There are many reasons to oppose Boston’s Olympics bid. But here are 24 to start.
(1) Fool Me Once: The Boston 2024 Olympics bid has been developed behind closed doors by an unelected group of CEOs and corporate lobbyists. Despite its stated commitment to transparency and economic inclusiveness, Boston 2024 did not find the time to host a single public meeting while preparing its bid for submission to the USOC. If they have flagrantly violated their own promises already, do they really deserve a second chance?
(2) Sliding Down a Slippery Slope: Mayor Marty Walsh has expressed his adamant opposition to a referendum on the issue of hosting the Olympics or using public funds for it, arguing that his election is sufficient for a democratic stamp of approval. He has also signed a document barring city employees from criticizing the Olympics, the USOC, or the IOC and requiring them to actively promote it. Boston 2024 has no intentions of releasing the full bid it submitted to the USOC, and Walsh has ignored public records requests about the bid. Such anti-democratic decision-making sets a dangerous precedent.
(3) Rotten to the Core: If you are worried that the corporate lobbyists and CEOs of Boston 2024 don’t have your best interests at heart, wait until you meet the members of the International Olympics Committee (IOC), an institution whose members and practices are notoriously corrupt.
(4) Not Keeping It Common: Boston 2024 is planning to build a “temporary” beach volleyball stadium in Boston Common and hosting the pentathlon and equestrian competitions in Franklin Park. However, our parks are our premier public spaces, places where citizens from all backgrounds and of any means can convene freely. Committing them to a closed, private, multi-week spectacle undermines the ethos behind them.
(5) Overrun This Town (and State): Miss the Big Dig? Over the past fifty years, the Olympic Games have produced an average cost overrun of 179 percent in real terms. Although Boston 2024 has promised that no public funds will be used for the games, Massachusetts has to promise the IOC that it will cover all necessary costs. And history has shown that such “no public funds” promises are as easily broken as they are made.
(6) Bleeding the Budget: Money spent on the Olympics will be money not spent on more pressing concerns like education, which is already underfunded. Massachusetts has cut per-student higher education spending by over one-third since the Great Recession, and Boston’s public schools face another round of cuts. Having to make budgetary space for the Games increases the risk of even deeper cuts.
(7) You Can’t Eat a Stadium: According to a recent report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 21.2% of Bostonians live below the poverty line, and 36% of requests for food assistance go unmet. Why should we be diverting money and resources to the Olympics when the basic needs of the people of our city are going unmet?
(8) Build up for What? Some people have described the Olympic bid as an opportunity to get politicians to commit to the investments in infrastructure and transportation that are so desperately needed. However, we should be developing our transportation plans with the interests of all members of our Commonwealth in mind, not a three-week spectacle almost a decade into the future.
(9) Un-Common Wealth: Economists studying the games have argued that the benefits are overstated and that, in fact, there is little to no impact on economic activity. In fact, a recent study by Merrill Lynch found that 10 out of the last 11 host cities experienced lingering financial stress due to the Olympics. The developers who receive large contracts for the Olympics may make a pretty penny, but those benefits are unlikely to spill over to the rest of us, especially those most in need.
(10) Not Lovin’ It: Proponents of the Olympics often argue that the Olympics will be a boon for local businesses, but the IOC has corporate sponsors with pre-existing contracts for various services related to the Games. Your local caterer won’t be the one benefiting from the Games; instead, it’ll be McDonald’s, the IOC’s exclusive partner for retail food services. And local stores and restaurants may suffer as Bostonians avoid them because of fears of overcrowding.
(11) A Tourist’s Detour: The occupancy rate for hotels in Boston for the month of August is over 90%. Filling these hotels with Olympic visitors will thus only push out other potential tourists, leaving little in the way of net gain in tourism. Building more hotels would likely lead to displacement and divert land and resources away from providing the affordable housing the city desperately needs.
(12) Not All Tourists are Created Equal: When tourists come to Boston for the Olympics, they will be coming to see short-lived sporting events, not lasting treasures like the Freedom Trail or the city’s 58 National Historic Landmarks. What makes a “world-class” city: our culture and history—or an aquatics center and velodrome?
(13) Too Close for Comfort: The IOC demands 45,000 hotel rooms, housing for 16,500 athletes, and workspace for 15,000 journalists. The IOC also demands its own special traffic lanes. If you think that the T is crowded or traffic is bad now in our dense and compact city, wait until summer 2024.
