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Curiouser and Curiouser

In the last three weeks, one vehicle on my block was not towed on street cleaning days. This has never happened in the last decade. The debris under those cars sat there for two weeks.

A South End resident said a car on her street last week was not towed. Again, the cigarette butts, doggie-doo bags and dirt will remain. Even if residents sweep up, they can’t get under the car.

What gives? There seems to be more tolerance for scofflaw car owners and less concern about clean streets coming from City Hall. The Boston Herald first flagged this change of heart in February when they quoted a South Boston resident who said less towing will “reduce stress” for residents. Then they quoted the mayor as saying “if we’re able to get to a street and clean the majority of the street, we might not have to tow every single person that’s in the roadway.”

This idea sends the downtown neighborhoods into shock. The Alliance of Downtown Civic Organizations (ADCO) has prepared a letter urging the mayor to aggressively enforce street cleaning towing, according to Steve Wintermeier, who represents the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay. “Owning a vehicle is a privilege,” he said. “With that privilege comes responsibility.”

So what is the program that induces stress in parking scofflaws and that dirt-weary downtown residents adore?

After years of pleading, in fall, 2005, the downtown neighborhoods acquired the new program of towing vehicles whose owners couldn’t be bothered to move them so the mechanical street cleaners could do their work. Depending on the neighborhood and the weather, street cleaning can last from March 1 through December. The city engaged private tow companies, since the city does not own enough trucks. There were problems at first, but now they are mostly solved.

The Boston Transportation Department issues fines of $40. The companies charge up to $90 for the tow, $35 a day for storage and a small fuel surcharge. The tow’s high price, plus the inconvenience of getting to distant neighborhoods to retrieve one’s car meant most people quickly learned to move their car.

Some did not. Public Works Commissioner Michael Dennehy, whose department oversees the towing program, which has grown considerably, said the trucks tow about the same number of cars now as they did in 2005. Some people never learn.

Nevertheless, the downtown neighborhoods noticed a significant difference in their streets’ cleanliness from towing. The mechanical sweepers do a good job if they can get to the curb.

But popularity has caused problems. Except for the Seaport, Bay Village, West Roxbury and Hyde Park, most neighborhoods have at least some streets in the towing program because residents clamored for it, said Dennehy. Fifty Boston streets last year alone were added to the program. So tow lots fill up quickly. Only one out of four cars is actually towed on any street cleaning day.

The city recently proposed a pilot program for one neighborhood to assess whether not towing a car, but increasing the fine to $90 from $40, would be as effective as towing.

So many questions follow the weird thinking the city seems to be going through. The first question is for the mayor. Why would cleaning the “majority” of the street help if there is still a pile of debris under the cars that remain? How would you decide fairly which cars would be towed? Who would make that decision?

Downtown residents might also ask why the scofflaws’ stress is more important than the stress of those who have to live with dirt? Why would City Hall want to reduce effectiveness in a program that most neighborhoods want?

Interestingly, Dennehy seems to regret having to oversee this program. “I shouldn’t be in the towing business,” he said.

I asked city officials why they believe a ticket costing only $90 would deter scofflaws if the higher ticket plus towing price they now pay doesn’t deter them. Tracey Ganiatsos, spokesperson for the Transportation Department, said BTD cannot guarantee towing, but they can guarantee that a scofflaw will be ticketed. “We expect this will lead to increased compliance,” she wrote in an email.

I’m skeptical.

As of last week, the pilot program had not officially been assigned to a neighborhood. The program’s duration and how success will be measured had not been determined. Not all city departments had been brought up to speed. Moreover, the Boston City Council, which must approve changes to parking ticket rates, had not been consulted. Commissioner Dennehy promised representatives from the South End and Beacon Hill that the pilot program would not take place in their neighborhoods and the towing would remain.

Meanwhile, Steve Wintermeier hopes the city will continue with aggressive towing, but will also figure out novel ways to deal with scofflaws. For example, he wondered why on some streets a tow truck couldn’t pick up a car for the street cleaner and put it back. He said there might not be one solution that will work for all neighborhoods. He hopes ADCO’s letter to the mayor will be the beginning of that conversation.

Big question

Do San Diego residents experience joy? I don’t know the answer and I’m not sure I would believe a SanDiegoan if they told me. I’m talking about the sublime feeling, the rush, the pure happiness we Bostonians feel when the sun comes out and the temperature rises to 65 degrees.

We take a walk. We see all our neighbors—they are out walking also. Everyone is happy; no one is grumpy. The air smells good even if the hyacinths are too low to the ground to catch their scent. We feel we deserve this day, this feeling, this release. Winter is gone (probably). Spring is here.

We know it from the calendar, Opening Day and the Marathon. Those are wonderful too. But it is the nice weather that pushes us over the hurdle.

