Let’s wind the clocks back to December 26, 2013, the day after Christmas.
My colleague Nate Boroyan and I brave the winter weather to trek up Boston’s illustrious Beacon Street for a meeting with Mayor Martin J. Walsh, then still Mayor-elect.
His office is nestled unassumingly between corporate high-rises, archetypal brownstones, and Suffolk University dorms. In fact, we almost walked right by it.
It’s fitting, in a way, that he’s chosen this locale to sit down and talk with us. It’s a subtle personification of his life’s progression, his politics, and perhaps most importantly, his persona. A self-evident neighborhood guy at heart, Marty (as those still getting to know Boston’s new mayor have become accustomed to calling him) seems almost out of place among the gilded, bureaucratic realm of Beacon Hill.
But in actuality, there’s nowhere he’d rather be.
We climb up to the fourth floor and sit down with him and his press secretary, Kate Norton, in a suite no bigger than a collegiate dorm room. If it weren’t for his vibrant blue tie, his crisp white shirt would blend right in to the noticeably bare walls. He already knows, though, how he plans on dressing up his City Hall office, where longtime Boston Mayor Tom Menino famously hung a portrait of his personal idol, President Harry Truman.
“I’m going to have a poster of a hand holding a piece of rebar and the guy’s finger nails are all cruddy from working hard. That’s going to be in my office,” he tells us, a true testament to his labor-heavy background but also a motivator for what he wants to achieve.
After exchanging pleasantries about the amount of gift cards he shelled out and received for the holidays, he dips into a stack of free-to-the-public Frozen Fenway Open Skate tickets the way any self-effacing Bostonian would, coolly sliding us four each. He waxes nostalgic about how overloaded his past year has been, no surprise for a guy in his position. Then he takes us back to how it all began.
“So I decide not to run for State Senate with the anticipation that if the mayor didn’t run, I’d run for mayor; and if he did run, I’d support him.” began Marty. “I’d already gone through that period of ‘do I run, do I not run?’ and ultimately make the decision to run for Mayor.”
Mayor Menino, of course, had been at the helm of The Hub for an unprecedented 20-plus years, the longest in Boston’s storied history. Under his tutelage, the city blossomed into an epicenter of innovation, higher-education, and cultural eminence. After two decades of growth, expansion and prosperity within so many facets of Boston’s multidimensional socioeconomics, his legacy is exemplified nowhere better than the hard-fought approval ratings he’s earned from the often fastidious, even hypercritical Boston public – a rating that hovers astronomically in the neighborhood of 80 percent favorable.
Marty doesn’t worry about those kinds of things, though. For him it’s about putting to good use the work ethic that was instilled in him from an early age, after triumphant bouts with cancer and alcoholism, and fusing it with the leadership acumen he honed while skyrocketing through the ranks of his native Dorchester’s Laborers Local 223 union.
“I’m different than the mayor in a lot of ways, I’m probably similar in a lot of ways,” he said, reflecting on the inevitable comparison to Menino. “I just do the job and I think that’s the biggest thing for me, that I just have to perform the job of mayor and do a good job and be accessible to people and be out there and be seen.”
Accessibility and exposure, of course, are two components that comprise what Marty’s been preaching since putting on the gloves and entering the mayoral ring back in March: Transparency.
Keeping all levels of his administration transparent – that is, affording residents the knowledge of the intricate workings of various departments and operations and allowing opportunities for insight and input – is a priority under his new regime. His predecessor, however deservedly beloved, was a cunning businessman as well, often illustrating a deft ability to puppeteer major initiatives and deals from on high.
“[Mayor Menino] takes personally parts of the city that I think can be a little dangerous,” noted Peter Ubertaccio, political science chair at Stonehill College. “Like when he called it ‘my business community.'”
One way in which Menino wielded this power was through the Boston Redevelopment Authority. The BRA is a municipal entity which not only owns real estate throughout the city’s limits, but also has the authority to approve and develop building projects, an obvious red flag that’s been the source of local development consternation for years.
During the mayoral campaign, the rather inexplicable BRA morphed into something of a profanity, an institutionalized landmine just waiting to reduce the city to bureaucratic rubble. Marty acknowledges the perception, but sees more. And for good reason.
“I don’t think that people understand what the BRA is,” he explains. “I think the BRA could do a better job of planning communities and then marketing that planning … When you talk about the BRA, you’re talking about, really, the future of Boston.”
But in order for that to come into fruition, reformation is mandate. Walsh’s visionary blueprint is to restructure the organization and place it under another tier, an economic development authority in which planning, development and finances are all considered separate dominions but still housed under one umbrella institution.
Marty notes optimistically that first his administration needs to make “sure we have the right economic development officer but then under that, making sure the structure is transparent and predictable so that developers have a feeling of knowing what to expect.”
It’s an optimism some might find unfounded. But Marty’s has been forged, at least in part, by the local common denominator: a painfully extended drought of title-less seasons lost hopelessly on the ice, gridiron, diamond, and hardwood. As a young man, local politics were an afterthought when compared to stats columns of the Bruins, Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics.
