TV Binge

I've been watching so much TV lately that I worry this might mark the beginning of my downfall. There is just so much fucking amazing TV on TV that I couldn't get away from it.

I watched all 5 and a half seasons of the Good Wife in a very short period of time. The show makes me appreciate Chicago as the big, beautiful, but dirty and rough and tumble place that it is. Some of the shots of the skyline and the historic towers are stunning. Sadly, though, the show is shot in New York and sometimes it is obvious. In one park scene you could see clearly marked NYC recycling receptacles. In another outdoor scene, you could actually see the Radio City Music Hall sign.

I watched Amazon's original series Transparent and...Wow! The show progresses like a deep and carefully crafted novel that illuminates everything it touches. Yes, it is about a man transitioning to female. But I think most of all it is about a sad and emotionally broken family. There is a scene where Jeffrey Tambor as Maura declares to her transgender support group that her kids are "so selfish". That statement proves true as her adult children nearly drown in their extreme self-absorption. It reminds me of the novel The Corrections where all the adult children are a mess while the matriarch is becoming a surprisingly balanced human being. And Jeffrey Tambor--I never would have expected him to play a role so well. It has to be one of the best acting performances I've ever seen.

Mozart in the Jungle, another original series from Amazon, is also very well done. I enjoyed Alpha House too, and I think John Goodman is underrated. But I know I really want to see House of Cards, but I just don't have Netflix.

I also watched Amazon's pilot for Man in the High Castle. It is based on novel about a 1960s America after losing World War II to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The continent is partitioned so that Germany controls east of the Rockies and Japan west. Hitler is dying and it looks like whoever succeeds him will go to war to take the western states from Japan. The scenery is amazing. Nazi New York and Japanese San Francisco are dreary but eerily beautiful places.

So that's what has taken up quite a lot of my time lately. I don't think it is a total brain fry, since the shows are very high quality.

Should Boston host the 2024 Summer Olympics?

The USOC recently selected Boston as the US’s candidate city to host for the 2024 summer olympics. I’m hearing a lot of spirited discussion about whether this massive endeavor will be good for Boston. Nate Scott’s commentary in USA today comes down squarely against Boston and lists specific reasons this position.  I find myself excited about the possibility of olympics in Boston, but I understand the concerns of skeptics. I think the financing is the biggest hurdle, so I would like to see a sound plan for paying for the games. And I think that it is awful to build venues or housing that will be abandoned after two weeks. Boston needs to build things that will serve the city after the games.

But I am writing this post because I take exception to much of Nate Scott’s case against the Boston olympics. I’ll go point by point, with Nate Scott in bold.

There is no infrastructure in place. “Boston is a geographically small city that’s already over developed.”  

Yes, Boston is geographically small, but that is because of how Eastern Massachusetts is a large metropolitan area cut up fairly arbitrarily into separate cities and towns. From what I hear so far, the Boston olympics is really the Metro Boston Olympics, with games taking place in not just Boston, but Camridge, Somerville, and even perhaps distant Foxboro where the New England Patriots play.

Furthermore, Boston isn’t over developed. The Boston area has a lot of centrally located, but vacant or underutilized land that it is only beginning to be built out. The ocean of surface parking in the South Boston Waterfront, adjacent to the financial district, is undergoing a build out. Other areas include Dorchester’s closed Bayside Exposition Center, Cambridge’s Northpoint development (former rail yard) and Somerville’s Assembly Square (former industrial). These are not small, scattered building sites, but major swaths of empty land where entire new neighborhoods are slowly being constructed.

I would also like to point out that Boston lost about 30% of its population after World War II. Although the city is growing again, it has a long way to go before surpassing its 1950 population.


Transportation will be a nightmare
 
Boston is not a normal American city. It is one of the exclusive group of US cities where you can get around happily without a car (such as NYC, Chicago, DC, San Francisco). It is compact and walkable, and served by an extensive public transportation network consisting of a real subway system (sorry Atlanta), several trolley lines, a Bus Rapid Transit System, countless bus routes, multiple water ferries, and a vast commuter rail network.

Let me say something about just the commuter rail. The system is truly vast, with 12 lines--or 14 if you count lines that split into smaller branches. So consider a tourist spending a week in Boston, one who happens to be interested in visiting some of the historic places outside the city. The tourist can visit Concord (American Revolution), Lowell (Industrial Revolution), Plymouth (Pilgrims), and Salem (witches) without setting foot in an automobile.

Boston is also on the Northeast Corridor, the Amtrak route that people actually ride. It connects Boston by electrified, higher speed train to Providence, NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC. Additional Amtrak routes from Boston lead north to scenic Maine and west to Chicago.