We’ve now had several of these days. Most of the snow is gone. Even those like me who love the snow and the winter—and I’ve found that I’m not that unusual—feel that same joy on the best spring days.

I’m betting that residents of San Diego don’t have that feeling. If it is the same weather all the time, even if it is nice weather, a person would not appreciate it, except to tell you that they don’t like to shovel snow, so that’s why they moved there.

My evidence is scant about happiness and weather, but I do have some personal clues and some studies by persons equipped to do such things.

One of our daughters went to college in California. When she was about to leave Boston at the end of the almost month-long Christmas holiday in her first year, I told her I was sorry that we’d had not one day of sunshine the whole month she was home.

She looked at me as if I were daft. “That doesn’t bother me,” she said. “I’m sick of sun. That’s all that happens. Sunny day after sunny day. It is so boring.”

Then there is Denmark. In study after study, that country comes in as having the happiest people. They have dark winters with snow. They pay high taxes. They aren’t the wealthiest people in the world, but they’re not poor either. Although Americans would think those factors matter, apparently they don’t.

The Danes report more satisfaction with life, less social isolation and feel more in control of their lives than residents of other countries. Most say they have a sense of meaning or purpose in their lives. Most also say they have free time to pursue interests. They tend to be happy in their jobs, which offer flexibility in working hours that help Danes balance work and family life.

Switzerland and Norway also have happy citizens. The U.S. is not too bad. Satisfaction with life is said to be greater here than in Spain, Russia, Greece and Hungary.

All this is measured by a group called the Happiness Research Institute. Their report on one Danish town concludes that happiness is dependent on several factors, one of which is health. Another important factor is a feeling of community, a connection to friends and family, opportunities to get together with other people from social occasions to study groups to helping out in a soup kitchen. Weather, apparently, has nothing to do with happiness. Alaska, for example, was recently named the happiest state.

I know of no one who has measured Bostonians’ happiness, although one UC Berkeley School of Law professor compared San Franciscans and Bostonians, and found that Bostonians achieve self-satisfaction through “educational attainment, finances, family support and contribution to others.” San Franciscans, on the other hand, “tied satisfaction of their life to work.” The study found that Bostonians place more value on community life than do San Franciscans.

I’m not sure that self-satisfaction is the same as happiness, but it’s close. I haven’t noticed that my San Franciscan friends are only focused on work or have less community spirit than my Boston friends. So maybe the happiness study needs more work.

We should be happy in downtown Boston. Every neighborhood here has a rich community life, with many opportunities for seeing friends, meeting people and collaborating with others. We only have to go out our front door to become part of our community, which starts on the sidewalk.

Nevertheless, we’ll take that sunny, fresh, beautiful spring day. Joy may be a completely different matter from happiness.

Picture L. A.

Picture the skyline of Los Angeles. How about Minneapolis, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Phoenix, even Chicago?

You can’t? Oh, well.

Now picture Washington D. C., Seattle, Toronto or New York. You know those skylines, don’t you? There might be a gimmick—Seattle’s Space Needle; Toronto’s CN Tower with the scary glass floor.

Or there might be the building that defines a city, one that cameras capture, one that ensures identity.

I thought about this when I viewed the proposals eight developers submitted for perking up Winthrop Square, the financial district parcel with the crumbling garage.

Take a look. None of these disappointing skyscrapers will become iconic. It is as if the same architect designed them all. Mostly the same material—glass. Mostly the same design—John Hancock clones, but with a protrusion here, a slash there, a bit of color, all bowing to hackneyed architectural trends. Who cares how tall they are? They are all alike and forgettable.

Architects and developers have gotten better at meeting the ground in Boston. But at the top—dullsville. And that’s the place that makes a building go down in history. Look at skylines, peruse the many books about skyscrapers—materials count somewhat. But more than materials is shape.

Ninety percent of the pictures of skyscrapers in tourist pamphlets, movies and books have the same thing—a top, a dramatic, pointy top, stepped back to allow more light to reach the ground as the building rises. Perhaps the same primeval instinct that built obelisks, pyramids, pagodas and church steeples remains if a structure is to become a symbol for a city.

So, Boston real estate developers, if you want to be remembered, give your building a top. Step it back for interest. It will etch you in history. It will make your creation the icon every city needs. It will ensure your legacy. Otherwise you are doomed. A timid slant won’t count. Your building will be indistinguishable from its neighbors, even if it is 60 stories tall.

Then why don’t real estate developers do this?

Blame architectural trends obsessed with new technology, materials and cheap flourishes to cover up that it is just a box. Blame the ease and cost savings when architects can design one floor plate and continue it to 30 stories, 60 stories—heck, make it 100 stories. Too tall? Doesn’t matter. Cut it down. Cheap.

