Street got its name"?

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I thought it was going to be space-related

A Lagrange point is a location in space where the combined gravitational forces of two large bodies, such as Earth and the sun or Earth and the moon, equal the centrifugal force felt by a much smaller third body. The interaction of the forces creates a point of equilibrium where a spacecraft may be "parked" to make observations.

These points are named after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, an 18th-century mathematician who wrote about them in a 1772 paper concerning what he called the "three-body problem."

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in (boston) english you would

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in (boston) english you would say "la grange" with emphasis on the second syllable, soft second g, silent e, and pronounce the second "a" like you would in the word "and" ...in french it would be similar except you would pronounce the "r" more like a "w" and the second "a" like you would say "aw" as in "aw shucks"

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Long "A" Sound

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I was born in and have lived in Boston for over 50 years ago and never did I hear "La Grange" pronounced with an "a" like "and", as in "grand". It is pronounced with a long "a" sound like range, as in "home on the range". Or like the color gray. La Gray-nge

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The Grange

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But with a La instead of The.

As in "let's go to the dance over at the Grange Hall".

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Interesting but highly condensed

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Interesting but highly condensed history of the Combat Zone. Counter-intuitively enough, the Combat Zone also had a certain facade of "respectability" about it. Circa 1976 Mayor Kevin White even had a ribbon cutting ceremony declaring it "Boston's official red light district". The 70s were like that, for better or for worse.

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Interesting

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Good read. The only thing I would take issue with is that it says the Combat Zone was killed by the internet. It is much more complicated than that. Its demise started much earlier and the technology of that day was the VCR. Also a lot of credit should be given to the community

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Historical accuracy?

I am struggling to understand how the chateau could at the same time be "untouched since the death of la Fayette" and also contain walled off rooms with documents as recent as 1990

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Left unsaid

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The murder of Harvard football player Andy Puopolo was the event that really galvanized City Hall into closing the Zone.

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