Loveable or finished?

Boston’s Scollay Square in the late 19th Century. The square, now modernist/Brutalist Government Center, became famous in the 20th Century as Boston’s sin (or fun?) center — hookers, strip shows, etc. “Hey, sailor!”

“There is no section in America half so good to live in as splendid old New England — and there is no city on this continent as loveable as Boston.’’

— Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens) (1835-1910), in a letter to his sister-in -law Mollie Clemens, in January 1971.

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“There broods over the real Boston an immense effect of finality. One feels in Boston, as one feels in no other part of the States, that the intellectual movement has ceased.’’

— H.G. Wells (1866-1946), prolific English author, in The Future in America (1906)