Blame the BRA. Planning director Kairos Shen said last fall that he considers how buildings perform as a group, complimenting adjacent buildings. I guess that means nothing should stand out. In most cities, nothing does, there is no sense of place. Every skyline looks like Hartford. Is this really what Bostonians want?

Blame the financial hit when the floors get narrower as the building rises. The top floors of the Empire State have less rental space than its lower floors.

It’s also a resistance to creativity. Contemporary buildings are only tall boxes, sometimes twisted to show that the architect has knows Frank Gehry. They are clad in predictable materials and dotted with a quirk or two. Not much originality.

The icons that define American cities are different.

New York City’s are familiar. The Empire State and the Chrysler Building are in 99 percent of every skyline picture of NYC. What do they have? Stepped back design. Pointy tops.

The Empire State’s top was designed so dirigibles could tie up and disgorge their passengers. That didn’t work out, but the design lasted anyway. Even “Hog Butcher for the World” boosters ignore Mies van der Rohe’s creations and feature the Chicago Water Tower.

Remarkably, the icons are at least 80 years old. The newer ones, including New York’s One World Trade Center and the entire Sixth Avenue can’t be recalled. (One World Trade Center does have an antenna. Hard to tell how that will play in 100 years.)

In Washington the White House confers a sense of place, as do presidential memorials. But two structures take precedence in pictures. One is the Capitol, with its step-backs and pointy top. The other honors our first president.

Even banal examples define cities. If there is one American city that should never have had skyscrapers, it is San Francisco. I once lived across the bay. When I first laid eyes from the Berkeley Hills on the Golden Gate Bridge, I thought I had experienced art at its finest.

Then I noticed the other work of art, the crowded city on its left with its low white buildings roving over foggy hills. It evoked a sense of place San Francisco lost as high rises rose. But even in San Francisco’s forgettable skyline, one building stands out. The pointy-top TransAmerica building has become that city’s icon, even if it is clunky.

Let’s return to the Boston skyline.

From the south you see a jumble on the right and the one-dimensional weirdness of the John Hancock building.

Approaching from points west, the jumble tumbles into the Atlantic Ocean.

From I-93 north, there is no skyline. The Pru is on the right, then empty space, then the John Hancock. To the left is a tall mass of indistinguishable blobs.

From the harbor, you’re confronted with Harbor Towers and the jumble behind.

Consider pictures of Boston and its icons. What building appears most frequently in tourist-attracting pictures? The Custom House Tower.

Is any skyscraper featured? The State Street Bank buildings? Dewey Square? One Beacon? Sixty State? 33 Arch? Any excitement over the Nashua Street Residences, now under construction?

They are all the new nothings. Big boxes in different clothing. Even my favorite skyscraper, Hugh Stubbin’s Federal Reserve Bank, is barely noticed. No wonder Bostonians don’t like tall buildings.

So here is the lesson for you developers: the buildings you are proposing are unlikely to be remembered or even noticed, except as they block someone’s view. If your creation is to become iconic, history has lessons. Step it back to allow more light to reach the street. Give it a delightful, well-lit pointy top that we can see from afar.

You too can go down in history.

What is best for us, not Tsarnaev

We’ve had the trial even though Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s lawyers admitted he was guilty on the first day. This trial was important to endure. If we hadn’t had it, the conspiracy theorists would crawl out, accusing the police of cover-ups. The Fox-TV screamers would be concocting stories about how it was all Obama’s fault. The right wing would be clamoring to send the guy to Guantanamo. And the rest of us would have to put up with such idiocy instead of being able to watch Wolf Hall in peace. So I figure the trial was for us, not for Tsarnaev.

The second phase, to which we’ll be subjected to next week, is different. It’s not in our best interest. In America, the accused is supposed to be tried by his peers. This guy doesn’t have any peers. So it was up to the citizenry of Massachusetts to provide a jury. But more than half of us were deemed unqualified because we believed the death penalty to be unproductive, so 17th-century and no deterrent. Sounds like not all the citizenry was valued or deemed equal, but there it is.

We know this guy is one pathetic, despicable humanoid creature. So why can’t we just put him away in some Colorado prison for the worst human beings ever and never see him, read about him or hear about him again?

This stance has nothing to do with the morality or immorality of the death penalty or some people’s desire for revenge. It has to do with the death penalty’s burden on us.      If the jury imposes the death penalty—and few would care if the guy dies—the nation’s justice system will continue to grind, costing taxpayers money. It will take time away from other matters we’d like to be considering, such as the Olympics, police brutality and Iran’s trustworthiness, matters about which we already have enough conflict. There will be hearings and appeals and news stories and television commentary and more drawings.