(14) You Can’t Live in a Velodrome: The displacement of low-income communities is part and parcel of the Olympics, as public housing tenants and renters get evicted to make way for Olympic venues. The homeless population is rising faster in Massachusetts than in any other state. We need to be focused on developing solutions, not making the problem even worse.
(15) No More Place Like Home: Evictions are not the only way that the Olympics threatens low-income communities. As developers salivate at the prospect of the Games and plan new luxury condominiums, rents skyrocket in the areas around Olympic venues, pricing people out of their own neighborhoods. Boston is already the fifth least affordable rental market in the country. We shouldn’t try to go for the gold.
(16) Spying Eyes: The Olympics have historically served as a testing ground for new intrusive surveillance technologies. The Games may only last for a few weeks, but these new tools and techniques will be an enduring legacy, further eroding citizens’ privacy and enabling the government to crush dissent.
(17) Meet Your New Neighbors: The Olympic Games come with a heavily militarized security presence. According to security specialists who have worked on past games, some of Boston’s neighborhoods will likely be turned into “something approaching armed camps,” given the number of security personnel and weapons present. Boston should be putting solar panels on roofs, not missiles.
(18) Rights at the Door: The 2024 Olympics will likely be deemed a “National Security Special Event” (NSSE), falling under the aegis of the US Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. With such a designation often comes an abrogation of constitutional rights, such as the right to protest on public land and the right not to be searched or questioned without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.
(19) Saddling Students, Not Just Horses: Boston 2024 is planning to rely on the area’s colleges and universities to cut down its own costs, but those costs will just end up offloaded onto the students. Tuition at our public colleges and universities has risen 20% since the onset of the Great Recession and ranks in the top 10 in the country. Tuition at private universities is even higher. “Carrying student debt burden” is not an Olympic game we should want to add.
(20) Not Easy (or Possible) Being Green: Promises of “greening” the Olympics routinely go unfulfilled, and it’s not difficult to see why. Olympic venues, both in construction and operation, suck up significant amounts of energy and water, and the necessary transport services further drive up emissions. The games can be “less unsustainable,” but a sustainable Olympics is an oxymoron.
(21) Temporary Stadium, Permanent Damage: Boston 2024 is considering constructing a “temporary stadium” in Widett Circle in South Boston. Widett Circle is not empty. It is home to New Boston Food Market, which employs 700 workers. The appropriation of this land via eminent domain would threaten these jobs and pave the way for a post-Games land grab by big developers who have been eying it for decades.
(22) White Elephants on Parade: The IOC requires host cities to provide—that is, construct—a stadium, a velodrome, and an aquatics center. But what happens when the three weeks of the Olympics are over? These venues are left to decay in disuse and disrepair, costing money and preventing land from being used for more socially beneficial purposes.
(23) Not Your Party: Tickets for Olympic events are notoriously expensive to buy and difficult to acquire. That’s because, although the Games may be in Boston, they’re not for Boston. The corporate sponsors and other elites will be the ones with front-row seats while you’re stuck watching from home.
(24) Eyes off the Prize: One of the biggest damages that the Boston 2024 bid will do–whether the city wins or not—is divert our attention from many of the pressing challenges that we face as both a city and a state. The planning that goes into the bid will take up time, money, and resources, and that will come at the expense of other issues we need to address: the dearth of affordable housing, the acceleration of climate change, the rise of health care costs, the plague of mass incarceration, insufficient funding and inequitable funding for education and infrastructure, among many others.
The bid document specifies that they want to take 55KMs (approximately 33 miles) of public road and turn it over to exclusive Olympic use, including dedicated lanes on the Pike, Rte 93 and the Bypass in So Boston, in addition to the obvious claims they make on downtown Boston roads. If they build a 14,000 seat arena on Boston Common, we can all kiss goodbye any chance of public use of the downtown roads.
If that was your lede, you should have buried it as it is simply not at all true A public forum was held on the 8th of December, on full month prior to the choice by the USOC. It was covered here (in fact, you recommended the diary!) and discussed widely.
