Headphones or earbuds are becoming common in the workplace. Not just for listening to music on a break, they allow people to tune out their co-workers all day long. But in many cases, those same co-workers are still communicating — online. ...
"We're getting used to a new way of being alone together," says Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
She's concerned that all these snippets of information, texts and posts are connections, not conversations. She says technology is letting us hide from one another.
The horrified fascination with loneliness — when will Washington declare war on it? — goes back to the 2000 book Bowling Alone and has intensified with the greater use of smartphones, hook-up sites, iPads, Twitter, etc.
I'm not convinced that loneliness is on the rise. I suspect that it's always been pervasive in free societies (as opposed to places with arranged marriages and the like) and that we're just disappointed that we haven't figured out a way to eliminate it.
The debate over Boston's dull nightlife, and the possibility of improving it, has flared up again in recent weeks. The spark was the launch of the Future Boston Alliance, a group that advocates for a "loosened-up" city; it was unsurprisingly brushed off by the 19-year-old Menino adminstration. (Note to blog followers primarily interested in my Top 100 Sitcom Episodes countdown: This is not off-topic, as the depiction of community-building is one thing that interests me about sitcoms.)
This morning, on the Sunday of a long weekend when just about everyone with the means has fled Boston, the Globe's Dante Ramos weighed with an indictment of the "Boston bar buzz-kill":
Nightlife — the bars, clubs, and restaurants where people hang out after hours — is a major part of the image a city presents to the world, or at least to a crucial sliver of entrepreneurial, highly mobile workers who are prone to comparison-shopping among cities. Yet Boston’s anti-fun image isn’t just bad publicity; it’s written into the law. Happy-hour drink promotions are banned statewide under a Dukakis-era state measure meant to curb drunk driving. Another state law requires bars to obtain a specific license before they allow patrons to dance. Boston’s entertainment license application asks venues to quantify their dartboards and wide-screen TVs. The rules are enforced. At a February concert at the House of Blues, Boston police broke up a mosh pit they deemed insufficiently supervised.
Matthew Yglesias uses today's new job numbers to further his "end of retail" theme:
According to the BLS, about 2 million more people were working last month than were working a year ago. But we have 10,000 fewer people working in general merchandise stores. We have 20,000 fewer people working in electronics and appliance stores. We have 17,000 fewer people working in "sporting goods, hobby, book, and music stores."
In particular, note the loss of 21,000 people working in "department stores," in contrast to a gain of 5,900 working in "health and personal care stores."
Since then, it's been announced that a huge Walgreens drugstore will replace the defunct Borders Books in Downtown Crossing ("health and personal care" padding its lead), and people are salivating over the possibility of a Wegmans supermarket replacing the Filene's Pit (shown at right). You might recall that when Filene's closed in 2006, we were hoping for a Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, or Target store to breathe life into the area.
If it weren't for cellphone stores, the breadth of new spending opportunities downtown would range all way from hamburgers to antacid.
Matthew Yglesias crunches the latest employment numbers and returns to a theme that he and I are fascinated with:
General Merchandise Stores stores got killed with 35,400 job losses while Food Services and Drinking Places added a stellar 40,800 jobs. That's the future of the retail environment if you ask me. Fewer stores, more eating and boozing. Health care (as ever) adds lots of jobs.
Lately I've been acutely aware of living in an apartment building, thanks to the noise (some of it, alas, my own) and a number of fire alarms going off in the middle of the night. But I still prefer communal living to having to worry about gophers in the driveway and snow on the roof. And most of my friends live in multi-family dwellings -- apartments, condos, and two-to-three-family starter homes that allow you to collect rent to go toward paying the mortgage.
A little more than one-third of all residents in Massachusetts live in multi-unit housing, second only to New York (see all the states' data after the jump). But what's common here is pretty weird in the rest of the US. Only 20% of all Americans live in multi-unit housing, and the number is as low as 8% in West Virginia. And my guess is, when that number is lower than the poverty rate (which is 18% of the entire population in West Virginia, compared with 15% nationally and 11% in Massachusetts), pretty much everyone with shared roofs are poor. Which must make the idea of voluntarily living above or below other people seem even weirder.
Apartment dwellers are commonplace in TV sitcoms, but American politics has a bias toward homeowners (think of the tax deduction for mortgages). The map above shows an extremely theoretical Electoral College majority of states with the highest shares of people living in multi-unit housing. What's interesting is that Florida and Texas are more urban, by this measure, than the older industrial states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
My new article on the downtown department store, and its inevitable decline, is in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Here's a taste:
It’s looking like Christmas in Boston’s Downtown Crossing, thanks to the wreaths, the colored lights, and the 60-foot tree at Macy’s, but the holiday decorations can’t hide a ghost at the center of it all: the cheerless facade and huge hole in the ground that used to be Filene’s.
