Boston’s Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill coined the famous phrase “all politics is local,” which was true perhaps in more than one way in 2011. Longtime Representative Barney Frank, often seen more as a national political figure rather than a local one, announced his intent to retire in part because of facts of local geography. Decennial redistricting--moving lines on a map--changed the constituency of his district enough that he decided the required new campaigning would not be worth it. In a twist on O’Neill’s phrase, former Massachusetts House speaker Sal DiMasi was convicted at a courthouse just about in view of the North End district that had elected him for years.
Sometimes events carry extra meaning if you think about them on a map. The sports triumph of the year was the Bruins--a team whose main fan base lies far outside wealthy neighborhoods like the Back Bay, but whose Stanley Cup championship parade brought millions of people to the moneyed heart of Boston, reminding everyone downtown what Boston is really the “Hub” of. The parked-up streets of one of the city’s densest college neighborhoods were crunched even further during “Allston Christmas,” the college neighborhood’s annual display of moving trucks and discarded furniture on Sept. 1. And if you were trying to map the tide of gentrification, you couldn’t do it more precisely than by watching the tension when a Whole Foods replaced a Latin grocer in Jamaica Plain’s Hyde Square.
Geographic stories can reach not just across neighborhoods, but across time: When James “Whitey” Bulger was arraigned, it was at the vast brick-and-glass federal courthouse at Fan Pier, an anchor of the “new” South Boston just a mile away from the “old” South Boston that had been his home turf as a gangster. (Neither remotely resembled the sunny apartment complex where he was captured, thousands of miles in Claifornia.)