“I just wanted the sports teams to win championships when I was 25,” he laughs. “No one won anything when I was 25. You know, the Celtics had kind of done their run, Bruins weren’t winning, Patriots weren’t winning, my life was really focused around that. You’ve been spoiled, by the way.”
We can’t argue with that logic. Our generation is used to winning in Boston. Since 2001, Boston sports have won a combined eight championships, complete with victory lap Duck Tour rolling rallies throughout Boston’s crooked streets for each of the Big 4. A devastating loss can be instantly tempered with a we’ll-get-’em-next-year mentality.
Mayor Walsh once lost faith in his beloved Patriots though – if he could, he’d play “right wing for the Bruins, starter, and quarterback for the New England Patriots wearing number 12 on my chest” – until they hired Bill Parcells and he reneged on a fateful decision to cancel his season tickets. Quintessential New England optimism at its finest. And since, “I’ve had season tickets the whole run.”
Again, it’s that same optimism that helps him torebut naysayers before he’s even settled down in City Hall, especially when it comes to his legislative brainchild of overhauling the BRA. Some out there think it’s a pipedream. Others think he’s already rescinding his word, laxing on the BRA before he’d even assumed office.
So he does what any pragmatic idealist does. He shrugs it off.
“I don’t know what to say. I laugh I guess,” contends Marty with a smile on his face. “Before you do anything new you have to asses what’s in place. You make the changes short-term that can be made and then there will be long-term changes.”
Optimism.
So how does an anti-establishment kid born and raised on the tracks of the Red Line end up among those with which he draws a stark contrast? It’s a bit cliché, but really, he did nothing more than follow his dreams. “I love politics. I love the whole idea about politics,” Marty reminisces. “I remember always thinking in the back of my head, ‘I want to be Mayor of Boston someday,’ and here it is.”
A dream come true for this gritty native to the area known simply yet affectionately as Dot. To the haughty he may appear ill-suited or ill-matched to the prestige of Beacon Hill and City Hall, but truth be told, it’s probably a good thing. Because unlike the stereotypical partisans holding office who are just out to get theirs, Marty wants to use the Mayor’s office as a bully pulpit to the benefit of his community.
Take the Olympics, for example. Talk of Boston playing host to the most competitive athletic spectacle in the world has buzzed almost nonstop since an investigative commission was formed to explore its feasibility. It would add world renown to Boston’s already celebrated story – we are, after all, now somehow the subject of that whole City on a Hill bit – and add international acclaim to a metropolis that in size and scope may not rival the likes of Los Angeles, London, or Beijing, but certainly does in resolve.
However, Marty’s perspective is essentially, why risk that? The Olympics is boom or bust, more often than not the latter, and not a burden he thinks warrants the possibility of a strenuous tax on resolute Bostonians. Instead, he wants to start out small and work his way up to the possibility of hosting the games.
“In a perfect world, if we knew we were going to make money on it, and we knew it was going to promote our city worldwide, absolutely. Unfortunately it’s not a perfect world,” contends Marty. “I don’t know that Boston needs to have the Olympics to become a world class city. But I’d love to have the Olympics here, absolutely.”
In keeping with the themes of optimism and realism, Marty knows that in order for Boston to up its hosting chops, serious improvements in infrastructure are obligatory. And in Boston, that can only mean one thing: the MBTA.
From collegiate students to recent grads, young professionals and older alike, the MBTA can be a daily strain on the psyche and patience of those who dare ride it. Marty was adamant about keeping the subways open late while he was blazing his campaign trail, though Governor Deval Patrick has already done most of the leg work.
In March or April, the MBTA will undertake a one-year pilot program empowering late-night T and bus service on the weekends, running until approximately 2:30 a.m.. We’re hard pressed to find anyone who thinks this is a bad idea and Marty Walsh sure isn’t one of them.
“I think it’s going to be successful. I think we’re going to grow off that,” he adds, ever the enthusiast. “We talked about it every single place we went … what the city’s part of that will be is to make sure this is getting marketed. People will understand around the city the T is going to be open later at night and it’s very important for people to ride the T.”
Safe to say, he’s got plenty on his plate just one week into the job. Which means he’s charged with the added responsibility of remaining grounded. Not like it’s a problem for Marty, though. When he’s not burning the midnight oil, he can be found perusing the men’s section of a nearby retail outlet, of all things.
What would he do if miraculously granted a day off?
“I like to shop. [For] clothes. I could do that, sure,” he offers to our surprise.
And with the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, you can find him planted in front of the television, likely donning his new swag. “I love the Olympics, they’re awesome. I mean, I’m a product of 1980.” He likes the hockey, of course, but counts himself a curling fan as well.
He’s a man of modest taste with grand aspirations. He’s personally invested in Boston on all tiers, from his deeply-rooted relationships with its sports teams to its potential in accommodating the greatest show of athleticism on Earth. He’s the son of Irish immigrants ascended to the most powerful person in Boston.
He knows people regard and treat him differently. But they shouldn’t.
“Oh yeah,” he says with a smirk. “Which I really don’t like. I’m Marty, you know what I mean?”
We know what you mean.
