Schrödinger's landscape

Cambridge Road, Burlington MA, circa 1949
My maternal grandmother grew up in Woburn's west side, three steps from the Burlington line. Her father and grandfather worked at Cummings Farm, long since bulldozed and obliterated to make room for the shopping centers, condo complexes, and office parks that occupy the crowded stretch of Cambridge Road (and it will always be "road," not "street" for me) from Bedford Road to Route 128.

Traces of the Cummings estate still remain, as the bulk of Mrs. Cummings's substantial land holdings were bequeathed to the "children of the City of Boston" in a restrictive trust which eminent domain takings have only taken a small bite out of. Every so often there has been talk by Boston politicians to find a loophole to break the trust and sell the prime real estate, thus securing a huge windfall to fund projects like the Rose Kennedy Greenway or a 1:1 scale replica of the Sphinx -- bearing Tom Menino's face -- to be built on the South Boston waterfront that is Mayor Mushmouth's personal Valley of the Kings.

For now, though, the patches of forest and scrub between the office buildings and used car lots remain overgrown and beyond the reach of deep-pocketed developers. Every time I drive up that way with my grandmother, which is more times than I can count, she delivers the same series of nostalgic rambles about what the area used to be like when she was young.

"We used to race paper boats in that drainage ditch. My uncle drowned in that stream when he was trying out his new galoshes. He was six. I used to babysit for people up this hill. It seemed so steep back then. You could wander wherever, and no one would tell you to get off their land..."

The litany never varied, and became etched in my brother's head and mine through years of repetition. Even when I drive the stretch alone the routine of places and events queues up unbidden, a subconscious mantra and stuff of which family in-jokes are made.

On the way back from our weekly trips to Target, I'll occasionally take a detour through my old North Woburn stomping grounds, though it has become harder and harder to reconcile the visual input with the expectations of decades-old memories. The phantoms retain more substance than the present reality, and I still see the Tomato Hill sandpit or the seasonal marsh/skating pond in the woods in place of the subdivisions that now occupy those spaces.

From my late childhood through my mid-twenties, the pace of development in the area was glacial -- a single-family home here and office building there, but apart from the last lurching encroachments from the local industrial park, there was little in the way of rapid, drastic transformations of the landscape. What did occur was gradual enough to be easily internalized and placed in context. This not only applied to Woburn and its surrounding communities, but to the places in town where I used to spend my time -- Brighton Ave to Kenmore Square, Mass Ave from the MIT Bridge to Porter Square, Cambridgeport to Central Square, Porter Square to Davis.

Then came the real estate boom and tsunami of gentrification that came in wake of rent control being repealed in Cambridge. I also got a car and started driving again, which shifted my axis of operations away from the city and back to the suburbs. I work in Boston, but what I actually see of the city is mostly limited to a stretch of Morrissey Boulevard and the view from I-93. It's no great loss, to tell the truth. In this era of retail chains and global branding, the only difference between city and suburb is that the suburbs have better parking and slightly smaller chance of stepping in a puddle of human urine.

When I do make the rare trip into town, I find a landscape transformed beyond recognition, to the point (as in the time I met up with a friend in Davis Square) where I lose my bearings in places I've walked through dozens of times before. I can deal with the new well enough, but I've yet to encounter an instance of the "new" being an improvement rather than a bland upscale repurposing.

The nature of the changes filters back to me from my wife or from urbanocentric friends. Kenmore Square has been effectively eradicated. Allston has slowly been absorbed into the fiefdoms of Boston University and Harvard. Harvard Square has turned into a strip mall with pretensions of atmosphere and Central Square has gone from the home of radical bookstores and Cheapo Records to hosting The Gap.

There's no real reason to go back anymore, and I prefer to preserve my mental image of the landscape (including the stop sign in Kendall Square my pal Leech walked straight into in a golden moment of unintended slapstick) as it was back in 1994 in a dead/not dead state immune to the quantum flucutations of empirical evidence.

It does make me an unreliable source of driving directions, however.

Duran Duran - Careless Memories (from Duran Duran, 1981) - Infinitely preferable to "Careless Whispers."

Saint Etienne - It's All Gone Horribly Wrong (from The Misadventures of Saint Etienne, 1999) - A Japanese soundtrack album to an English film released only in Spain and which starred an American actress (Parker Posey, as per the Mandatory Posey Appearance Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994).

Svensk - Getting Old (from a 1967 single) - Psychedelic freakbeat is immune to the ravages of time.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Architecture and Morality (from Architecture & Morality, 1981) - Brutalism is maladaptive.