On leaving Cambridgeport

Last year I moved back to my old neighborhood in Cambridgeport after sixteen years gone.  I was around here from 1978 to 1989, working the Massachusetts miracle at Polaroid, DEC, MIT and other companies.

Somehow, I sort of expected that -- perhaps because I didn't grow up here, but was here as a young adult -- that I could go home again.  But now I'm moving, this weekend, to Somerville, Cambridge's townie neighbor -- now more like Cambridge used to be than Cambridge is itself.

I guess I really miss the way this neighborhood used to be.  It was more mixed class and mixed age.  I miss all the Greek families, and how many kids there used to be.

I miss the swirling, open culture those kids had, hanging out but not gangs, no knifings and people getting shot for drugs.  People let their good teens hang out on the street -- now they don't, and the streets seem to belong to...the other kids.

I miss the Ward 5 block parties in the summer, and people out sweeping their walks nearly every day partly as a reason to be out to talk to the neighbors.  I miss the activity around the old Catholic church and the convent and school, now closed and waiting to be converted into condos. 

It's nostalgia, I know, but somehow I thought if I moved back here it would be the same, only better off. 

I have one neighbor in this building who knows me, and that's more because the mother-in-law and I got to know each other, and the husband is from Poland and a bit more old world.  All the rest are transient student/yuppie types who think the people in the two third floor units -- you know, those people with *kids* -- are a bit odd and old.

Still, I'll miss walking on the Charles in the moonlight, and listening to the patter of the drunks in Central Square.  Oddly, I'll be closer to Davis, but Davis is the square I'd more expect to be attached to this neighborhood than Central.  Central's still pretty gritty, and Davis has become very yuppie.

In Clarendon Hill, we have working class people and Tufts professors, public housing and painted ladies, all cheek by jowl.  I'm hoping it will be a bit more vibrant, and a little more like this place was back in the day (or as I thought it was in my dimming possibly idealized memory?).

Ah well, back to packing!