In addition, and this is often glossed over, the bid committee itself was created and organized through the work of a Senate Commission authorized by Deval Patrick and the entire legislature in 2013 to study the feasiblity. That is, in fact, when and apparently why nobostonolympics was formed… in response! The representatives of the public authorized it and members of the public were paying attention. Gloriiosky! The process hasn’t broken down nearly to the extent you think it has…
Third, and perhaps most importantly, we can now test the level of transparency prior to last Wednesday. A document dump happened and there were no surprises: the details of the bid fall in line with the general statements of the bid committee since it’s inception. The concerns of cost overruns, white elephants, efficiencies and all that are at the least acknowledged and, I believe, can fairly be read as attempts to address them forthrightly. Those who have decried the purported lack of transparency insinuated nefarious intent at the fairly general and/or non-specific comments of the committee. Now that we have the bulk of the bid documents we can test whether or not that is the case. If there is broad agreement between the general statements before and the details after, then those who decried a lack of transparency, were mistaken.
Finally, the bid committee’s work is not done. The bid to the USOC was preliminary to the real bid to the IOC. As it happens between the document dump and planned public meetings, there appears to be some disconnect between expectations and actualities.
It’s a shame, actually, because a few of the 23 remaining points you list have merit… but you’ve so padded them with both overlap and demonstrably untrue statements it’s hard to see how you should be taken seriously…
I’m confident everyone will manage without the hectoring, scolding and unceasing assertions just fine.
… that nobody else is willing to call out untruths when they occur.
Are you saying you’re OK with the occasional untruth as long as it’s in service to a cause you support?
Because we have already been shown that the organizers of this bid have been every bit as guilty of the “occasional untruth”, and that is being generous.
Having said, that of course we should aim to be as honest as possible in this discussion.
It is earth shatteringly urgent to maintain a chihuahuas vigilance and yip mightily at every possible infraction because as we well know the very sky depends on the verity of quasi anonymous comment jockeys on a blog.
… categorically and without constraint of any kind that if the Olympic organizers can be found and proved to have deliberately deceived the public then I will join you in opposition. You have made the charge. You have not proven it. Above the diarist made a comprehensive statement that was easily disproved with but a moments typing into the BMG search bar.
It would be a bald hypocrisy upon my part to care for the truth in one aspect and discard it in another. I am laying it right out there: if you can prove to me the skullduggery you allege, not just what you wish, but what you can prove, then I will turn my efforts to bid to the games.
You have long had the opportunity to change my mind. But you have to do it with rigor and honesty. You cannot simply assume that I’m digging my heels in for the Olympics. I’m stating clearly that i’m digging my heels in for the truth… for, as this blog purports to aim for, a REALITY BASED COMMUNITY which is something I value very highly. If the Olympic bid committee finds themselves to be at odds with the truth then I will join you in opposing them.
So far, most everyone here has confused accusation for truth, innuendo for fact and wished-for in the place of as-is. I have opposed this. I do not oppose this because I want the Olympics. I oppose this because I want BMG to be truly reality based.
I alleged no “skullduggery”.
I merely point out that the committee has also been guilty of stating the “occasional untruth”, for instance in their claim in the bid document that they had contacted all of the land owners when they clearly had not. I have no particular reason to believe that statement was intentionally dishonest, and it could easily be explained by sloppiness on the part of the person who wrote that particular part of the text. Yet it is an untruth.
I do have to say that I don’t think you are being quite fair to expect quite the same standards of random people posting comments on a blog as from a highly organized and well funded group of people who are proposing to spend billions of dollars and virtually shut down the city for a couple of weeks. It seems that given what they are asking for, we should expect a much higher level of honesty and proof then we would expect from individual internet denizens posting on their spare time.
for some time. Your response is to stomp your feet and dig your intellectual hole deeper.
The dishonesty is standard issue pettifogging. God, I hope the check clears.
The foot stomping is as imposing as a canary fart in a sawmill.
But the delusions.. they are stunning.
The self appointed hall proctor for us all is fervently convinced that all these categorical statements, self righteous rig a morale and whatevs will send us scuttling back to our perfidious and benighted lairs to take long deep looks at the errors of our ways.
… we can’t all be as righteous as you. That’s just the way it is.
And we all know how much information they actually gave out at that public meeting.
A month is simply not enough time to gather and respond to public feedback. All you can do in that timeframe is hone your marketing strategy a bit.
… the charge was that nothing happened. Well, that’s not true. Something happened.
You can argue that it wasn’t something that you liked. You can argue that it was insufficient. You can even say it was deceitful if you so choose. You can say all manner of things about what actually happened… except you cannot say it did not happen.
The specific charge that was made was that it did not at all happen. It did.
Happy now?