Today, Christmas shopping for most of us means going online or driving out to a mall. But not too long ago, it was a different kind of experience. In Boston, it meant a trip downtown to Filene’s or Jordan Marsh, the department stores that would try to outdo each other in winter-themed window displays and oversized wreaths. It meant riding escalators up and down as you tried to decide between a scarf and a punch bowl for your sister or between a sweater and a camera for your dad.
For a century, department stores — real department stores, the ones built by local families, that dominated city centers and could take up entire blocks — ruled downtowns the way they ruled the holiday season. They felt like part of a city’s infrastructure, as much a part of the urban fabric as the parks and the libraries.
If you're a present or former resident of the Hub, check out Shopping Days in Retro Boston for a fantastic gallery of photos and ads from the Golden Age of department stores (mostly the 1950s).
A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for the Boston Globe on the explosion of eateries in the Hub (in contrast to the shuttering of retail stores like Borders). Yesterday's New York Post suggests that the trend is even stronger in the five boroughs.
The number of restaurants citywide skyrocketed by 42 percent -- from 5,610 to a gut-busting 7,966 -- between 1999 and 2009, a Post analysis of Census data released last month reveals.
For the record, the number of "full-service restaurants" (the category used by the Post) in Boston's Suffolk County increased 14 percent over the same period, from 661 to 754.
We've got to catch up. It just won't do to have New Yorkers look down on us as people who actually use our kitchens.
I have a new piece in today's Globe about the bars, restaurants, and food trucks that seem to be the only businesses opening in downtown Boston. I see some good things in the trend; bibliophiles and anti-obesity warriors may disagree. Here is a sample, but please check out the whole essay at Boston.com:
The city has always been about the spaces where people can run into each other. So cocktail bars and food trucks will fill the gap left by Filene’s Basement and Tower Records. Instead of checking out the new record releases every week, we can now peruse the city’s increasingly inventive cocktail menus or see what’s new on the board at J.P. Licks.
This probably isn’t great for our waists or our productivity. Downtown office buildings will have to offer nap rooms for workers who can’t resist three-taco lunches. But psychologically, a new emphasis on eating rather than buying things may be a healthy trend. In a Cornell University study published last year, people reported more long-term satisfaction from experiences (such as vacations) than from cars, TVs, and other consumer goods.
Photo of Boloco burrito shop on School Street from Boloco website.
One of the most frustrating dilemmas for mass transit advocates is that many (most?) people are exposed to subways and buses only during the worst conditions imaginable.
So there was plenty of bitching about MBTA service on Saturday, when hundreds of thousands of people came to downtown Boston for the Bruins victory parade. The T told the Boston Globe that a record 120,000 people took the commuter rail on Saturday, or almost double the ridership on a typical weekday. And there were plenty of horror stories about crowds stranded on station platforms while packed trains zipped by without stopping on their way into the city.
Is this really a surprise? I imagine a lot of suburbanites are asking, "How do people put up with this every day?", just as they do after New Year's Eve, the Fourth of July, and blizzards that force "drill, baby, drill" SUV owners onto noisy, smelly buses and trains. Some of them may be angry enough to demand cuts in public transit funding on the grounds that there's no point in throwing good money after bad.
Well, we true urbanites don't put up with this every day, and we stay the hell away from the T (or Boston altogether) when the bridge-and-tunnel crowds invade the Hub for a few hours. We know that it's impossible for any public transit system to double its capacity for one day. We also know that no public transit system can or should maintain staff and equipment levels to meet once-in-a-lifetime crowds. Indeed, if a subway system doesn't have crowded trains during rush hour — so packed that lots of people have to let a train or two go by before they can fit on one — it's surely wasting money.
I enjoy luxurious subway service, with short waits and plenty of seats, because I generally travel outside of rush hour. (There are occasional glitches with disabled trains and "signal problems," but they occur most often when unusually large crowds tax the system.) Same thing with popular restaurants: I tend to go on weeknights, when the service is better than on Friday and Saturday nights. Thanks, people who come into the city on weekends, for subsidizing the other nights when these restaurants are bearable!
As for the people injured on an escalator at Back Bay Station: That was terrible and shouldn't have happened. But next time you might consider not getting on an escalator that's overloaded with people who just swarmed off a crowded train. You could take the stairs or even hang back for a minute or two to let the crowd disperse before trying to get out of the station. Believe it or not, those of us who use the T every day are not trampled on a regular basis.
