I lived in the South End for most of the 1990s, by which point gentrification was all but complete. In this summer of strife, the story of this beautiful “city upon a hill” struggling against its ugliest impulses might well be the story of the United States. The Harvard-educated Yankee lawyer who goes to work for the charismatic and progressive mayor and moves to the South End in the vanguard of gentrification. It can seem contradictory: A city caricatured for its intellectual liberalism (or snobbery), it’s also socially conservative, and proudly working class. BOSTON‘Common Ground’Boston is a fiercely tribal city, a complex taxonomy of neighborhood and parish, race and ethnicity, Harvard and Boston College.

Source: New York Times August 04, 2016 17:45 UTC