Urban enthusiast

For one BU professor, the American city can do no wrong

interview by Michelle Chihara

America's self-image may be built around small towns and family farms, but according to Daniel Monti, that image couldn't be further from reality. For Monti, the messy, imperfect struggle of American public life is very much a product of city existence. "Whoever we are as a people," he says, "it is definitely an urban-based people."

A sociology professor at BU and the author of The American City: A Social and Cultural History (Blackwell, 1999), Monti speaks about the American city with an almost religious fervor. Where liberal critics see urban isolation, Monti sees cohesive ethnic enclaves. Where conservatives see moral dissipation, Monti sees tolerance. He waxes poetic about things like ethnic mutual-trade associations. He once told the New York Post, "Rooting for the Boston Red Sox is an exercise not so much in frustration, but in the redemptive power of hope in the future, always coming back next year, always battling."

Those are the words of an inveterate optimist -- and of someone who loves Boston. He also loves Springfield. And Salt Lake City. His faith in cities seems boundless, as does his interest in the details of urban life. In preparing The American City, he and a handful of students pored through 150 years' worth of daily newspapers from across the nation. They filled three filing cabinets with photocopied newspaper pages: an enormous, color-coded anecdotal history of urban Americans trying to make things work. Monti's book marshals some of those anecdotes as proof that we're actually much better at figuring out ways to live with each other than we give ourselves credit for. The city, Monti says, is the place where we've gotten right everything that we've gotten right so far.

Q: Your optimism about urban America sets your work apart. What are the criticisms of American cities that you take issue with?

A: Cities are not a place, historically, where people have been thought to get along especially well. To the extent that they do, it's because they mind their own business and leave each other alone. That's the way cities have been portrayed by social philosophers, social historians, certainly social scientists for 200 years. There are so many different types of people squished in the same small spot, they're unwilling or unable to find out what they might have in common.

There are exceptions -- philosophers and commentators who have a much more optimistic view of life in cities and in America more generally. But what they tend to focus on is the energy and dynamism, the richness and diversity as ends in and of themselves. Even they, these most optimistic of reviewers, don't see much, if any, unity.

Q: And you see unity?

A: Oh, yeah. Because whatever unity we understand ourselves as having as a people nationally is predicated upon what the human beings who lived first and foremost in cities did. They were the ones who showed us how to do it.

Q: Take Boston as an example. What kinds of things might people not recognize as evidence of a healthy urban civic life?

A: I first arrived here eight and a half years ago. Somewhere in my first year I had the opportunity to come to know a businessman of some reputation in this city. He took me out to lunch in one of these classic men's clubs. And he said that one of the things that has always bedeviled him -- and most city leaders who wanted to get stuff done -- was the fact that Boston had a reputation for being so tribal.

The greatest example is the school-desegregation controversies that sprang up in Boston in the 1970s. They produced an incredible amount of bitterness and confrontation between different neighborhoods. But he had something smaller than that in mind as well: the way in which, irrespective of what was going on in schools, neighborhoods and different people who lived there seemed quite satisfied to leave each other alone, and not to think about the big picture.

I accepted this, but I countered with one important point. Many other cities in the 1980s and 1990s have gone through such an incredible period of disinvestment and neighborhood abandonment. Boston has too -- but not nearly as much as other cities have. And one of the reasons is that inside those little parochial neighborhoods were worlds that mattered to the people who lived there. They were worlds and places in which people had a stake. It's where they made their babies, it's where they buried their dead. Those places were precious for the men, women, and children who lived there. And it was the very fact that that preciousness drew these people in almost a sacred sense that made them [the neighborhoods] defensible, special, worth fighting for.

The very thing that often frustrated city leaders, trying to make everyone else understand the big picture, was the very thing that helped keep Boston -- even with the tumult and the conflict and the disagreement and the bitterness and the misunderstanding -- more whole than many other places.

Q: You've written that our civic culture is what allows us to frame an explanation of the meaning of big changes in our societies. How has civic culture been dealing with changes in Boston?