Borders Books is closing its downtown Boston branch (where I've done almost all my Christmas shopping over the past decade), which means more debate over why a growing, prosperous city has such a crummy central shopping district. The Filene's Pit debacle is one reason, of course, but there must be ways to improve the neighborhood around that giant hole on Washington Street, just as Boston should be able to fix up the Government Center area instead of being distracted by the unlikely prospect of tearing down City Hall. (Both places were in my "10 Worst Things About Boston" post.)
Tuesday's Boston Herald has some suggestions from its business writers for turning things around. But I can't imagine a casino being a good thng, despite Frank Quaratiello's argument that it would bring "foot traffic" and fill in storefronts. Don't gambling establishments offer cheap food and drink and do all they can to stop people from leaving? Are people really going to play the slots and then drop $80 for a meal at BIna Osteria or Petit Robert?
Besides, a lack of foot traffic isn't really the problem. There are plenty of pedestrians at all hours of the day, thanks in part to all the workers in the area. Nighttime is a different story, and other Herald writers are correct to urge more housing and round-the-clock activities, though I think the city has already been aiming for that.
My suggestion is cut back on the glitz (which is proliferating nicely in other parts of the city) and turn Downtown Crossing into an historic district.
Today in alleged news: The New York Times reports that Iowa and New Hampshire have disproportionate power* in determining who will lead the United States. And their bigfoot status is of a piece with the anti-urban bias (the US Senate is an even more glaring example) of American politics:
Above all, Iowa and New Hampshire lack a single big city, at a time when large metropolitan areas are crucial to lifting economic growth. Big metro areas are where big ideas most often take shape and great new companies are most often born. The country’s 25 largest areas are responsible for 52 percent of the country’s economic output, according to the Brookings Institution, and are home to 42 percent of the population.
Yet metro areas are also struggling with major problems. The quality of schools is spotty. Commutes last longer than ever. Roads, bridges, tunnels and transit systems are aging.
You don’t hear much about these issues in the first year of a presidential campaign, though.
The big picture quote in the piece is from the Brooking Institute's Bruce Katz, who says, “The United States stands apart as an anti-urban nation in an urbanizing world." He unfavorably compares us to China, where urban planning is at the core of economic strategy.
*Update: Jonathan Bernstein makes a valid point, that Iowa and New Hampshire have become less important than non-state-specific "support from party actors." That may have something to do with how many potential 2012 GOP candidates have dropped out long before Iowa. But I disagree with Bernstein (see his comments section) that the the dynamics of the general election give more weight to urban issues.
Not coincidentally, the Phoenix's David Bernstein today gives a big "CAUCUS PANDER WIN" to long-shot Republican presidential candidate Buddy Roemer, who promises to hold his inaugural balls in Iowa rather than in Washington, DC. Presumably, this would show the world how little we care about our job-generating, immigrant-attracting big cities. We could show China that our political elites are keeping a laser-like focus on the aging, population-losing, obsolete-industries backbone of our great nation!
Matt Yglesias suggests moving the first primary from New Hampshire to Massachusetts so that "we’d probably see candidates saying something about traffic jams, mass transit, regional planning, etc. instead of all farms all the time," but this has to be mostly for the joke of forcing GOP candidates to compete in the most educated state in the US. Yglesias says that he doesn't want to get too far from the small size of New Hampshire that supposedly helps little-known candidates. By that logic, we could move the first primary to Washington, DC, except that it has far too many... federal employees for the Republican Party's liking.
So why not shrink the New Hampshire primary to just Nashua, whose size (86,000) is reasonably close to the population median? (That is, a bit more than half of all Americans live in cities bigger than Nashua and almost half live in places that are smaller.) Or Portland, Maine, which is a bit smaller but slightly more diverse and, frankly, a lot more interesting?
It won't happen, of course, because of our national romance with little bitty towns where nothing happens. Speaking of which, I've been asked to post more Andy Griffith Show clips, so below is what is probably the best episode of the series, a Twilight Zone-ish tale of a "Man in a Hurry" to the big city of Charlotte who is trapped in Mayberry on a Sunday afternoon. (I think Mayberry is actually the afterlife here and he'll never escape.) Seriously, it's a beautifully written and produced episode, but I'd love to find an urban equivalent.
I wasn't aware of it when I posted my list of 10 things that bug me about Boston (including the Filene's Pit, the cap on alcohol licenses, and the running out of town of Sam Yoon), but John Keith had beaten me to it with his own Top 10 list on the Charlestown Patch site.
His list is completely different and includes too-frequent trash pick-ups (which mean garbage bags lining sidewalks too much of the time) and the madness of wearing flip-flops while walking through a city filled with dog poop.
The only one I'm dubious about is "Boston Common abuse," since I wouldn't mind a Shake Shack there.