Moreover, it will keep the spotlight on him. It is impossible to judge the role fame plays with people like this. But one suspects the attention might make him proud of his actions, might validate them. It might affirm that he did what was needed for the religion he claims is his. It might give him pleasure to think he could be a martyr for his cause. Maybe he looks forward to the drama his death by lethal injection would cause. Maybe he looks forward to those virgins, which surely are preferable to imagining a life spent among the occupants of the Colorado prison for the worst human beings ever.

Observers in the courtroom play up Tsarnaev’s demeanor—impassive, unemotional, glazed. They imply or say it means he has no empathy for the father who described what that day was like for his family or the young, injured woman who held her friend’s hand as she died.

That demeanor means nothing. Anyone who has ever criticized someone has seen that kind of demeanor. Anyone who has ever been criticized has probably displayed that immobile face. Does anyone actually expect this Tsarnaev to be remorseful? After all this is a guy who ran over his own brother. He might have been supremely annoyed at that brother, the one who got him into this mess.

If someone did what Tsarnaev did to my child, I’d want to strangle him with my own hands. The rest of my life would be shrouded in a gloom that never went away.

But private feelings are different from civic ones. We are better off if we put him away and never hear from him or about him again. Life is too short and too precious, as we were reminded on that day, to be caught in the mire that he created.

 

Young adults invest in city

This is what older adults think of the newly minted adults—20 to early 30s—living on their block:

They have loud parties. They drink too much. They put their trash out at any old time and don’t bag it properly. They have too many dogs, and they don’t pick up the you-know-what. They don’t care about the neighborhood because they’re here temporarily—only until they get a new job or find a mate and decamp to the burbs when they think about having children.

So who wants such troublesome people living in Boston? Actually, we all do—if they are the kind of young adult who gets accepted to Boston’s ONEin3 Council.

Realizing that the age group between 20 and 34 years old comprised about one-third of Boston’s population, Mayor Menino started ONEin3 as an advisory group in 2004. Those who are accepted to the council meet one another and learn about the city, its many activities for young people, the various neighborhoods and work and family life in those neighborhoods. If they choose later to take a leadership role in the city, they have a leg up in knowledge and experience in negotiating civic affairs. A good example is city Councillor Tito Jackson who is an alumnus of ONEin3.

This year 37 members from 20 Boston neighborhoods started their year’s service about six weeks ago. The city bills ONEin3 as a group that helps Boston be the best place it can be for that age group.

But the participants I spoke to said it was more than that. It expanded their world, introduced them to current and future leaders, and enabled them to make a unique contribution—different from serving on other boards or volunteering at other organizations.

Senam Kumahia, 30, who lives in the Back Bay, applied because he wanted to meet like-minded young people. He works as a consultant connecting real estate companies with suppliers and service businesses owned by women and minorities.

Shea Coakley, also 30, is enthused about ONEin3 because it builds bridges. “It brings together different groups that might not bump into one another,” he said.

Coakley, a Charlestown resident, is an entrepreneur who started LeanBox, a healthy, fresh meal delivery service for smaller companies that don’t provide a cafeteria for their workers.

He said through ONEin3 he has met people in his age group who work in the arts, non-profits and other industries he has not been involved in. He and Kumahia both said they have especially liked the evenings when everyone gathers at a restaurant in a specific neighborhood when ONEin3 residents of that neighborhood explain to the others what it is like to live there. Next month they will gather in West Roxbury.

“It’s not networking,” said Coakley. “It’s community building.”

In addition to the monthly introduction to different neighborhoods, ONEin3 members meet city officials and participate in volunteer projects such as last year’s art installation outside the Boston Public Library in which residents and visitors wrote in up to five words what Boston meant to them. Last year they also invested time in such efforts as collecting 600 warm coats for those who need them.

Coakley is one of four ONEin3 members to participate for the second year to provide extra leadership and continuity for the group.

This is Kumahia’s first year. He said he has been most impressed with the energy in the group and the support members give one another at events and efforts they are involved in. “There is excitement around the program,” he explained. “People are coming up with good ideas, and they’re fired up.”

Although 82 percent of Boston’s young adult population has never been married, both Kumahia and Coakley are. So that brings up the next question: do they intend to stay in the city and raise a family here?

Both men say yes. Coakley pointed out that he and his wife are expecting a baby, and Charlestown is filled with strollers, mother-to-be yoga classes, and schools, so he and his wife feel right at home.

I hope they do stay. I hope all of the ONEin3 Council members stay in the city. We need engaged, civic-minded residents who know one another’s neighborhoods and one another’s industries and professions.

