You can take the girl out of Boston ...
By adamg - Tue, 07/08/2008 - 9:24am.
Jennifer Garrett, now a denizen of Seattle, reports her Boston dander was raised by a Kate Hepburn biography that referred to her old neighborhood, Jamaica Plain, as "a suburb of Boston:"
... I'm telling you, people, my head almost spun off right there at the break room table. Suburb, my ass. And if you can't get that right, how I am supposed to believe you when you intimate that Hepburn was a lesbian? Well, okay, the man probably does have a point there. ...
i think a lot of jp does
i think a lot of jp does have a suburban feel to it.
Off by a few decades
Kate was born in 1907. JP stopped being a suburb and started being Boston in 1873. But I imagine it still did seem pretty suburban a hundred years ago.
streetcar suburb, you mean
JP definitely has some elements of what we think of as a modern post-WWII suburb, but it's technically a streetcar suburb (and even still has a streetcar at the Heath Street end). See the book that historians love to cite, Streetcar Suburbs by Harvard prof Sam B. Warner...
FWIW
The reference is to Phelps Putnam (1894-1948), a poet who had numerous affairs with prominent persons of both sexes, including Hepburn. It would be interesting to know where in Boston he lived.