Nate Scott’s commentary includes an image of the old elevated Central Artery highway that ran through downtown Boston before the Big Dig demolished it and replaced it with an underground tunnel. Although the Big Dig was completed late and over budget, and it certainly didn’t solve all of the city’s traffic problems, it did result in a massive upgrade and modernization of Boston’s road network.

“Storrow Drive is the single most terrifying road in North America.” 


I can’t argue with this.

Public transit won’t be a lot better. “I once got on a Green Line train out to Boston College on a Thursday night and got to my stop sometime early Sunday morning. We all made little shelters in different parts of the car and rationed food.”

The Green Line trolleys are not always fast and efficient, especially where they run above ground. But they are part of an extensive public transit network that most American cities can only dream of.

There’s no main stadium.

I share NS’s concern with this. I don’t want to see a major stadium publicly financed. And it will be stupid to build a stadium that is used only for 3 weeks.

…because now the New England Revolution won’t get a new stadium for 9 years 

This could be interesting. The owner of the New England Patriots is interested in building a Major League Soccer stadium in Boston. An idea is out there to build it bigger in order to serve as an olympic stadium, and then shrink it down to a smaller permanent soccer stadium. This might mean Boston wouldn’t get a soccer stadium as soon as it might otherwise have. But I think this is a fairly creative idea if it can be pulled off.

Their proposal says that colleges could build some of the infrastructure. “Awesome. Let’s have the private colleges build sports complexes and probably drive tuition up for the kids there. Good stuff.”

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I think the exorbitant and growing cost of tuition is one of our society’s biggest problems. However, with that said, Boston’s many colleges provide an advantage for its olympic bid. Many schools have major athletic facilities that can be used as is for olympic events. Others might build new venues regardless of whether Boston hosts the olympics. I hope none of the colleges build anything wasteful for the games. However, I am just speculating here: If an existing venue or one they were building anyway can bring in some olympic revenue to a school, that is money that supports the school without coming from students’ pockets.

The former Bayside Expo site in Dorchester has been mentioned as a potential location for the athlete’s village. It is a big site consisting of a closed down convention center and quite a lot of parking. The University of Massachusetts Boston recently bought the property with the intention of expanding its campus there. Umass Boston is a major public university with over 15,000 students. Today it is exclusively a commuter school with no student housing, but it intends to build some dorms. If planned well, athlete housing at this site could serve as Umass Boston student housing after the games. One of Atlanta’s successes with the olympics was repurposing Olympic Village housing as permanent residence halls for the Georgia Institute of Technology.

There aren’t enough hotels.

This is probably true. I can’t imagine Boston has enough hotel rooms for such a massive event. But I think part of the pitch for Boston is that the city is full of college residence halls that are vacant during the summer and can house olympic visitors.

They’re already protesting.

Naturally.

Boston might be the most civically engaged place in the country, going back to Pilgrims fleeing their homeland and colonists protesting actions of the English King. Bostonians speak their mind. I’m not exaggerating when I say that you can’t cut down a tree in Boston without a protest.

That is how Boston is. It likes to debate. Five out of the last 6 Massachusetts governors were Republican in what might be the country's most Democratic state. I seriously think the state just likes to ensure that there will be political debate. And Boston continues to wedge itself into national politics with recent reforms that went national, such as Romneycare and marriage equality, and a steady stream of presidential candidates. Just since JFK, the losing candidacies of Ted Kennedy, Mike Dukakis, John Kerry, and Mitt Romney.


There will be heated debate about the prospect of a Boston olympics. If Boston is selected to host, this debate might lead to a better, more soundly planned, and more innovate olympics.  But also consider that the IOC doesn’t care about whether citizens want the olympics. The IOC has no way to know if citizens of Beijing supported hosting the 2008 summer olympics, since opposing the will of the government is illegal in China. And I hear rumblings that another thing that gives Boston’s bid an edge in the eyes of the IOC is how it became a police state in the days following the Boston Marathon Bombing, shutting the whole city down in order to find the alleged bombers. That might look good to the IOC when they wonder which city can handle terrorism at a major sports event. But I don’t think the IOC has much use for democracy.

In closing, I just think Boston is a special place. Some American cities never recovered from the deindustrialization, racial tensions, white flight, urban renewal, and suburbanization of the 20th Century. Yet Boston suffered through all those challenges and stands tall today as a thriving 21st century city. If Boston can carefully plan a smartly financed olympics that doesn't leave abandoned venues in its wake, I think it could be a successful host in 2024.