A: In the past two decades alone, changes in both the city's physical structure -- how it's rebuilding itself and how it's recasting itself -- and its larger civic rituals have been profound.

On the one hand you have this immense notion of rebuilding -- buildings, highways, the Big Dig, what to do (if anything) about Fenway Park, should we build another tunnel, what do we call it -- all of these issues. On the other hand, the only reason Boston's population has grown in recent years is because of an influx of new immigrants, primarily folks from Central and South America and the Far East. And finding a way of dealing with both of these things -- building a new and different city, and finding a place for these new people to fit in -- has not always been easy.

Recently retired city councilman Dapper O'Neil was notorious for one of his last great public outbursts, during a parade that passed through Dorchester several years ago. [In 1992, O'Neil commented, within range of a video camera, about the number of Vietnamese stores in the vicinity: "I thought I was in Saigon, for Chrissakes."] As soon as we get that kind of outburst, there's the reaction to it. People are embarrassed, or they reach out to the very people who have been insulted. This doesn't happen unless you are in a place where folks realize that they have to reach out to each other, that you can't avoid these people.

Q: So you're saying that people tend to focus on the friction -- on comments like Dapper O'Neil's -- rather than on the process of dealing with the friction?

A: That's right. You can go down Dorchester Avenue and continue all the way out of the city, and you're going to see layers of Boston history. You're going to find businesses with Irish names and Latino names, Asian names of every stripe, sometimes set on the same block, two or three different stores with shop owners of very different backgrounds. Dorchester Avenue is a living, breathing example, at least in a commercial sense, of how these folks are trying to figure out a way of being next to each other. They're reconciling their differences and finding a common way to deal with the world as businessmen, as shoppers, as investors, as neighbors.

Q: In your book, you reassure the Italians in the North End that they shouldn't worry about losing their neighborhood's character. Why not?

A: It will be okay. It won't be the way they knew it, in part because a lot of them left. And they might not be thrilled with yuppies. The yuppies don't like the noise that goes along with street festivals every summer and early fall. They don't like the saints -- they think it's cheesy or tacky to march around with a saint, pasting dollar bills on it. The Italians who still live there find this [way of thinking] an act of disrespect, but also an act of profound ignorance, in the same way a child is ignorant. The glaring ignorance of the newcomer to the oldcomer's ways is a flashpoint for tension.

But these folks aren't damaged by living up there -- they're tolerated. The yuppies may be laughed at by some of the Italians, but they find a way of living next door to each other.

Q: So gentrification is just something that we should accept?

A: They [the neighborhood residents] will accept it and worry about it up to a point, and then they'll go with the flow. That's the one constancy about neighborhood life in American cities, with rare exceptions.

The North End was originally founded by British folks who grudgingly made room for some Irish-Americans who weren't real thrilled about having some Jews and Italians begin to move in, and some of the Italians didn't like it when the Sicilians started moving in. South Boston hasn't been exclusively Irish-American, ever! They may be the predominant population there, but they are not the sole proprietors of that neighborhood, never have been. That's largely the way it is in most neighborhoods. That's why it works.

Q: What are the best examples of racially and economically mixed neighborhoods in Boston?

A: One that has gradually found its way to becoming economically more prosperous and more mixed is the North End. South Boston has done this as well, bringing in younger people with more money. Some of the outlying neighborhoods, like Hyde Park, have done a good job. Some of the neighborhoods in JP, parts of Dorchester.

Older, more established black families are worrying about the gentrification of Dorchester. There are these wonderful old houses that black folks have been living in for a long time. Now the neighborhood is being upgraded so dramatically that wealthier whites are moving in. And the black families are worried: is there going to be a spot for them? Yeah, there'll be a spot for them, they'll be able to maintain a very healthy presence.

The best thing that's going to happen in this city will be seen on Blue Hill Ave. We're going to see that area revitalized. It won't be just the black people living there who'll revitalize it -- they're going to get a lot of help from outsiders. A lot of this initiative is going to come from the business community.