You aren’t going to really win the crux of the argument by quibbling over minor debate points and parsing words.
No need for him to quit now. Remember when we were all sexists for saying Coakley wasn’t progressive enough….
I know I’ve linked a couple times to sources pointing out that many tickets are priced affordably to most people. Some of these are of course philosophical differences too. For example, the diarist objects to taking over Boston Common; I don’t.
Swell. From your vantage point in — where is it, Lowell? — you don’t mind if Boston residents and other citizens lose access to the Common. How about that part of the Public (!) Gardens the Olympians want to commandeer, and all of Charles Street in between?
..directing the charge of the Light Brigade from a yacht in the harbor while looking at the wrong map.
…and I understand we might get some of the events. That’s a large part of why I want it – a once in a lifetime opportunity for such a great event to be within walking distance. The stretch of the Merrimack likely to be used is just a mile down the street.
Because Homeland Security will probably not allow ordinary people to drive down Pawtucket Boulevard. How do you think the people who live in Camelot Court, across from the boathouse are going to like that? The only access to their homes is from the Blvd. Will the Rourke Bridge be closed?
Tickets are not affordably priced. Pointing to ticket prices in an LDC country like Brazil is not reflective of what we can expect. When I pointed out that most tickets in London were sold on the secondary market at triple the face value, you said that black market rules don’t apply. The info you do not acknowledge is that is how most tickets are sold, as scalpers buy first and fast and then re-sell.
…and I’m pretty sure illegal (at least here, don’t know about other countries). I did provide a link on London with face-value prices in the affordable range. Those are the prices of record and I stand by both the link and my interpretation.
if it is legal or not. The face price does not matter unless you are part of the list of privileged people from around the world who have first access to tickets. If tickets are quickly bought by the Olympic swells and the remainder are bought by sharks, then the only thing that matters is the black market price.
That is partly caused by the IOC because they offer privileged access to tickets before the hoi polloi in the host community can try to buy tix.
Whether scalping is legal or not is the subject of litigation and legislation here, but these tickets are being bought and sold internationally. You assumptions about the market do not apply.
It was a forum that Boston 2024 “participated” in, if we can call not giving out a single straightforward answer to any question participating, or putting out someone who hadn’t even read the bid as a representative of Boston 2024 participating.
… as I don’t recall you asking of the BMG editors, at the time, why they entitled it “Watch the livestream of the first public forum on a Boston Olympics”
No mulligan for you.
Me saying
isn’t negated by you (or our esteemed editors) saying
I didn’t say it wasn’t a forum on the Olympics, and the editors didn’t say it was a Boston 2024 forum.
It was a forum set up by the media in which Boston 2024 was invited to participate in — and they sent someone who either didn’t know anything about what was actually going on, or lied about it.
The fact remains that Boston 2024 didn’t have a single public forum before they released their bid — not one. Sending a shill to a media forum isn’t an example of them hosting their own forum or providing anyone with any answers.
…
I know what you think you meant. But it’s sophistry to try to ex post facto justify the first, dishonest point in list of 24 points, some of which have merit, others of which do not have merit. You had your chance to bring up that objection when it was relevant. Now it’s just grasping at straws.
Drop the hostility and admit you were wrong.
You accused ryepower12 where you are demonstrably wrong and then claim it is too late for him/her to respond with continued accuracy against your stupidity. Those of us who strive for accuracy do not give you the mulligan for being wrong (again).
it would be a sacrifice, but not completely unreasonable.
However, Olympic stadiums and facilities take significant time to build and carve up huge swaths of land. I can’t see how it wouldn’t take at least a year for the Commons Volleyball stadium to be built.
So, it’s not just closing it for a few weeks, it’s closing the bulk of the Commons for upwards of a year, while the facility is being built. It’s also likely shutting down the parking under the commons for that time, because of security concerns, which will deprive the city of revenue and workers, visitors and tourists one of the few major parking areas near the Commons.
It’s also going to place a huge scar on the Commons, one that will never be able to be fully healed. We’ll never have the old Commons back.
More significantly, most of the same can be applied to Franklin Park, one of the most beautiful spots in the entire city. How could we destroy huge swaths of it to build an equestrian facility?
Do people realize how absolutely massive an equestrian facility is? Here’s was the one used in during Beijing’s Olympics.
It had seating for 18,000 — average for the event. It covered 199,000 square meters of space, which translates into 50 acres. That would occupy roughly 10% of the total park just for facilities, never mind the security footprint, etc.
