A City Not on a Hill

Joan Wickersham

 

EVERY CITY HAS a nickname, used primarily by people who don’t live there. New Yorkers don’t talk about “the Big Apple,” tourists do. My sister, who lives in Chicago, has never mentioned the wind to me. Boston, where I’ve lived for over thirty years (well, Cambridge, which for the purposes of this essay is close enough), is sometimes referred to as “the City on a Hill.” If nicknames in general have little chance of catching on, this one seems particularly clunky. It reeks of rhetoric—in fact, it was first applied to Boston in a Bible-quoting speech by Puritan John Winthrop in 1630—and it has a kind of self-conscious eagerness about it, a panting and futile wish to be adopted. It shows up in guidebooks and political speeches, but that’s about it.

Still, though I never heard the phrase while I was growing up in New York and then Connecticut, that’s what Boston seemed like to me. I first encountered the city in a novel: Johnny Tremain, which I read in fifth grade. Boston! It was a place of sunlit wharves and screaming fishwives, silversmiths and revolution, coffee houses and roasted squabs and arrogance and heartbreak and a night spent crying alone among old gravestones. Its place names—Hancock’s Wharf, Beacon Hill, Copp’s Hill, the Neck—were deeply familiar to me (I read the book at least a dozen times) and imbued with a kind of bright glamour. Boston was sharp, smart, alive, beckoning. It shimmered in the distance on its hill. I lived there, though I’d never been there.

My next glimpse of Boston came a few years later, when my younger sister started watching a TV show called Zoom. I would sit with her pretending to read or do my homework (the show was too young for me), but covertly fascinated by the juvenile utopia of Zoom, where kids wrote and delivered the jokes and conducted science experiments and art projects and talked about their lives and there wasn’t an adult in sight. I envied them their autonomy and their striped shirts and their camaraderie, their twitchy nerdy smart-ass curiosity, which in the world of my school was definitely a social liability, but in their world was cool. I never thought much about where other TV shows were made, but Zoom shoved Boston in your face, punctuating and ending each episode with invitations to mail in your jokes and ideas; the kids in the cast chanted the address—“Box 3-5-0, Boston, Mass.”—and then they sang, “0-2-1-3-4.” That zip code, which couldn’t have been farther away from Colonial America, did the same thing to me that Johnny Tremain’s Beacon Hill did. It glittered with smartness and made me wistful; I wanted to go there.

And then I did go there. I started spending time in Boston, but I could never seem to find it. I went and had a bunch of crummy, crabby little Boston afternoons, each disappointing in its own way. I was at boarding school in New Hampshire, and people used to take the bus to Boston after Saturday classes. I remember getting off under the highway near North Station and walking around in a maze of dark streets, thinking, Huh? I took a different bus and got off in front of a Howard Johnson’s behind the Park Plaza, and walked around boring concrete streets and thought Huh? again. Everyone was always saying how beautiful Boston was, but this was baffling, ugly. Where was Beacon Hill? Where was 02134? I kept walking around in circles, too shy to ask. Eventually I took the bus in with my friend Holly, who knew things: that you had to take the T from North Station to Harvard Square, and that once you were in Harvard Square you had to go to Design Research. Holly loved Design Research—the airy glass building with its floating blond staircase, the Aalto vases and Breuer chairs, and especially the Marimekko dresses, brightly colored and dramatically unshapely. I said I loved Design Research too, but really it made me feel young and stupid, as did the other things in Harvard Square that people seemed to love: the Coop, the Wursthaus. Much as I had yearned toward Boston from afar, once there I just didn’t seem to get it. I went back during college to do research in the Museum of Fine Arts; my handbag was stolen (I had stupidly left it in the car). I went back again with my husband just after we were married; it was pouring and we couldn’t find a place to park. This is all dopey little stuff, but isn’t that often how we form our feelings about a place? The mechanic who ripped us off in Memphis, the time we got food poisoning in Houston?

In our early twenties, my husband and I moved from Connecticut to Cambridge. He was starting architecture school and I got a job as an advertising copywriter. We began to discover Boston in a different way—not as a mythical place on which to project our fantasies or our worries, but as a real place in which to live. We fell in love with the bookstores in Harvard Square (in the early eighties there were more than a dozen), found records at the Coop and Briggs & Briggs, bought cards and Advent calendars from the gentle hovering ladies at Olsson’s gift shop. We lamented Design Research, which was already gone by the time we moved but which we would have been old enough to appreciate. We did volunteer work for Physicians for Social Responsibility, went for walks in Mount Auburn Cemetery, saw the Christmas Revels in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre.

That was all Cambridge, but I was getting to know Boston, too. The first ad agency where I worked was in Back Bay and the second was downtown. Walking around on my lunch hour, I found places that made me nostalgic for an older Boston I had never known, vestiges of what I thought of, affectionately, as Stodgy Boston: the little marble tables at Bailey’s ice cream shops; Makanna’s, a store on Boylston Street where you could still find lace handkerchiefs and seersucker blanket covers; and, a few doors down, with a gilded swan suspended over its doorway, the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, a venerable social welfare institution that ran a genteel shop where I bought needlepoint wool and a set of six old Portuguese side chairs. There was a fusty restaurant off the lobby of one of the buildings where I worked. The window was full of large and ancient cacti growing in a bed of sand—a landscape that felt eerily and perhaps deceptively sleepy, as if at any moment a snake might separate itself from the camouflaging vegetation to dart at some tiny, hapless, equally hidden creature—and the bar was inlaid with brass plaques commemorating the men who had done a lot of drinking there. Many of them still worked in my agency; they came upstairs after lunch and fell asleep.

Then we had children, and again the city opened itself to us in new ways. We got to know the playgrounds and the schools, the aquarium and the Children’s Museum, the plesiosaur skeleton and stuffed mammals at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, the ship-model rooms at the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Mathematica exhibit at the Museum of Science. We got lost going to birthday parties in parts of the city where we’d never been, which always seemed to involve driving on either the McGrath Highway or the Monsignor O’Brien Highway, two roads we confused so often that we began trying to psych ourselves out by choosing the one that felt intuitively wrong, only to find that that one, too, was wrong.

Another place where we always got lost was Jamaica Plain, which is adjacent to Boston—part of it, in fact—but which seemed to be in a different place every time we tried to find it. Then our kids grew up and our older son got an apartment there and we started going there a lot, and Jamaica Plain, too, became part of the Boston we knew.

A city on a hill is a city viewed from a distance: a symbol. But once you live there, it’s the city where you get stuck in traffic on Storrow Drive; and where you go to the dry cleaner on Brattle Street because the one on Mass. Ave. kept smashing the buttons on your shirts; and where you’ve been a patient in a couple of the hospitals and a visitor to patients in pretty much all of them; and where you walk by the building with the Moorish windows on the corner of Newbury and Dartmouth Streets and wonder about Anne who used to live there, and Barbara and Ed who used to live there, and you realize you’ve been here long enough to remember the women’s clothing store that used to be on the ground floor of that building and the video store that replaced it and the French interior-design store that went in after that, which is gone now too.

Once you are in it and of it, Boston stops being a city on a hill, a place you might aspire to and generalize about. It’s not a tough town, or a resilient town, or a stodgy town, or a glittering town, or a small town, or a big town. You can’t see it anymore. It’s quotidian. It’s maddening and beloved and you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. It’s yours.