I wish such a council had been in existence when I was in that age group. It would have saved me time and frustration in learning how to negotiate city government and in forming alliances with people in other neighborhoods. The connections among neighborhoods is an antidote to the tribalism that has infected and degraded the city for too long. Menino, to his credit, did not participate in tribal Boston. He recognized that it’s a new world order out there. The ONEin3 Council members are the leaders of that order.

Keep City Hall Plaza

Mayor Walsh has asked for help in re-making City Hall Plaza. He has resorted to Twitter to re-invent, re-imagine, re-envision #CityHallPlaza.

In letters, radio commentary and Twitter, Bostonians have chimed in. Art exhibits, a baseball diamond, a roller rink, Yo-Yo Ma’s music garden idea, trees, an inexplicable suggestion for an “enhanced multimodal hub-ness”—all these ideas are great.

Except none of them will work.

I’d like you to consider a shocking concept: there is nothing wrong with City Hall Plaza itself. It’s the edges that make it fail.

(Full disclosure: I once served on a mayor-appointed panel that heard opinions on what to do about the plaza.)

Let’s concentrate on the plaza’s pluses. Find the bird’s eye view of the plaza soon after it was completed on #CityHallPlaza on Twitter. It’s not bad. The brick looks warm. Granite steps break up the expanse. The fountain is tucked in rather nicely.

The plaza functions well for one purpose—big crowds, whether it’s for a concert or a sports celebration. (Trees, a common suggestion, will get trampled by boisterous fans celebrating the next Red Sox World Series Championship, should that ever occur.)

City Hall Plaza’s architects are said to have envisioned Italy’s great plazas when they laid out theirs. Regrettably, most 1960s architects concentrated on whatever they were designing and forgot the setting their design was in. Copying the great Italian plazas, they noted the empty space, the majestic building at one end, the limestone surface, the activity. They ignored the feature that made those plazas successful—the edges.

Whether in Venice, Sienna or Rome, otherwise cold, windswept plazas are lined with dozens of cafes and restaurants filled with people. Those restaurants open early and close late. If you’ve visited Italy, I’ll bet you’ve crossed those plazas to find a spot to sit, sip a coffee or glass of wine, and watch the activity.

So here’s my recommendation: keep the design of the plaza. Remove that awful concrete and restore the old fountain. Re-lay the bricks. Pull out the weeds that make the granite steps buckle. Care for the trees next to the JFK building and plant the pits with flowers that someone waters. This fix is cheap.

Then rezone the edges. An eyeglass shop or an office supply store has no business being on the Sears Crescent side of the plaza. Neither does a blank back entrance to the New England Center for Homeless Veterans. Instead ask the vets to enliven their entrance, perhaps with a café that they run. Persuade Boston’s best restaurateurs to set up shop and spill out onto the plaza. Let them stay open late. But that’s only one edge.

Cambridge Street presents a challenge. A roadway is a disaster for Italian-style plazas. The farmer’s market helped, and food carts or Faneuil Hall-style trinket carts could too, and once many years ago, they occupied space there and were successful.

The last blank edge degrading the plaza is the JFK building. When a hotel was proposed in the 1990s, some objected to privatizing public space. But that use would have succeeded in bringing life to that edge. The feds objected to the hotel, claiming that windows facing the JFK would make it vulnerable to bomb-throwing terrorists. We didn’t yet know airplanes were a bigger threat.

If the feds are scared of having people nearby, they shouldn’t be located next to an active plaza. It is a long shot to persuade JFK’s handlers to invite activity into its ground floor, but it is worth trying. The state successfully did this at the Saltonstall Building across the street.

Meanwhile, activate the plaza with events and all sorts of things. Because of no good edges, it will take an dedicated leader and a lot of programming.

Bostonians should take comfort. We don’t have the worst city hall plaza. Visit Dallas, or go online to view their city hall and its surroundings, brought to them by I. M. Pei, the over-rated architect who laid out our regrettable Government Center.

Dallas City Hall is uglier than ours—hard as that might be to imagine. Roadways surround that plaza, and its surface is concrete.

As to Boston City Hall itself? Plant some ivy. Let it grow up the walls. And call it a day.

 

Do we have any privacy?

The notion of privacy has received much attention recently. I’m still waiting for someone to draw a reasonable line about how far to go in collecting information on the world’s population.

The new handwringing about privacy began when Edward Snowden, the contractor working for the National Security Agency, leaked classified documents to the press about the NSA’s activities.

He entertained us as he fled to Hong Kong, tried to get to Bolivia and finally settled for Russia. Poor guy. And he thinks the U. S. is bad.

His present life has some compensations. Apparently his girlfriend visits him in exile. He has been lauded with a whistleblower prize, a person-of-the-year designation, a teleconferenced speech at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin, Texas, and films about his activities.