When London had its equestrian event, they shut down the whole park it was located at for an entire month, not just a few weeks and not just the areas of the park where the events would take place — and that was a World Heritage Site, one that’s absolutely massive compared to Franklin Park. It can be certain the entire park would be shut down for a considerable time — and large areas of the park would have to be shut down for even longer to bulldoze 10% of the entire park to build the facilities.
What would happen to the Franklin Park Zoo? Are they going to shut that down for a month or longer? If they could shut down a World Heritage Site in London, you can be sure they’ll take that away from all the kids and families that go there during the summer. So much for a fun summer day trip.
This was Olmsted’s crowning jewel on the Emerald Necklace and it’s going to be wiped out.
Beware.
Each hare brained, ham fisted encroachment will become a litigation node.
We probably just need to hit a certain acrimony and litigation threshold to make the IOC run away screaming and never darken our door again.
It’s great to see the quality of initial litigants and opponents among the early adopters.
It has important structural differences from the Casino Gambling opposition in that it has considerable breadth and depth. It even seems to be creating rifts up and down the class structure hierarchy as some constituents of the 1% and aspiring oligarchs also line up in opposition.
This is going to be fun.
In Chicago we are having a big controversy over the Obama library, and my alma mater’s bid to take park land from the public and turn it over to the library. It has drawn widespread opposition from Friends of the Parks, who oppose altering the original footprint of Washington or Jackson Park to make the library happen. Community opposition was the primary reason the Chicago 2016 bid didn’t get picked, and it was precisely because park land was going to be taken away for a stadium.
Legally speaking, the City Council has to authorize Rahm to spend the dollar to transfer the parks from the Park District to the City of Chicago itself, and then transfer that land to the University for the library. Not sure what kind of legal entities, transfers, or approvals would have to take place for the Common and Franklin Park. Happy to find out though!
Not sure about Boston Common and Public Gardens without looking it up.
..come under the jurisdiction of the Boston Parks and Recreation Department.
How would the transfers take place, or since this is a “temporary” change the IOC will be ‘leasing’ the property?
On the surface, it seems Boston 2024 made the same error my alma mater made by committing land it doesn’t own to projects many in the community don’t want to use it for. I’ll concede to simply scratching the surface, and would love to get more specifics on the exact mechanisms for using public land for this purpose, and what input, if any, the public may have.
with some small exceptions.
The Arboretum is owned by the city, but is run and managed by Harvard.
But, by and large it’s all run by Boston Parks and Recs Dept and owned by the city.
don’t want the Arboretum. They want pretty much all of Franklin Park, including White Stadium and the golf course, for equestrian and pentathlon events.
Of course the Swells did not consult the Franklin Park Coalition, because they represent poor colored people who should just step aside, again… and again…and again.
http://www.cityofboston.gov/Parks/emerald/
The Esplanade is one DCR jurisdiction element of two reservations.
I just finished mixing down video of the south bank part of Upper Charles River Reservation in Waltham. It runs all the way to Cutler Park in a wide arc. I’ll probably finish it in spring as it is another great greenway system for bicyclists looking to avoid street traffic.
The properties that Boston 2024 wants to use are owned variously by the Commonwealth and its multitude of agencies, the City and private parties. For example, they want to force the University of Massachusetts Building Authority to build 7000 beds in time for the games. The Authority wants to build housing for students but the funds are not currently available. Boston 2024 wants to also use adjoining land, which would require eminent domain land takings of land that is privately owned so they can turn the equivalent of a profit on re-selling some of the housing after the games. Obviously there is a convoluted trail of authorizations on this single parcel, let alone all of the others.
Generally, city and state land that is sold must go to the highest bidder. However, either the state or city can tilt the bids by stating pre-conditions about acceptable use, including manipulating the zoning rules, which is further limited by rules agains spot zoning which is further limited by…blah, blah, blah.
Boston Common is under the control of the City. Franklin Park is under the control of the Commonwealth. Surface roads have mixed control. The MBTA is controlled by the state (and if you have not read the bidders plans on how they will decided who gets to board the subways, when, where and how, that shit will make your eyeballs pop!). IDK about the claim on Somervile land for the Velo.
I keep returning to the vision of Boston 2024, whose graphic shows Boston Common covered by a stadium and half of it tree-less. The fool in Lowell says it does not bother him if we lose one of the most historic space in the US. Let’s here it, rah, rah, rah for one of the leaders of the Democratic Party.
