The North End As a Palimpsest
As I ascended to the street level after gliding through the hustle and bustle of Boston’s subway system, I found myself looking at a neighborhood that started with America and stayed along for the ride. The North End wants to stay in the past as much as it wants to continue to move forward into the future. From the expansion of its borders to its red brick motif, the North End has seen plenty of evolution while maintaining some of its key elements. The subtleties of its history hide in the vulnerable spots; they dwell in the Bocce courts and are embossed on the backsides of memorials. One of its treasured locations, Langone Park, features some of these subtleties in the humble American fashion associated with little league baseball, war memorials, and harbor-side views. Although, this smaller part of the larger whole quite understandably does not adequately characterize the layered industrial timeline of the North End. Originating from capitalist goals, the North End has been home to a steady flow of industrial ventures and facilities that decorate its coastline. David Harvey provides a useful framework for the analysis of such a neighborhood in The Urban Process Under Capitalism. While he does quite thoroughly discuss the urban process in relation to the capitalist behavior of accumulation, I believe that there is an ever present complement which deals with the accumulation of social capital that he does not discuss. More specifically, the influx of immigrant cultures over many years has contributed greatly to the diversity which the North End can now claim as its social capital. With Harvey’s theory in mind, the North End can be identified and analyzed as a palimpsest which has continued a tradition of [social] capital accumulation that has been superimposed over time.