I have mixed feelings about Snowden and his revelations. Mostly I sympathized with the young man’s parents, who raised a smart son with a frustrating tendency to bring trouble on himself—starting with dropping out of both high school and college. I could imagine them saying, “Oh, no, Eddie. What have you done now?”

The privacy conversation continued with the juicy revelation that we were tapping Angela Merkel’s phone. I always assumed the Germans were tapping Obama’s or maybe Kerry’s phone too.

I’ll admit I’m mostly ignorant about spying. My information comes from spy novels. If you like them too, and you haven’t tried the works of Joseph Kanon and Alan Furst, in addition to old favorites like John Le Carre, you’re in for a treat. So I have always assumed everyone is spying on everyone else. It’s sort of like the doctrine of mutual assured destruction with the atom bomb. If both sides have it, no one goes too far.

But if I know little about spying, I do know about privacy. It’s not the government I’m afraid of. The government has journalists scrutinizing every move. I’m afraid of private entities, unregulated, unobserved and operating with proprietary tactics. For most people it is irrelevant what NSA does. Electronics have already blown your cover.

It’s Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. It’s the iPhone that knows your location, helpfully (and creepily) displaying the correct time in your new time zone as you step off a plane. Your laptop follows you, showing your location when you go onto Google Maps and tracking your website visits and purchases. I once called Comcast about a problem, and they knew the television program I had been watching.

When you are out and about, it’s not the NSA, it’s all electronics that record your every movement. Cameras watch people in stores, hospitals and at intersections. Other cameras take photos of license plates as cars go through toll booths. Charlie cards record the time we tap through the fare gate. Library cards confirm the books we check out. The airlines know about your vacation plans. Your Visa card reveals a lot about how much money you have to spend.

Then there are the websites devoted only to digging up your dirt. I tried one—InstantCheckmate.com.

It was unnerving. InstantCheckmate charged me $22.86 for one-month access to its data, which it apparently collects from all sorts of websites. It knew my name, age, address and phone numbers. Moreover, it knew all about my husband and our daughters, including their married names and home addresses. I have Facebook and Linked-in accounts, but neither of those pages has much information on them. How did they accumulate so much information about me?

The site promised to show any lawsuits in which I was involved as well as any court appearances I have made or arrests I have had, although some information required more payment. I decided I didn’t get paid enough for this column to spend more money on this website, especially since I knew I had never been arrested. I didn’t look anyone else up. I’m just not that curious about any secrets my friends might want to keep from the world.

I’m certain this is only one website of many providing accurate information that might be none of your business.

I can see how such sites as this are useful. If you don’t trust your daughter’s boyfriend, you can see if there is good reason for your suspicion. If you are hiring people, you’ve got a tool to learn about secrets they do not reveal on their Facebook page. The site asks you to agree not to use the information for hiring and several other purposes, but they don’t care if you do.

I’ve known people, however, for whom such sites could be devastating. A friend suffered from a stalker. Another friend had a sticky divorce, and she did not want her ex-husband to know anything about her life without him. Electronic information could bring danger to such people as this.

I hope we can settle on boundaries for the NSA. At the same time, I hope we can make private companies do their part in keeping our information private.

Saving space

So far this year, Bostonians have truly weathered the storms. Most people have kept their cool and maintained their good nature. I have also detected a note of pride in our resilience and bravery in the face of unprecedented snowfalls.

The T didn’t work. The city’s plows and melters had trouble keeping up. But the worst outcome was the mean behavior, unworthy of a class-act city, that came from some of those who decided the parking space they had shoveled out was theirs alone.

Two factors contributed to that behavior—the physical characteristics of a neighborhood and Mayor Marty Walsh. The Back Bay, the West End, Downtown and the Waterfront usually don’t have to manage parking spaces in snow. There is off-street parking in those neighborhoods, either in alleys or in garages connected to large residential buildings.

The North End, the South End and Beacon Hill have never had a culture of saving shoveled-out parking spaces. The South End’s gurus have actually written a rule against saving a space. In the North End and on Beacon Hill, the space-saving culture never took hold. A quick survey of my favorite fellow observers pointed out a few reasons.

No one in the dense neighborhoods of the North End and Beacon Hill has ever expected to find a parking space in nice weather, let alone after a snow storm when the piles hide every car. Residents of those neighborhoods have no sense that the space in front of their house has ever been theirs. Because those neighborhoods are centrally located there is less need for a car, and many cars sit unshoveled anyway.

The reasoning is as follows. Your car is in a legal space, no street cleaner will come by and have it towed, and you don’t need it anyway. Leave it there until the snow melts. You’ll save a lot of back-breaking work.