For instance, I'm working with a set of businessmen and -women, entrepreneurs, private-development specialists, from six of the major cultural groups in the Boston area. Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Jews, Italians, and Irish-Americans. And we're beginning to figure out how they can grow a new generation of ethnic leaders who understand that they need to cooperate with each other across these lines and invest in each other's communities if they are to prosper together.

Q: Given all the construction, don't you think there's a danger that corporate interests will damage some of Boston's neighborhoods? Isn't that threat worse when the developers are mega-corporations on a whole new scale, headquartered in other cities?

A: No, because we have been reckoning with this tension for 150 years. Cities that wanted to establish sewer systems or clean water supplies have always sought money and outside investors. The scale is larger, but the principles are the same.

If we stumble once in a while -- maybe we forget that we need to have some low-cost housing attached to the newer places -- it's never too late to learn. If the mayor had said [of affordable housing], "This is irrelevant and I'm not going to do it," that would have been a much different matter. Could he have recognized it earlier? Perhaps. But a lot of elected officials are capable of learning and growing.

Q: What do you think is the most revolutionary and controversial aspect of what you're saying?

A: In the book, the bigger fights that I try to pick are the following: first, that our civic culture works, and it works well. And second, that its point of origin is in the last place that we'd ever expect to find it: in our cities. So those are two huge fights.

In the book, I say that you have sets of purists. You have folks who have a very conservative view of the world, and folks that have a very liberal or leftist view of the world. They each have sets of principles that they hold as being important, which they hold cannot be reconciled with the other set of principles.

The world that Americans have made inside cities is a unique combination of principles that conservatives would want to integrate and liberals would want to integrate. Somehow the sort of sloppy, mucky, inelegant people called Americans, with all their colors and stripes, have figured out how to take these irreconcilable differences and put them to work on an everyday level so that the impossible can become real.

Conservative people believe in having strict entrance criteria to the club. Liberal people tend to be more open-minded and willing to share. They both think that the only way to build the world is to either have strict entrance criteria or open up to everybody.

Americans have found a way of putting those two things together so you don't open it to everybody, but you're more open than some people would like. Instead of building the world in one way or the other, we have found a way of bringing these two distinctive approaches together for a better world in our cities. And it works.

Q: What concrete evidence of that working process would you ask the average Bostonian walking down the street to look for?

A: First of all, appreciate what you have and appreciate your contribution to it. Understand that you are a part of a wonderful show on those streets every day, in which very different people from different backgrounds and different levels of society somehow find a way of getting along.

I love to go to malls, or Downtown Crossing, at Christmastime and just stand there and look at the variety of people. Clearly some have more means than others. And not just wealthy people, but young people and old people, people with families, and people who can trace their ancestry to Africa, the Far East, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, South and Central America -- they're all there, and they're all managing to get along. They're all doing something, following a set of prescribed rituals, at the end of which are these wonderful presents they give themselves.

Q: So is the most unorthodox aspect of what you're saying simply your faith in the process?

A: I have a great deal of faith in American society, and I think we've done remarkably well. And even when we are grumpy and grouchy about letting newcomers in, whether they come from the Far East or Southern Europe, it doesn't make any difference.

Q: Isn't that just a way of glossing over problems like racism?

A: It's not a way of glossing over those problems, it's a way of working beyond them. Sooner or later we'll figure out that we are in this boat together and the only way of not sinking is to figure out how to work together. And we do that with remarkable consistency in this country.

Q: We're still pretty segregated, in many ways.

A: We have a lot more mixing than you think. The fact that you have these enclaves -- whether rich or poor, Asian or Italian -- there are lot more people of different backgrounds within those populations than we typically recognize. We learn that these other people are here, and be it grudgingly, we learn that we must deal with that.

Our colonial ancestors made that decision for us. They realized that you couldn't keep tight control over who was coming into our towns and cities. If they were going to prosper, then they'd have to loosen up.

When the Mormons moved out West, they thought that God's country was the most godforsaken place on earth. They wanted to keep outsiders out. But that was impossible, and they learned pretty quickly. They learned that what was good for them could also be good for other people, and that allowing others in didn't necessarily denature their way of life. And that's the great trick of who we are as a people.

Isn't that disgustingly upbeat?

Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.