Physical scale of the Patriots' Day bombing and the hunt for the Tsarnaevs

[xiphias]

One of my friends, who works in media, and used to live in Boston, was noting how much better the coverage from local stations was than from out-of-town places. My mother-in-law noticed the same thing, and emailed us to get better information than she could get from her own news in Florida.

And he mentioned how Watertown was being described. I heard someone from SOME organization call Watertown a "sleepy little New England town" -- which, in five words, has two incorrect adjectives and one incorrect noun.

And the BBC called Watertown a "district of Boston." That is completely wrong factually, but manages to give a much, much more accurate impression to a British audience.

Non-Bostonians talk with astonishment about locking down the entire metropolitan area and five outlying communities for a manhunt. And, yes, we Bostonians DO recognize how extraordinary this was. But apparently people don't realize just how physically small this all is.

So -- for any of you out there who are more familiar with London than with Boston: Watertown is about as far from the center of Boston as, maybe, Brentford is from the center of London. I was originally planning on comparing it to Croydon, but, from what I can tell, Croydon is more affluent and has a richer cultural and arts scene.

(Okay, I THINK I just threw a burn on Watertown, right? That was supposed to be a witty insult. But I don't actually know enough about London to be sure. For the record, I actually really like Watertown, and the Caruso branch of my family is there.)

In general, can those of you who know Boston and also know other areas come up with decent analogies that could help other folks understand what Watertown is, and where it is in relation to the rest of the city?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm Fnordy.

according to wikipedia, Watertown calls itself a town but is considered a city by state statue. so it could be considered either. with about 32,000 citizens, it's smaller than Billerica. The place i live is called a small town with a population of 20,000. very confusing.

So little and town are debateable. Sleepy? I have no idea. New England? abosultely.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Certainly, the image called up by "sleepy little New England town" is nothing like Watertown. There isn't a single white clapboard church next to a covered bridge going over a babbling brook winding through green hills in the entire place.

(And, for people who haven't been to New England -- those actually do, genuinely, in real life, exist.)

[cos]

Comparing populations like that can be very misleading. Watertown is a slice of the urban inner section of metro Boston. It's a geographically small slice, which is why its population is small, but it's also pretty dense, has a lot of business, large intersections, major streets, public transit running through it on the way to and from Boston and other nearby municipalities... describing it as a sleepy little town is totally wrong.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Having grown up in New York City, it took me a long time to realize that what the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area calls a "city" is what I grew up calling a "neighborhood."

Start with Boston = Downtown.

Cambridge? That's Greenwich Villiage.

Newton? The Upper West Side.

Watertown? It's where midtown would be, except it's more like Astoria in character.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

It's pointless to try to explain, as one explanation explains:

The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston, which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End. And, the Back Bay was filled in years ago.

I've been there dozens of times since the late 70s and have no wicked ideah where I'm going except by the T, which works fine except always remembering to carry that extra nickel so I won't get stuck down there forever.

(And the only thing I remember about Watertown from that era was it was as indistinguishable an inner-ring burb as Cambridge or Somerville, and that at least at that time, it boasted the highest per capita number of funeral homes in the country.)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston, which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End.

The "West Side" of St. Paul is kind of southeast of the center, and West St. Paul is south of St. Paul. But that's OK, because South St. Paul IS south[east] of St. Paul, and West St. Paul is indeed west of South St. Paul ...

I wonder if this has anything to do with the Irish?

[gingicat]

Well, there's character and then there's location; these don't line up geographically. There's West Roxbury, which is part of Boston proper and a lot like the nicer parts of Flushing. And the part of Dorchester (also part of Boston proper) is a lot like a shorter version of the area around St, John the Divine, at the north end of Central Park. The area near New England Medical Center and the Greater Boston Food Bank is a lot like Pelham Parkway.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

This is why I generally refer to the whole mess as Bostonish, having gotten tired of people getting on me for, say, saying I was in Boston for Arisia, and being corrected re the hotel actually being in Cambridge.

[jjhunter]

I generally use walking distances / time to walk a particular distance to get it across - e.g. one can walk from one end of Boston to another in under a day. Or, Watertown is unto Cambridge [MA] as Brookline is unto Boston - an independent neighborhood cheek by jowl with the city proper that is fully integrated into the same metropolitan public transit system.

[jjhunter]

Actually, show people the MBTA subway map roughly scale with, say, the NYC public transit map for comparison, and then superimpose rough 'Watertown' vs. 'Boston' vs Cambridge' etc. divisions.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

This would be a very good graphic.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the national news media was/is more focused on the big story and painted broad strokes. The local media, sometimes with better contacts, can get some of the finer points.

[kiya]

I was actually doing a geographic comparison for a friend - not character of location, but "If the event happened at place-you-know, then I live on the north side of such-and-so park and they were driving to thereville."

I was mildly croggled by the realisation that thereville was just barely outside the city limits containing place-you-know. (I have lived near-but-not-in both cities, but somehow my brain seems to think that 'city' is a unit of geographical size.)

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Um, I'm not sure your London analogy works. I live in London, and I consider Brentford quite far out. It doesn't even have a London post code. It wasn't locked down for the 7/7 attacks, for comparison. Neither was my area, and I'm only a half-hour commute from one of the bomb sites.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

What areas were locked down on 7/7? I'd be interested in seeing what the area was. Maybe there are other spots that are similar distances that feel closer.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Also, is Croydon near or far by the way that you feel about it? Emotionally -- not physically -- is it closer or father than Brentford? Cities are weird and "near" and "far" in terms of distance, time, convenience, and emotional connection don't always line up.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Croydon is south of the river and therefore far; the Thames is a major psychological barrier for Londoners who live (or feel they ought to live) north of it. You would probably need to find somewhere north of the river and in zone 2 of the Tube network, but even then it might be difficult, given the actual response to 7/7. Because the thing about that is, there was no general lockdown. There were localised lockdowns around Buckingham Palace, Parliament, New Scotland Yard and the US Embassy - which lasted about 90 minutes, and the press commentary during the inquests was to the effect that this was an extreme and unprecedented response. The transport system shut down completely for about half the day, but buses outside zone 1 resumed in the afternoon and most Tubes and trains the following morning. There was a very British request from the police that people not make unnecessary journeys into London, but there was no enforcement, nor any attempt to stop people moving around within London. Most tourist sites and theatres closed for the rest of the day; a lot of offices also closed, but less for security reasons than to give staff a fighting chance of getting home to pick up their kids from school etc, given the lack of transport. Most London Boroughs put their emergency response plans in place, but again, not so much the security aspects as the parts on dealing with casualties, people needing emergency accommodation and kids whose parents couldn't get home. Bear in mind these bombers had just killed 52 people, so pretty much any lockdown from the Boston bombings outside the immediate area of the marathon route is going to seem excessive from a London perspective. From our point of view, Boston was on a similar scale to the Admiral Duncan nailbombing, which killed 3 people at a gay bar in Soho; for that, I think the police cordoned off a few streets immediately around the pub and that was about it.

[yendi]

In fairness, I was very sleepy last night. But yeah, not an accurate description at all.

I walked from my home to Copley and back on Saturday. Whenever anyone finds that strange, I just note that I walked from uptown to The Village and back in NYC all the time. It's just that I never left one borough when doing so then, and was in three cities on Saturday.