In neighborhoods without the central location and close T stops, more people have cars. Charlestown and South Boston fit that description. There are more single family houses in those neighborhoods, and, frankly, more space. So there has been a longer practice of parking near one’s house, if not right in front.

These neighborhoods have fewer students and young professionals temporarily living there, so it is likely they will know their neighbors and their needs. One Charlestown resident pointed out she knows the car of the elderly woman who has paid to have her space shoveled out. The woman usually parks there. My informant said she would never park in that woman’s space and neither would her neighbors. Good for them.

In the outlying neighborhoods, the only option is street parking, so it might seem more valuable. Beacon Hill and North End residents have many nearby garages, said my Charlestown observer. That’s not true for South Boston or Charlestown. Charlestown’s garages are mostly in or near the Navy Yard, far from many residents and cut off by the roads to the Tobin Bridge.

The dense, centrally located neighborhoods are also more public, said one observer. They are used to having shoppers, tourists, office visitors and other outsiders parking on their streets, even though every car is supposed to have a resident sticker. This public nature further erodes any thought they have that a parking space is theirs.

Even in the dense neighborhoods, this winter brought out some viciousness. North End residents suffered from several incidents.

The mayor gave subtle permission to be aggressive about saving your space, although he wouldn’t condone slashed tires. Apparently Mayor Menino said that after 48 hours, the city would pick up the space savers in shoveled out spaces, Mayor Walsh went further. He sympathized with the shovelers. He did not send out the guys who pick up the space savers until weeks after the storms.

You can probably tell I side with those who don’t believe in saving a space. I figure if I shovel out—and I’ve done so more times than I can count—someone else will take my space, but I will take another shoveled-out space. It seems selfish to save a space—like taking more than you deserve of our limited resources. As a North End friend put it: “[Space saving] propagates the idea that parking is a car owner’s “right” rather than a shared public benefit.”

I also realized a secret. A few times when I’ve seen a piece of equipment saving a space, I have picked up the equipment, set it on the sidewalk and gone on my merry way. Who are those drivers who think they own a parking spot? I polled some observers. It turns out there are many space-saver stealers like me. And I thought I was the only one.

So if someone parks in the space you claim is yours when you have gone shopping, don’t blame the driver. It could be the posse, made up of folks like me, who are making sure the public realm stays public.

Optimism or pessimism

My friend and I recently attended a public meeting convened by the Boston 2024 Olympics Organizing Committee.

It was entertaining in so many ways. The cast of characters was impassioned, especially the opponents. One cute girl from Somerville—probably around 20 years old, not yet a woman— was handing out posters rejecting the Olympics and asking for transit and education funding instead. Wouldn’t it be nice if things worked that way?

There were the presenters, who talked about “sport” not “sports.” One presenter was more impressive than the rest. Not only was Cheri Blauwet a Boston Marathon winner and a former Olympian, but she achieved her glory in a wheelchair. And, by the way, she’s now a physician who has time to join in the Boston 2024 effort. Listening to a person like Dr. Blauwet can make everyone wonder what important thing they’ve done with their lives.

There were the elected officials who, if they run a city or a state, have lined up in support. There were the legislators and city councilors, who seem miffed that they’ve not been properly consulted in the planning. There was the audience, packed into the main room as well as an overflow room. It was one more piece of evidence that Bostonians, quirky as they can be, are deeply involved in civic affairs.

As presentations, complaints, haranguing, praise, dire warnings of fiscal implosion, repetitions, hope and general mayhem ensued, my friend and I began noticing that the enthusiasm or the dire predictions had something in common.

Most of the speakers’ attitudes toward the Olympics were not based on fact, although “facts” were cited. Instead their position corresponded more closely to their outlook on life. Pessimists emphasized each detail that could go wrong. The optimists were less specific. They just thought problems could be solved, and they appeared to trust that the people who were running the show could bring it off.

My friend and I realized we were both optimists. We liked major initiatives. We’d started a few successful ones ourselves. We liked problems. We were confident we could solve them. We trusted that smart people like the presenters could also solve problems.

We remembered a Boston Globe columnist complaining that the “elites” of Boston were pressing the Olympics on us, almost as if he were jealous. But we saw those promoters differently. The reason they were elites was that the leaders of the effort are people of achievement. They run things. They’ve made money. They’ve held important jobs. Because of their success in their work lives, they can garner support from impressive quarters. We didn’t know any of them personally, but we could tell from the presentations that they too are optimists. Remarkably, these local leaders have reputations of honesty and good business practices. What lucky people we are to have those kind of leaders. It made optimism seem justified.

The pessimists attributed the uncertainty about venues, locations and routes to a “lack of transparency,” implying that the Boston 2024 people were hiding something.

