It’s funny, living in Boston, because even if you’re born here, you’re always living in someone else’s shadow. If it’s not the tall steeples and crumbling headstones of Boston Common reminding you of history you don’t even feel connected to, then it’s the ivy-clad towers just across the river. Cambridge sits there, dripping with prestige, and stretches across the water like it owns the whole city. You hear the whisper of it on every corner, in every coffee shop, every conversation between students. They come here to study *us*, they say. These “Boston types” and their grit. Like we’re characters in some novel they’ll read for a class about authenticity or urban decay, but never have to live themselves.
I grew up on the other side of that whisper, a Boston kid who learned more from the hard lines of working-class life and the worn pages of library books than from any lecture hall. Boston Public Library was my classroom. That old building, all marble floors and cathedral ceilings, never cared if you had money in your pocket or if your last name had a legacy. It just gave you the books and let you find the lessons yourself. Maybe that’s why I could sit for hours under that vaulted ceiling, my breath visible in the winter cold seeping through the stone, surrounded by people who were there because they needed it, not because they were entitled to it. The BPL was the only place I ever felt I could stretch beyond what my neighborhood wanted me to be, without having to sell my soul for it.
I could’ve been out on Lansdowne Street with my friends, yelling over cheap beer to the angry pulse of punk bands like The Bruisers. Or watching Cheers at some dive.drowning the week’s grind in a corner booth with my friends, knowing that you could say anything to anyone and it’d stay there, just another secret shared over dirty glasses and the clinking of cheap liquor bottles. That was the other side of Boston, the tribal side. We had each other’s backs. But there was a cost. The second you started to reach, to try and see beyond what was right in front of you, you were branded. It’s a paradox—a community that raises you, loves you, protects you, but the moment you try to step outside the boundaries it’s set, you’re seen as some kind of traitor. It’s that classic Boston loyalty and defiance, all mixed up in the same breath.
You don’t even need to go far to see the line between the art of our lives and what they call “real” art. It’s plastered on brick walls in Back Bay, sprayed on alleyway doors, scrawled in Sharpie on subway seats. It’s the grainy black-and-white photos of our neighbors in Southie, our parks and playgrounds, snapped by some kid with a $10 camera. But over there, in Cambridge, they talk about “street art” as if it’s a concept, a genre, something to dissect. They’ll sell it, package it up and hang it on gallery walls. Suddenly, it’s something else, something that only those with the right education can understand, instead of what it actually is—a piece of us, left out there in the open air, exposed to the rain and the dirt and the reality of the world it came from.
The punk bands from here knew it. The Bruisers, The Dropkick Murphys—they weren’t playing for fame or to get rich. They were playing because they had something to say. There was a power in the way those chords scratched against your soul, raw and unfiltered. There’s a reason we screamed those lyrics like they were battle cries, fists in the air, feeling like maybe, for once, someone actually got it. To the people over in Harvard Square, it was an exotic novelty. But to us? It was blood and bone. Those sounds were our stories, our battles with everything this city demanded of us.
And then there’s the Boston Brahmin, the old-money elites who seem so different but hold their own walls. Born into wealth, their world is just as closed off, their lives bound by their family names and history, a legacy they wear like a badge but can’t shake off. They look at us, the working class, like we’re some quaint museum exhibit of toughness. But they’re prisoners too, trapped in their own gilded cages, bound by expectations they didn’t set but will never escape. To them, Boston is just a backdrop, a place to display their heritage, not a city to get dirty in, to fight for.
I see it all as I sit there in the library, flipping through books on philosophy, then switching to a detective novel, *Spenser for Hire,* or some story about Boston’s underbelly. Hawthorne’s prose on one side, some paperback pulp on the other. Each page in my hand feels like its own Boston—a different story, a different lens, but somehow part of the same city. I look around and think: Why is one art and the other “trash”? Why do some stories matter more than others, when they’re all pieces of this place, this strange, split world where nothing is just one thing? I want to reach out and shake those professors who pontificate about the “Boston experience,” to tell them you don’t know anything about it until you’ve smelled the grit in the air, until you’ve had to ride the T during rush hour, shoulder to shoulder with the people whose lives you’re dissecting in some lecture hall. Until you’ve bled for a place, you don’t know it.
Because in the end, Boston’s a city of ghosts and echoes, of street corners stained with memory. The library’s full of them—shelves of people who lived and died right here, whose stories seep into the wood, into the cold marble. You hear them if you sit quietly enough, if you just listen.
I think the library is haunted. Maybe not in the way you’d think, no rattling chains or anything, but haunted in the way old buildings are, like they breathe out the people who’ve passed through them. You feel it at night, when the crowds thin and you’re left alone, the hum of the pipes your only company. Sometimes I’ll just sit there, looking up at the massive stone columns, the half-lit murals on the walls, thinking about all the people who’ve walked across these floors, left their fingerprints on the pages I’m reading, all the ideas that floated up to the ceiling like cigarette smoke back in the days when nobody cared if you lit up inside.
Those people—they didn’t need Harvard or MIT to make a mark. They lived here, in the cracks of the city, and the library keeps them alive, even if the world outside forgets. It’s like every dusty book, every yellowed page, is a small rebellion against that other world across the river. The world that says you need a diploma, a legacy, to be worth something. This place gives you a voice, no matter who you are. And sometimes, I wonder if that scares the people who built those Ivy walls, the people who want to own knowledge like it’s a piece of property. Because what does it mean when some working-class kid like me can walk into the library and read the same books they do, feel the same fire, the same hunger for something more?
