May 23, 1993, Sunday, NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION
CURRENTS;
LETTER FROM BOSTON; Pg. 32
By Al Gordon. Al Gordon is a Viewpoints editor.
DURING the “Massachusetts
Miracle” ‘80s, I used to joke with my friends here that Boston had turned
into the kind of city I was looking for in the ‘70s when I left. But all too
abruptly the laughter stopped.
After decades as an economic
backwater, the boom years transformed the stodgy, provincial Hub into a lively,
even trendy town. Skyscrapers blossomed on the downtown skyline. New England
boiled dinners gave way to American nouvelle cuisine.
Some of my friends were happily riding the gravy train. One had moved from a big consulting firm into a lucrative position as a financial wizard for a major developer. Another, also a graduate of the consulting world, was developing computer systems for the health-care industry. A third was a wheeler-dealer, snatching up small businesses that were having trouble keeping up.
Then
the boom went bust. In the space of a few months in ‘88 and ‘89, all three
friends became unemployed. The real estate developer stopped developing. The
health-care computer operation was “downsized” out of existence. The
wheeling-and-dealing market collapsed. Ultimately, with the range of new-style
Boston jobs drying up, they turned to some old-style Boston solutions: One went
to work for a university; one got a state job; and one left town.
The significance of the recession
for Boston - indeed, for all of New England - isn’t just the loss of jobs.
That’s happened everywhere. But the very character of the place has been
transformed.
There always was a trendy
subculture in Greater Boston, stemming from its status as a college town. The
metropolitan area is home to Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Boston University,
Tufts, Wellesley, Northeastern and scores of other schools.
But it was always just that: a
subculture.
Students, faculty and some kindred
professionals and entrepreneurs were to be found in the Back Bay, Brighton and
Allston sections of the city and such suburbs as Cambridge, Brookline, Newton
and Belmont. They were influential on their home turf, and their presence gave
Massachusetts a grossly distorted reputation as a hotbed of left-wing thinking.
The state’s contradictory strains can be seen in the popularity of Republican
Gov. William Weld, who has liberal views on abortion and gay rights, but is
strongly conservative on government spending and economic policy.
Historically, the Boston business
community was Yankee and conservative. The political community was almost as
thoroughly Irish, and conservative in its own way. With the exception of a few
breakthroughs by Italian-Americans, the two camps were closed shops.
This is a place where police and
transit authority jobs are still passed down from South Boston father to son,
and financiers have made money the old fashioned way: They inherit it.
The college students who came to
Boston might linger in the area for a few years after graduation. Eventually,
though, the “real” world demanded a search for a grownup job. And if they
sought upward mobility, but did not move in the right circles, their career
paths led out of town.
Even if one did travel in the
right circles, the prospects weren’t all that terrific. By the mid-’70s,
Boston was in crisis. The traditional manufacturing businesses, such as shoes,
textiles and shipbuilding, had deserted New England. Richard Nixon had taken his
revenge on the home of the Kennedys and other political foes by closing military
bases and other federal facilities. Little new economic activity had sprung up
in their place. The city had been
torn apart by upheavals ranging from anti-war protests to anti-busing crusades.
Where, then, did the Massachusetts
Miracle come from?
For one thing, prolonged economic
declines tend to drive down the price of labor, real estate and other costs of
doing business, thereby making the region more attractive to business
development. It was no accident, for example, that Prime Computer moved into an
abandoned brewery in Natick, Lotus Development Corp. took over derelict
warehouses in Cambridge, and Wang set up shop in Lowell, a depressed former mill
town.
Second, the area rode the Reagan
economic wave. It benefited from the spurt in national growth, and it
particularly profited from the Reagan defense buildup. The Reagan and Bush
administrations invested heavily in the kind of high-tech weapons systems that
Massachusetts universities were good at devising and Massachusetts defense
contractors specialized in building.
Third, in the ‘80s, many of the
interests of Boston-area students - such as computer design and programing -
moved from the economic fringe into the mainstream. Thus, Mitchell Kapor, who
had been working at MIT, helped create a spreadsheet program called “1-2-3,”
which became a multimillion dollar mainstay of personal computers and the
foundation of the Lotus software empire. An Wang, a product of Harvard, parlayed
word-processing and minicomputer expertise into industry leadership.
Over time the Yankee domination of
Boston business ebbed. A more diverse - and more aggressive - group of
executives came to power in the city’s banks, financial service companies and
real estate development firms. The
ambitious had no need to look elsewhere for attractive opportunities.
The former subculture overtook the
old Boston culture.
But not for long.
Too many high-tech companies stuck
with minicomputers for too long, and they paid for it with bankruptcies or
draconian cutbacks. At the same time, the defense spending spree came to an end.
Boston came to learn that the “multiplier effect” cuts both ways. Without an
electronics industrial base, the need for a supporting phalanx of lawyers,
financiers and consultants was minimal. In turn, there was little need for
office buildings to house such firms. And the financial deals that had fueled
real estate speculation rapidly turned into bad loans.
Now not only are the
universities’ best and brightest again leaving town, but the colleges
themselves are facing troubled times, plagued by declining enrollments and
dwindling research dollars.
Inevitably, the social tensions
that were smoothed over during fat times have resurfaced. Last month, South
Boston High School, the focal point of school busing tensions, was the scene of
an ugly black-white clash. And there has been a wave of racial and anti-Semitic
incidents throughout the Boston area.
The American Dream has always been
that tomorrow will be better than today. Boston, however, has reverted to the
stagnant conditions of 20 years ago. No new economic miracle looms on the
city’s horizon. And if the dream is flickering in what has always been
regarded as one of the nation’s more manageable cities, what does that portend
for such harder cases as Los Angeles or New York?
Copyright 1993, Newsday Inc.