“Kill A Yuppie” Graffiti in Cambridge Mimics Somerville
While biking home from Harvard Square last night, I found this graffiti in front of Cambridge College on Mass. Ave. It’s not the light-hearted, humorous graffiti I like to feature on this blog, but it warrants a mention here.
A stir was caused in Somerville last year when a rash of anti-yuppie taggings were found there, mainly centered in Lexington Park. Being near Davis Square, Lexington Park is one of those formerly working-class neighborhoods that have experienced rapid gentrification since the Red Line was extended in 1984. The park itself once housed a full basketball court populated by generations of neighborhood kids, the most recent crop of which are now in the late teens and twenties.
A few years ago, however, the size of the court was drastically reduced, a tot-lot installed and the neighborhood kids felt the park they grew up in was taken over by the new, yuppie residents with young children. The old-timers (ironically in this case the younger ones) felt their history with the park, and right to use it, was disrespected by the newcomers who would yell at them for swearing or otherwise causing a racket in the heat of basketball games. As this dispute was brewing other factors were clearly at play: while more and more “yuppies” populated the once-working class neighborhood, which subsequently saw the highest increase on rental-to-condominium conversions in Somerville history, the kids who grew up nearby saw a spate of teenage drug-overdoses, suicides, and the murder of one of their best friends just blocks from the park.
As Somerville Alderman at Large and State Representative Denise Provost so eloquently wrote in her enewsletter in April, 2005:
The vandalism - and the anger - are probably connected to a loosely-knit group of teens+ who drift from Kelly Park to Lexington Park, up and down the Bike Path to various other hangouts, including under the Lowell Street Bridge. You can learn something of the psychic wounds borne by these self-styled “soljahs” by going to the “Fallen Soldiers of the Ville” section at http://pdiddy.servebeer.com (no longer working).
The aching, affectionate memorials on this website tell of friendship, loss, pain, and longing. They speak of loyalty: to individuals, to an idyll of a youth hardly idyllic, to the idealized place - “the Ville” - where that youth is experienced. The untold ‘official’ stories are painful ones, of suicide, substance abuse, overdoses; as well as the lashing out and receiving ends of violence. Embedded even more deeply here are the private stories of suffering, typically unspoken in this city that so values silence.
I wonder, then, about this new graffiti between Harvard and Central Squares. To be quite brash, the gentrification in Cambridge has long been a reality and has not seen the same intensity as in Somerville in recent years. Is this arising in response to a particular situation like in Somerville, or is it just a spill-over/copycat from that dispute?
September 11th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
[…] I’ve been fortunate to get to know Matt and two of his brothers through their community activism in Somerville. Matt and the McLaughlin clan come from Lexington Park, the neighborhood where things blew-up last year around the “anti-yuppie” graffiti that I wrote about last week. These guys were really the first generation to grow up along side the major gentrification in Somerville. They saw their neighborhood — just a stones throw from Davis Square — transformed from the working-class, laborer community it once was to that trendy spot that gets written about in magazines. […]
September 24th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I saw an even bigger tag near the BU Bridge on Memorial Drive the other day coming from work. Who ever did this obviously is using their anger in the wrong way. I found the above post very insightful because its good to see people rise above it all and try to change things for the better. I wish that when I was growing up more people acted like that. I can see where the person who wrote this anger is coming from though.
I was born near NYC and moved upstate when my father found work. I would often go back to my old dwelling (Yonkers) to hang with friends and family though. Up until recently these areas had been Irish/Italian working class neighborhoods and today it feels like a totaly different place with people outpriced from Manhattan moving in. Its a trend that is happening all over the east coast. Alot of people call it progress because formerly economically depressed area are becoming vibrant. I want to pose the question to people, is there any other way to make cities more livable without gentrification?
I might be wrong, but it seems like most cities in the Northeast have been trying to make themselves trendy for yuppies at the cost of the people who already live there. Years ago when my parents were growing up, people were poor but there was no crime, and people seemed happier. Everyone knew each other, the center of the neighborhoods were the church, and people did things together. I attribute this to a sense community and a strong bond to the neighborhood. I live in Charlestown now and notice that many of my neighbors are very mistrusting of outsiders. I want to make the argument that this isn’t as bad as you would think especially since outsiders tends to mean gentrification.
When everyone knew each other, people used to take care of each other and these days it seems like all we care about is ourselves, our careers, and materialistic goods. It just seems that alot of people lost that same bond and love we used to have. These days many people are drawn to live an area because of trendy bars etc. Those of us who have strong bonds to where we grew up respect the heritage and culture that was in place before. I will use myself with the old diner my grandfather used to take me to that was closed to make way for luxury condos.
Many of these yuppies are very transient, the move and then they move out. Some come in and try to change the culture of the city and the Politicians seem to go out of their way to accomdate them at the expense of the people already there. I think one of the reasons these kids are doing this is because they have that bond to their homes (many of them displaced) and they feel like these people are coming in and taking a part of them. I know alot of people will disagree with me, but how would you feel if someone came into your house took your bed, told you to sleep on the floor and then through out your food and brough their own. Then they start to tell you that they know better then you. Its childish what this punk did, but it points to the sign of times.
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:59 pm
This is not the yuppies fault, yuppies don’t have kids, yuppies sacrificed their families for BMW and porsche payments, yuppies don’t have and don’t care about families, yuppies are young, high income, and materialistic people who would try to buy houses in richer places instead of working class places, so whoever those kids are hating, they are not the yuppies.