Down Where The Drunkards Roll

There are ley lines of vagrancy in every city, the same compass points of desolation along which the homeless and the derelict have shuffled since time out of mind, guided, like the drunken sailors in Shakespeare’s Tempest, by some mentholated spirit of the air, some invisible hobo Ariel, to those old familiar concrete arenas of dejection, gloom and neglect to which they and their kind have always been drawn.
Despite the prefabricated gentrification, despite the new international hotel that used to be a prison, Cambridge Street in Boston is such a ley line, terminating in the grandly named but wholly soulless corporate wasteland of Government Center, which was once an alcoholic haze of whisky bars and burlesque theaters called Scollay Square.
Here, no doubt built over the bulldozed foundations of a seedy speakeasy, is a paved pit of ordure whose rectangular boundaries are formed by four crumbling and grimy concrete benches; and here the eternally incapacitated still gather, inaugurating their incoherent parliaments amid the stale air and broken glass, all day and everyday. Meanwhile, just twenty feet away, in the well-scrubbed halls of administration, over deodorized clerks in polyester pleated trousers are processing new social security numbers.

Comments

[Peter Horne]

Sounds good, how do i get there?