It’s funny—I used to watch *Spenser for Hire* reruns with my dad, back when the show would air late on some local channel, the kind that’s all static and flickering lights. Spenser was always in some bar or alley, digging around in the darker parts of Boston, but he wasn’t ashamed of it. He didn’t need to prove he was better than his surroundings. I loved that about him, how he moved through the city without apology, like he knew that his story mattered as much as anyone’s. He wasn’t some polished-up Brahmin hero; he was rough around the edges, just like the rest of us. And he made me believe, somehow, that you could live here, really live, and be part of this city without having to pretend to be something you’re not.
I think that’s what I’m chasing every time I open a new book in the library. There’s this drive in me, this itch to understand the city, to see it from all sides—Harvard and the back alleys, the mansions on Beacon Hill and the tenements in Dorchester. Because Boston isn’t one thing, and it’s definitely not just what the brochures or textbooks say it is. It’s a city that chews you up and spits you out, but it’s also the place that holds you up when you’ve got nowhere else to turn. It’s the father who’ll knock back a whiskey with you after a long shift, the grandmother who grew up on these streets and remembers when the North End was still filled with Italians and bakeries that smelled like anise and fresh bread.
I think of the kids in Harvard Square, walking with their scarves and worn leather satchels, talking about Derrida or Foucault or whoever else they think will make them sound profound. And it’s not that I hate them, or even that I think they’re wrong. They’ve got their own ghosts to wrestle with, I’m sure. But there’s this layer of irony, this sneering judgment that comes out in the way they talk about the “real” Boston, as if they could capture it in an essay, wrap it up in a footnote and file it away. They might study the working class, write papers about social structures and inequality, but they don’t *know* it, not really. They’ve never had to pawn a ring for rent money or watch their dad work himself to the bone just to put food on the table. They don’t know what it’s like to live in a world where every dollar matters, where every choice you make is weighed down by what it’ll mean for the people you love.
Sometimes I imagine bringing one of them into my neighborhood, introducing them to the guys down at the corner bar, watching them squirm as they try to make small talk over a few cold beers. I’d love to see how they’d handle the rawness of it, the unfiltered language, the way everyone talks with their hands and laughs with their whole bodies, like each moment is something to grab and wrestle down. Would they see the beauty in it, or would they just see “roughness,” something they could never understand because they’ve never had to live it?
And the thing is, there’s an art to it. There’s an art to being from here, to knowing the rhythm of the streets, the hidden spots along the harbor where you can watch the sunrise over the water, the dive bars where the jukebox plays Springsteen and The Bruisers on a loop. The line between art and life here is as blurry as it gets. It’s like graffiti, sprayed across the city’s walls, something born out of desperation and raw creativity, something the people at Harvard might call vandalism but I call truth. It’s a kind of art they can’t touch, no matter how many degrees they earn or how many galleries they fill.
The Boston Public Library is like that, too. There’s no velvet rope keeping anyone out, no polished plaques saying “only for those who’ve earned it.” It’s a place where every Boston kid can sit under the same roof as anyone else, rich or poor, Brahmin or Southie, and see the whole world laid out before them, book by book. That’s the kind of education I believe in—the kind that doesn’t care who you are, where you’re from, or whether you’ve got the “right” kind of name.
The BPL isn’t just a library; it’s the heart of Boston, and maybe, in a way, the heart of everyone who’s ever felt caught between worlds. There’s something almost mythic about it, as if the city itself carved out this place where anyone can come and look for something bigger than themselves. It’s a strange thing—walking into a building where history and possibility collide, a place where you can read Plato and punk zines in the same afternoon. And maybe that’s the real magic of it, the way it doesn’t choose sides.
I think of all those books on the shelves, their spines worn and cracked, filled with the voices of people who are long gone. And I think about my own voice, about how it might fit in there someday, just one more echo among thousands. I picture some kid like me, years from now, pulling a dusty book off the shelf and finding these words—my words, my story—and maybe, just maybe, seeing themselves in it. That’s what I want. Not the legacy of a name chiseled into stone or a diploma framed on the wall, but a connection, a kind of immortality that comes from being understood.
I guess that’s what I’m doing right now—writing this down, letting my thoughts pour out onto the page in some strange, unfiltered rush. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the library, why I keep circling around these words, trying to make sense of what it means to be here, to be part of Boston’s shadows and its light. I want to capture it, to pin down that feeling of being between things, between lives, between ideas of what’s “real” and what’s “art.”
And maybe, in the end, that’s what Boston is. A place that resists being pinned down, that refuses to be just one thing. It’s a city that lets you slip through the cracks and find your own way, that teaches you that the line between art and life, between the sacred and the profane, is as thin as a page. Boston, the way I know it, doesn’t belong to Harvard or to the textbooks; it belongs to everyone who’s ever lived here, to everyone who’s left a piece of themselves in its streets, its bars, its libraries.
In a way, I think I’ve written myself into this city. The words spill out, each one leaving a mark, like footprints in fresh snow. I’m writing my story, yes, but it’s bigger than me. It’s about the kid sitting two tables over, lost in a book; it’s about the ghostly figures moving through the library’s halls at night, the voices that drift down from the stacks. I’m writing their stories, too, because they’re part of mine, and because that’s what this place does—it brings us together, lets us haunt each other in the best way. It lets us feel like we’re not alone, even when the world outside is cold and indifferent.
And maybe that’s the lesson the library has taught me, the one I could never get from a classroom or a lecture hall. That words aren’t just symbols on a page; they’re bridges, connecting us across time, across class, across lives. They’re the proof that we were here, that we mattered, that our stories deserve to be told.
So I keep writing, keep filling pages with the rhythm of my city, with the voices that echo in my head as I sit here in the shadows of Harvard, in the shadows of Boston itself. I write because someday, someone might read this. And maybe, if I’m lucky, they’ll see themselves in these words, feel the pulse of the city beneath their feet, and know that Boston—the real Boston—is as much theirs as it is mine.
-Lou Toad, November 4th, 2024
