8 posts tagged “boston”
One of my favorite place names is Assinippi, which happens to be very close to where I grew up. It's an area in Massachusetts near where the towns of Hanover & Norwell border each other. The main landmarks are the Assinippi General Store at the corner of Rt 53 and Rt 123, nearby Jacob's Pond off 123, a thin strip of commercial development along Rt 53, and a small handful of residential side streets. Nearby is the Assinippi Industrial Park, a small industrial complex notable mainly (to me) for hosting the headquarters of Zildjian, a cymbal company with some famous customers
Assinippi is not one of the 301 towns & cities in Massachusetts, as recognized by the commonwealth, which puts it instead on the list of Archaic Community, District, Neighborhood, Section and Village Names. It isn't even big enough to have a Wikipedia page to call its own, though it does come up on the list of place names in New England of aboriginal origin, which notes that the name is a Wampanoag term meaning "rocks in water". So there.
You wouldn't necessarily learn any of this from a naive Google search though. In the first 100 results, I count three hits for things specifically about the area: a painting of the Jacobs family (presumably of the above-mentioned Jacobs Pond), and a review of the Assinippi General Store and a listing for the adjacent Assinippi General Store grocery department.
This real estate directory looks like one of the only honest programmatically derived pages, and even it misses the mark in stating "We don't currently have an article about Assinippi. Here is an article about nearby North Pembroke." North Pembroke isn't actually all that nearby -- you have to go through Hanover to get there, but Hanover doesn't get mentioned. Whatever.
In any case, there's no way this many people are interested in Assinippi. It's just not that big of an area, and as it has no clearly agreed-upon boundaries -- unlike Hanover & Norwell, which are very well defined -- most people in the area think of themselves as living &/or working in the town of Hanover or Norwell, rather than the village of Assinippi, and so would start their Google searches from the town name, not the neighborhood name. The vast majority of these search results, except for the handful that specifically refer to a particular business or street address, have to be SEO Google spam. And if a little, unknown area like Assinippi is getting this many hits, how much of this kind of thing is targetting areas where there are actually a lot of people? A lot, surely.
Human societies have always depended on having ready access to cheap, efficient means of transportation.
The Egyptians built their kingdoms along the Nile. The Greeks built their civilization among their islands. The Mesopotamians had the Tigris & Euphrates, the Indians had the Ganges, the Chinese had the Yangtze. Later, the Romans and Incas built vast empires laced together by paved roadways.
In America, the continent was [re-]populated first by ships & horses, then Conestoga wagons, then the locomotive, then automobiles and airplanes.
The topography of ordinary life is a reflection of this need to have access to transportation, balanced against other needs for agriculture, trade, industry, and so on.
From what I've seen of Germany, most of the old cities & towns are organized along roughly similar lines, with a dense cluster of homes & other structures, clearly demarcated from the surrounding countryside -- often by a literal wall. Of course, this probably has old medieval origins where the people would live together in town but farm in the fields, and occasionally would have to hide behind the walls as the town was besieged by some invading army or mob. But it also means that for ordinary life, the things you need are all within walking distance of home -- your job, the people you trade with, and so on.
Older American cities on the east coast started out along similar lines, but with less fear of invasion (after all, Native Americans tended not to have cannons & muskets) plus good roads and horses to get around with (not to mention the allure of an entire vast continent to stretch out across), they never really had the tight, walkable density that old European cities had.
And then, of course, the train came, and not long behind it, the car. If you look at how American cities are laid out, especially as you move west, and as you look at cities that had most or all of their growth in the 20th century, it's obvious just how much these places grew up with the assumption that the car would always be there, would always be cheap, and was strong enough to be the almost physical foundation of how society is built, lives, and works.
It could be grim, according to an Atlantic article from March
It could be really grim, according to a LA Times article from this week.
