Chez Chesler

Yet another job switch (and a much better economy for programmers :-) ) has me working in downtown Boston for the first time (and the first time I've engineered in any city since my very first professional gig at 26 Broadway, over Bowling Green, during the year I took off from college switching from pre-med to anything else.) I've got a bus commute from the other side of the house next to mine to about 2 blocks from the office -- that's nice! I've long known that "once you leave New York it's all Connecticut" and "Boston is nice, if you like small towns" but I hadn't realized just how true it is. Here I am in Post Office Square, the heart of the downtown financial district, the closest Boston has to concrete canyons, with a mix of pre-war buildings (this section was rebuilt after the great fire of 1872, and has served finance since then) and modern skyscrapers, and I'm not impressed. The non-rectilinear streets (the theory is that Boston streets were laid out either by cows or taxi drivers) give it a smaller scale, but it simply _is_ small. All of Boston proper (excluding the assimilated towns like Charlestown and Dorchester) and most of Cambridge would fit in the area below 14th Street; all of the inner suburbs (the Route 128 belt) would fit in the area of the 5 boroughs. But a lot of it is the people, instead of the New York mix of serious business people, all sorts of cutting edge fashion and urban culture, and all sorts of crazy (from those who march to different drummers to the outright delusional) we've got suburbanites, tourists, students, and the rare homeless beggar. I could make myself at home in San Francisco. Chicago felt like home. There are some suburbs here (Medford) that feel a lot like the north central Bronx. But as the song says, "Massachusetts is a long cry from New York."