But we considered uncertainty appropriate at this stage. Planning is an iterative process, and the word iterative is an important concept. Plans get made. Then they get adjusted. Then that adjusted plan causes a future step to become clear. That step causes the planners to reconsider an earlier step.

For optimists, this is exciting. Since I’m not a pessimist, I can’t tell what feelings it might cause for that kind of person. But it could generate caution. It could cause fear. Caution and fear could mean that no steps get taken, no problem gets solved. I know a person like this, who, when she led an organization, missed several opportunities to expand its reach.

Pessimists often see themselves as realistic rather than pessimistic. But optimists can view a claim to such “wisdom” as negative, possibly delusional. Most optimists would not call themselves realistic, although their confidence and hopefulness often carry them through difficult situations.

I looked online to see what others were saying about optimism and pessimism. A wag named Gil Stern said, “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.”

The columnist George Will, one of the all-time great pessimists, wrote, “The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.”

But we’ll have to leave it to the optimist Harry Truman to address most closely whether Boston should host the Olympics. “A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities,” said Harry. “And an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”

It looks as if that’s what the Boston 2024 promoters are trying to do.
 

A handsome building

All the news about Boston’s central business district has been about the Millennium Tower and the remake of Filene’s.

Sitting around the tower, however, is a lot of old Boston, much of it built after the devastating 1872 fire. It isn’t yet known if the tower will prove to be as handsome as some of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century structures near it. Look at the nine-story, 100 Franklin Street as an example of one of the best buildings in Boston.

Its materials are first rate— white marble blocks, bronze details, decorative cast iron trim and a pair of Roman centurion torchbearers mounted on either side of the main entrance. The front façade curves gracefully to match the line of the street. Every detail, from the window grilles to the fire escapes, is beautifully designed and executed. The contractor was Norcross Brothers, who also built Trinity Church.

A bank now occupies the main floor, which has suffered from modern replacement windows and a newish, banal doorway. But the building is lucky in that other classical details have been preserved.

Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, an architecture firm responsible for many handsome Boston and Cambridge structures of that era, designed the 1908 building for the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. It cost $1.1 million to build, said Robert J. Roche, archivist and records manager for Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott, as the firm is now known. The City of Boston currently values 100 Franklin (or 201 Devonshire, as listed in official records) at more than $22 million.

Its occupants have included the Boston Stock Exchange and the Vault, a group of business leaders who met there as they helped instigate Boston’s urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s. Now one of its occupants is the building’s current owner, Synergy Investments, which maintains the building at a high level. It is 98.5 percent leased, according to the CoStar real estate database.

A building such as 100 Franklin is desirable, said Kirstin Blount, senior vice president at the real estate firm Colliers International, even though it does not have the large floor plate of newer skyscrapers. It is ideal for smaller firms, she said. Many of these older buildings exist in Boston since high rises account for only 29 million square feet in the approximately 63 million square feet of office space located in Boston’s business districts. The rent in older buildings, even when they are in meticulous condition, can be half that of a high rise or a new building.

The urban analyst Jane Jacobs loved older buildings, claiming they add variety in aspect, diversity in ownership and economic vitality. She believed that older buildings were required to keep streets vigorous.

But such buildings can be vulnerable. The Shreve, Crump and Low building at the corner of Arlington and Boylston is slated for demolition to make way for the Druker Company’s new building as soon as the company signs an anchor tenant.

While 100 Franklin Street looks as if its current profitability will enable it to last, it has no protection other than its owner’s good will. It is eligible for listing on the National Historic Register and is located in Boston’s Commercial Palace Historic District, designated by the National Historic Register. But those honors are not much protection, said Lynn Smiledge, chair of Boston’s Landmarks Commission.

The state-sanctioned historic districts such as those of the Back Bay and Beacon Hill have serious protections for historic structures, but there are no such Massachusetts-designated districts in Boston’s central business district, she said.

As for individual buildings, “the bar is high and the process lengthy,” Smiledge said about designating a structure as a landmark. “A building has to demonstrate significance beyond the local level or be the finest example of its style.”

That wasn’t the case for the old Shreve, Crump and Low building, even though many preservationists objected to its demolition.

Dozens of buildings in the financial district or Downtown Crossing are fine examples of the classical revival period, so 100 Franklin, for all its beauty, has company. Few older buildings demonstrate state-wide or national significance even though they may have interesting local histories. Unless a building is threatened with demolition or significant change, it typically sits on a “pending” list for a local landmark if it has any paperwork at all, said Smiledge.

For now, such beautiful buildings as 100 Franklin Street serve proudly as contrasts to the high rises, most of which in Boston are made of lesser materials and possess little interesting detail. Perhaps the qualities of the older buildings could be the jumping off point for the design of some of the new high-rises in central Boston or the Seaport District’s mid-rises. We could do worse.