Steve Reads

…and not just the well-documented problem of its streets. For those of you who’ve never been to Boston, you’ve never experienced the comically, bewilderingly, sureally unlabeled streets. You can go for miles on certain major streets without once seeing a sign telling you where you are. I’ve heard it said — but have not confirmed — that it’s actually enshrined in legislation: major streets shall not have signs on them. Yet the cross streets are all perfectly well labeled. It is bizarre.

(My favorite experience trying to figure out where I was, back when I first moved to Boston: I walked up to a random fellow on the street and asked where Commonwealth Avenue was. Only then did I realize that the fellow I had chosen was drunk, and homeless. Nonetheless, he gave me a very clear answer to a question I hadn’t asked: “The streets down in this part of Boston are alphabetical: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford.” I thanked him, then asked, “Right, but where is Comm. Ave.?” to which he replied by turning, pointing, and saying, “It’s right there.”)

But the signage problem extends well past the roads. Whenever there is construction, or anything vaguely out of the ordinary here that requires a detour, no one realizes this ahead of time and prints up a nice, professional-looking sign — no matter how nice and professional the city officials are. There are typically two approaches to signage around here:

1. A hand-written sign that lingers for months, curling at the edges and getting riddled with graffiti in the meantime.
2. A police officer or other official standing there looking bewildered. Some common commuter route is closed, so you ask the police officer where to go; he replies as though he didn’t expect anyone to ask such a thing.

The latter happened to me today as I was transferring from the orange line to the red line at Downtown Crossing. The one stairwell that will take you down to the Alewife-bound track was closed. T officials were standing there looking bewildered. There weren’t any signs. They directed me to the tunnel that connects Park to Downtown Crossing; if I hadn’t known that the red line was there, their pointing would have confused me. It still confused me, because I’m not accustomed to walking to another station to catch the train.

The signage problems extend still further. I remember going to the 1369 Café years ago with my friend Jason, who doesn’t keep his frustrations to himself as much as I do. The 1369’s line was flowing to the right away from the counter where the barista was taking orders, and the barista yelled to everyone to swing around to the left. Jason very acidly commented, “If you want people to move that way, how about putting up a goddamned sign?” Putting up a sign would not be in this city’s nature. Nor would something more permanent and effective, like setting up a rope line that follows the path you want your customers to take. That sort of structure, I contend, makes the audience feel more at ease, because it knows exactly what it should do; Boston’s typical way of setting things up is to assume that you’re a local and that you know how things work.

I could extend this to what seems a very Boston habit: set up your architecture in a broken way, then pile hacks over top to make it work, approximately. To me the pinnacles of this are the walkways over Storrow Drive near the Hatch Shell, and the route you have to follow if you want to walk on the Longfellow Bridge from MGH. With absolutely no evidence one way or another, it seems to me that neither of these was built with pedestrians in mind.

If it sounds like I’m bitching about the city I love, it’s true: I am. But I bitch out of love. Those of us who love the place, I think, alternate between exasperation and a wry smirk when we see how busted it can be. Like watching a close friend, in many ways upper-class and refined and erudite, who nonetheless can’t help chewing with his mouth open.