I was just about to uprate your comment for providing good info until you once again gave in to your common temptation to insult people. I care very deeply about the historic nature of Lowell having both worked and volunteered for Lowell National Historical Park, thank you very much. If I start hearing that LNHP or the Historic Commission has concerns I will be very interested, though the Tsongas Arena is not a historic structure and the stretch of river used for rowing events has long been used for that purpose. Also, one of the chief legislative boosters for the Olympics is the Senator from LOWELL, who is, you know, a DEMOCRAT.
(Really, does nobody else object to how this commenter treats other BMGers? My experience on this site has gone downhill fast since he joined us.)
said it was okay for the 2024 crowd to take over our great central park, one of the most historic in the country.
Please do not offer your support for your own public park as payment for your willingness to dump the Boston Common for two years.
As to your political party affiliation, ain’t most of us Democrats? Porcupine belongs to a different winged party and maybe Merrimac guy (sorry if I am incorrect here) but I am glad for their presence even if I disagree with them.
You, OTOH, sought political office as a member of the DSC. Own it, or quit it.
…but it has nothing to do with my opinion of the Games and there is no official party stance on that matter.
You’ll well recall his prior readiness to just toss a basket of civil liberties for the sake of expedience.
We usually toss that stuff for more urgent things like the war on terror. The Olympics hardly rise to that level of significance and it’s bad enough when we do it to fight terror.
This quarrel doesn’t run along party lines anyway. And the party is hardly a monolith.
It boils down to those who are convinced with significant conviction and some degree of authority that the IOC will be a ridiculous bull in the old fragile and cluttered Boston china shop and those who think the thing is a swell hook or crook way to get free stuff, glory, etc.
The manifestly asinine plans promulgated by this bevy of pretentious dunces and Swells is a tip off that Boston doesn’t have much workable space in a compact assignable area, so we have this strange patchwork of wishful locations unexamined by any rigorous thought process.
As for Lowell, I see you have a fairly popular cute little boat race event every October.
Maybe building on that is a more useful game plan than letting the IOC crap all over Boston because the local 2024 idiots picked a fairly harmless low impact thing for your bailiwick?
Your solipsistic approach probably isn’t winning you any friends either. The most common facet of your comments is how self absorbed they seem to be. It’s too much “I” and me” and not enough “us” and “we”.
With all due respect, that is a strange approach for an aspiring politician.
The ability to figure out others and build working bridges to them is generally more a valuable skill than just maintaining this sophomoric ‘me’ litany. That can blow up in your face as the others invariably ask… “Well who exactly are you?”,( particularly when you may not have much to show for an answer).
…and with some of the questions and considerations have come up I have tried to do some of that. The reason for the first person singular on this topic is I am neither expert nor speaking for anyone other than myself. I’m just some guy offering his two cents. Maybe two cents is all my opinion is worth on this one, but I’m still entitled to it. After all, if we get that referendum (which I would be perfectly fine with having BTW despite not usually being a fan of direct democracy on public policy questions), the votes will be of individuals expressing their opinions.
when you offer up all of Boston’s public parks and the entire region’s constitutional rights on a silver platter.
I have just started delving into the financial damage of having two of our most historic properties overrun by the games. We will lose prestige with tourists if the parks are mucked up.
It is worth repeating that losing our parks will not just be for three week of games. The Paralympics adds another month, the construction will likely take at least a year in advance, the deconstruction maybe half as much. We are talking about the loss of the Common and Franklin Park for almost two years.
As I noted previously, the communities of color near Franklin Park were not consulted about this. If there is going to be an Olympics here, the neighborhood should be pretty much able to demand what happens to FP, during and after the games. Or are we really going to watch the horse riding set and the European wannabe forest fighters cavort in one of the poorer parts of Boston? Yippee! Get me a javelin. I wanna play.
…I just re-read your previous comment, and realized you weren’t necessarily referring to Lowell when you spoke of historic places. Since you named the city I made the connection to that city’s history. Whether Boston, Lowell, or anyplace else I do strongly feel that maintaining a communities historical integrity and significance is a strong and legitimate concern. I very much hope that the Games can proceed without destruction or loss of relevant sites. Every city has history, though – of the current bidders Rome especially comes to mind, and 2012 host London is certainly very historic – so I would imagine that there are things we can learn from how those cities did or would handle it.