West End

And when I was a, um, a graduate student, I put a lot of things together.

I was very interested also in urban sociology, and I thought about and I read about, um, the West End of Boston, great book by Herbert Gans called The Urban Villagers, and he talked about how they got organized or they didn't get organized and I realized that ...

And, and I, so I started to look at the literature on social networks, and I realized that most of those studies were about very tight-knit little villages, neighborhoods in the West End, for example.

But if you read between the lines, you could see that how those different neighborhoods got connected actually mattered a lot.

And the more I read about that kind of thing, the more it looked like the way those different close-knit clumps of social structure like neighborhoods got connected had to do with ties that weren't very strong at all.

I will also just say that if you're interested in this episode, there are definitely some back catalog ones to go check out.

One of those is on, uh, the West End and the demolition of the West End.

One of those is on urban renewal.

And then also, I know as streetscape curator, we talked a bit about City Hall.

Okay, so now we can get back to my original first question on this ma- on this discussion guide, which is what was there before Government Center? What was on this site? What was the neighborhood like?

Yeah, it was really fun getting to research this, um, learn more about what, what we had lost, fun and then also a little sad.

But I'd say the West End Museum, they have a lot of really great resources, a lot of primary sources and, and just great articles.

So a lot of my knowledge of that came from clicking through their site and then going a little deeper.