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Trail Of The Lobster: How Cities Work

Neal Peirce

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BOSTON--How does a lobster make it from the seabed to a bed of rice at one of Boston's famed restaurants?

The answer says a lot about the gritty businesses that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino argues are "the real backbone" of cities--more than all those skyscrapers and stadia and casinos that city promoters so often put first.

Menino, himself a man of few pretensions, gets credit for starting the country's first "Back Streets" program to protect and promote a city's less visible but essential industries.

So how does the lobster get to its plate? First, it's caught--perhaps by O'Meara Lobster, a father-son team with a single small boat. The bait to lure the crustacean comes from Channel Fish of East Boston. Traps, ropes and buoys are supplied by Medeiros Pier in South Boston. Other local suppliers provide necessary boat upkeep, trucks, fuel, and ice. Commercial Lobster, a Northern Avenue wholesaler, ends up selling the lobster to the restaurant. Ten businesses and 200 employees have a hand in the transaction.

Taken singly, Back Street businesses look insignificant. But add them up--firms hiring truck and bulldozer drivers, tool and die makers, electricians, printers, fish handlers and sausage makers, printers, scaffolding assemblers--and the totals are significant. A reckoning conducted by the Boston Consulting Group and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City counted up 4,000-plus firms, hiring 118,000 workers in Boston proper.

Most pay solid wages--typically $16 an hour to $28 an hour, far ahead of the $7 to $10 range typical for restaurant cooks, tellers, retail clerks and waiters.

"Everyone focuses on the big beautiful buildings," says Menino of Boston's famed centers of financial services, health and law. But the time has come, he insists, to focus on the warehouses, construction, manufacturing firms "where you get your hands dirty."

In hot-growth cities like Boston, such companies are imperiled. Too often the industrial spaces they occupy become prime development opportunities for offices, residences and studio space, or for chain retailers' big boxes. Boston industrial space has declined almost 40 percent since the 1960s. "It's a real problem for us," says Kathy Kottaridis, Boston's director of economic development. "We need these services, and we need to protect them before it's too late."

So the Boston Redevelopment Authority has a new goal: no net loss of industrial space. Zoning is being tightened. A team of business managers has been hired to act as ombudsmen for Back Street businesses, offering a hot line, financing help, pipelines to job training and assistance in lining up such city services as street and lighting improvements. Land use lawyers are available. A "site finder" helps growing and new companies find space in the city.

For Menino, the Back Streets program is a logical extension of his widely heralded Main Streets program--a steady stream of technical assistance and loan funds for the commercial centers of working class neighborhoods. Housing alone can't and won't improve challenged neighborhoods, Menino insists; there's no substitute for sprucing up facades, promoting local businesses and recruiting merchants for missing services.

Menino's Main Street effort (with a hand from the National Trust for Historic Preservation) has brought in 12 supermarkets--often a scarce commodity in older cities. And it has helped renew such blue-collar neighborhoods as Dorchester, Allston, Brighton, Roslindale, Hyde Park and Jamaica Plain. A number of once-bedraggled commercial strips are starting to be seen as "urban village" shopping districts--a critically positive shift.

Now other cities are consciously emulating the Boston neighborhoods approach--among them Baltimore, Houston, Buffalo, Philadelphia and Detroit.

Is Menino's "back to basics" approach the ticket for smart American cities in these years? Maybe so. It won't solve all problems, but it does direct attention to critical first details.

Take immigrants, a rising population factor in most our cities. For example, Boston's--and Massachusetts'--population would actually have declined in the '90s without them. Back Street businesses and Main Street stores in modest neighborhoods are critical starting points for new Americans who lack either the means or wheels to populate today's far-flung suburbia.

I'm always reminded of words I heard 30 years ago from Kenneth Patton, then economic development director of New York City:

"Urban economies are the only places that do what America is supposed to care about--the resurrection of people who've been left out, and newcomers who have yet to get in, and are not admitted to other places. Cities are successful in their ability to take people from some point of entry and elevate them to some higher level in the economic order of things. Suburbs look successful, but they are not. They just preserve a certain measure of achieved success. They are not creative. Cities look unsuccessful, but by definition they are not."

Cities, said Patton, are the real secret of the American Dream.

Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.