Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Zoning law of the day: the RLUIPA (Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act)

I’ve lived here for years but I can still get lost within half a mile of my apartment. Today I wandered down a different street just to vary the scenery of my walk to the post office and discovered an entire neighborhood I’d never known was there, filled with lovely Victorian houses on quiet tree-lined streets.

Before I found the neighborhood in between I would have said that the main road I started out on and the parallel road I was making for were separated by maybe one other road, or maybe the apartment buildings even backed directly on each other. If I’d kept walking long enough on the first road that would have become true. The trouble with Boston, though, is that none of the roads are straight.

It sounds simple enough on the face of it - some cities are planned on a grid, and others are arranged around cowpaths from colonial times. On a grid, you can always tell where you are, and that there are ten streets of predictable behavior between 70th and 80th. With squiggly cowpaths that change names every 500 yards and counties every mile, there’s no telling what you’ll find, especially if, like me, you keep thinking of the main roads as straight.

So the topology of Boston in my mind is highly non-Euclidean - in fact, it makes relativistic space-time look tame by comparison. My virtual Boston is laid out in virtual spokes of the virtual hub, made up of the branches of the Green Line and the other subway lines, with some bus routes crossing them. Places closer to the T have more fundamental solidity, while places off the T lines exist in a nebulous underworld of faerie Victorians. The trolley tracks mark the rays of maximum coherence, where the cardinal Bostonian directions of Inbound and Outbound can be readily identified. The midpoints between T lines form ghostly spokes of maximum confusion, where wise children should leave breadcrumb trails when wandering out of sight of a known bus route.

Needless to say, none of the spokes, light rail or ghostly, are actually straight, so the amount of real, solid land between them varies enormously. Thus entire neighborhoods can be hidden away, and people can get lost just hundreds of yards away from the T.

For example, at a point in my walk where I did know where I was, a guy in a minivan asked me where the Whole Foods (Bread and Circus to us old timers) was. He said he’d been driving around looking for it for an hour. Whole Foods is on a major road that doesn’t change names and goes in both directions; its street address corresponds to the one name of that road; it has several big green signs in front that say Whole Foods; and, in a city with no parking to speak of, it boasts an alluring parking lot that spans the entire block.

He was literally 300 yards away from Whole Foods, on that very road, when he asked me for directions. That’s what “none of the roads are straight” means.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2004 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Boston. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.