American suburbs just aren't ready for this. Hell, even the cities are mostly unprepared for this. With a handful of exceptions -- New York City, San Francisco, and a few others -- even most city dwellers tend to need a car to get around. The transit systems aren't in place in most places, and where the are, they tend to be running near capacity (and over budget, accumulating debt), and are not equipped to service a big uptick in ridership in a short time frame, which is what we could see if oil prices continue their climb towards $200/bbl and beyond (they hit $140 this week)."You'd have massive changes going on throughout the economy," said Robert Wescott, president of Keybridge Research, a Washington economic analysis firm. "Some activities are just plain going to be shut down."
[...]
Push prices up fast enough, he said, and "it would be the urban-planning equivalent of an earthquake."
Assuming you can't pull up roots and move to New York, San Francisco, or heck London or Paris, then where would be a good place to live for the next 10, 25, 50 years? What criteria would a "nice", "smart" place to live be? Good access to public transit, preferably rail, but bus should work too (there's always biodiesel or electric trolleybus options). Being able to walk to things like jobs, schools, and supermarkets would be good. Access to a river would be nice -- just in case we get reduced back to Egyptian levels, though I'm not quite that pessimistic yet -- but I'm willing to assume that some kind of motorized means of transportation is going to be a permanent fixture of human society now, even if individual, personal motorized transportation may not always be taken for granted the way it has been for the past century. What else? For that matter, what kind of physical home makes sense? Should we all move in to Manhattan / Soviet style apartment complexes, or is a patch of lawn still an option? Is an oil heated home any better or worse than gas or electric? The time to plan seems to be now.
The effects of the rise in energy prices continues to unfold.
This was fun. Amanda Palmer, the piano-playing half of The Dresden Dolls, did a show last night with The Boston Pops.
As Keith Lockhart said in introducing the show, whether you came for the Pops or you came for Amanda, the show wasn't going to end up being what you expected.
Reviews:
It seems the Somerville Public Library's decorated bull skull carvings are called bucrania, which is an ancient Roman tradition, or an even older neolithic fertility totem.
I'd always just assumed that the architect had a Texas fetish. It's heartening to learn that it goes a lot deeper than that. Moreover, such things can be found all over town, if you keep an eye out.
That is all, move along, citizens.
There was a shooting a block from our house this afternoon.
We found this out indirectly because the police had the street blocked off on the way home from work, and we had to circle around the neighborhood, then move a barrier out of the way, to get to the driveway. A neighbor who got home at the same time thought there was a shooting, but didn't really know what was going on.
Of course, nothing had been mentioned (yet?) on WBUR/NPR radio, and by the time I had a chance to get to the computer to look it up, there was still nothing on Boston.com/The Boston Globe, WBZ/CBS, WCVB/ABC, or WHDH/NBC -- the latter of which in particular has pretty much staked its claim to "if it bleeds, it leads" style sensationalist journalism.
But then there's the little Somerville Journal, which already had it on the home page: it happened around 5:30 (it was around 7:00 when I was finding out), and all they knew at that point was that it seemed to be a drive-by shooting.
Police sealed off the intersection of Cross and Pearl streets after a drive-by shooting Thursday evening, temporarily shuttering local businesses and stranding area residents making their way home from work.
Early police radio chatter indicated gunfire at 5:30 p.m., and were looking for four men in a black 1997 Toyota Camry.
Reload the article an hour later and it now has more details, photos, and even a YouTube video with an interview with the police. Plus, this reassuring paragraph:
The victim, who is believed to be 16- to 17-years-old, was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening gunshot wounds. He is in stable condition and was talking and alert when police responded to the scene, according to Holloway.
So that's good, at least. Inasmuch as "non-life threatening gunshot wounds" can be thought of as being "good".
Meanwhile, there were still pedestrians milling around as late as 8:30, presumably not knowing what was going on (the police weren't talking, but they were still out there with lights, sirens, etc. Score one for local web journalism to explain what's going on 100 yards from home... :-/
Sometimes it's hard to tell when Fake Steve Jobs is kidding.
Apparently, today Fake Steve was not kidding.
Most of the towns around here are named after British towns.
