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Some Watertownians consider their official name too confusing

Watertown News reports the Charter Commission for the City Known as the Town of Watertown is considering changing the official name to just the City of Watertown.

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But II can change.

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Why not call it WaterCity ? Sounds like a place I'd like to visit

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…hear me out on this one…

Why settle for a Watertown or a Watercity when you could have a whole Watercountry?

If you think Watercity sounds like a place you’d like to visit..

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And the summer gets hot …

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Watery McWaterface gets my vote!

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Water City does border Watch City so could be a boost for local tourism..

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According to the Watertown Wikipedia entry, it is “one of thirteen Massachusetts municipalities that retain the title of ‘town’ while functioning under state law as cities”.

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Places to scared to call themselves cities because of some "stigma".

Off the top of my head, Braintree and Weymouth have mayors but somehow they are "towns".

To quote Jean Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg in The Fifth Element " Be Proud Of Who You Are"

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I’m shocked that Braintree—the town that made the MBTA require you to pay an extra token to leave the Red Line because residents were afraid of “city problems” finding their way into town—would resist “city” as an identifier. I wonder what it is that they are afraid of?

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Can I get a citation on that reason for the former exit fares at Braintree and Quincy Adams stations? Before my time, after all.

As for our retention of the town name, I don't know, change is hard after 367 years. We put "town" on all sorts of things, we would have to change them all.

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You used to have to pay up until at least the early 90's to get off at Quincy Adams and Braintree.

In the words of many a repentant sinner, I hopped those turn styles on the way out as a teenager when seeing friends in Braintree and for this I will say I am sorry, but I am really not.

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but where is the evidence that any of these towns or cities requested this special treatment (which would have mainly been paid for by their own residents)?

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I'm not disputing that exit fares did exist. They exited on the Braintree end through 2007. I lived that part of it. But the "why" aspect to why those special fares existed, I wasn't here for and would certainly enjoy learning more about.

For reference on the end of these exit fares: http://www.bu.edu/articles/2006/end-of-the-line-for-free-t

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I always just assumed that the T wanted the extra money because you got a longer ride (similar to the Commuter Rail zone system.) The turnstile at Park Street didn't know whether you were going to South Station or Braintree, so they made you pay your extra fair share at the end. I have no proof that this was the plan, but that always made sense to me.

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But if someone was arriving from North Quincy or, say Columbia Point (er, JFK/UMass) they also get hit with the extra penalty. And who lives at Columbia Point in the 70s and 80s?

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... until some time in the late 1980s

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1988.

Before that the first stop was Andrew. Ron rarely replies to my comments, but when he does it’s usually to teach me something new.

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There was an arrangement to pay just a single fare, with no exit fare, if you traveled within Quincy and Braintree. You paid the double fare, but you got a paper ticket when you boarded which not only let you exit for free, but also go you a $1.25 refund.

With the double fare on the Green Line D, if you exited inbound in Newton, you got a ticket which gave you 50% off the double fare on your next inbound trip.

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Not so much who had the "longer" ride as who used the "extended" portion of the ride. In my tourist days, I thought it was to pay off some bond or costs associated with the expansion of the Red Line to Quincy Adams & Braintree.
The thought that that could just have been a convenient cover story for suburban exclusivity... Shocked! Appalled!

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When I was in high school I had a pass that had always worked at Braintree station for one portion of the fare getting on and had even worked when I got off the train one Saturday morning but when I went to go home at the end of the day I got stopped by MBTA staff when I put one portion of fare in and swiped my card. They told me my pass was useless and I needed to pay the whole fare. I had no more cash on me and it was getting late so I was in a panic. I had been doing work for a company that had me stopping into stores and I was there as part of a string of visits so as a Chelsea boy I had nobody to turn to for the dollar I needed. So I pleaded with the guy to no avail and he wouldnt even give me my dollar back.

We had these things called pay phones back then so I call my parents, collect. My mother is now in a panic and wants to turn the universe upside down to get me home but hands it off to my father. My Vietnam vet , motorcycle driving father from the tough part of Cambridge back when such a place was tough (so not who I am) is laughing at this point. He tells me to just jump the turnstile. I tell him there's a guy there. He tells me "your 6'1, 250 pounds and your shoulders look like your wearing shoulder pads, when you hear the train coming put down the phone and just run, leap over the turnstile and just keep going until you get to the train. Call me if you need bail." Looking back I remember the startled look on his face but at the time I was petrified he was going to follow me... But I keep sprinting as the train pulls up and doors open, I rush in still thinking he was going to chase me onto the train but in reality I am sure he just said screw it as soon as I lept over the barrier.

I definitely got the impression I didn't "belong" there though based off of how he was talking to me.

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I enjoyed reading it and glad you made it home that day. One of the best comments contributed here of late.

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I'm going to be one of those old men who sits on their front porch in a rocking chair reciting stories without being asked... But people become engrossed and just sit on the steps to listen as my husband sighs because he heard it ten times before and the details change every time.

I'm pretty much halfway there.

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Of course I don’t want to imply all the people in Braintree that like the quaint and traditional aspects of referring to Braintree as town vs a city are mouth-breathing racists.

I do, however, think there is some overlap with certain residents identifying “town” with whiteness and “city” with diversity, to use a euphemism. This is backed up by hearing for years certain Braintree types explain that they don’t want Braintree to become “the next Randolph” (Randolph ~40% Black). As a Braintree man yourself, I’d be surprised if you have never heard that lament.

As to the stated reason the MBTA had higher fares for Braintree: of course the MBTA isn’t going to say they’re setting higher fares to keep “city” people out of nice suburbs. But in the 1980s my family in Braintree were happy to tell you that it was a “good thing” for Braintree to have higher fares because it detered Boston criminals. It was a widely held belief and my family was not the only place I heard this.

I don’t have it handy, but I was recently researching the restoration of the Old Colony Commuter Rail Lines to the South Shore and I came across an article on public hearings (either the Ledger/Enterprise I think) and one of the concerns was that a train from the city would bring “problems” from the city. This of course proves nothing, but it’s not a stretch to postulate that the 1990s “concerns” about Old Colony trains and crime were ideas directly descended from 1970s/1980s beliefs about Braintree and the double fare.

If I can find this article when I get home I will add it to this thread.

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According to the wikis, the Town of Randolph is yet another city that insists on being called a town.

I swear, though, that most of the resistance to adopting the city form of government was the loss of the word Town. Back in the day, the Town of Framingham, replete with town government, had more people than a surprising number of cities. The irony is that South Framingham (think the prison and old GM plant) changed towns from Sherborn because Framingham had the infrastructure to deal with industry.

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So what?

The point is that there is a very real element in Braintree that does not want to become Randolph. What do you suppose Braintree residents mean when they say they don’t want to become another Randolph?

I used the example to agree with what Costello was insinuating, that certain people find a stigma in calling their community a “city”. And if the form of government changed 20 years ago or whenever, what is the stigma that associated with calling a community a city?

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The City of the Town of Braintree and the City of the Town of Randolph, though very different in your eyes, are bound by the desire not to call their towns that have adopted the city form of government cities, and most likely for the same reason. The reality you don’t want to admit is that both towns are full of people who high tailed it from Dorchester when they were able to. The difference is that wave one and their descendants liked being close to the South Shore Plaza so the demographic mix is different.

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I think I admit elsewhere that most people who like to retain “town” are not Patriot Front culture warriors but like the name for innocuous reasons and bucolic associations. My original comment came on strong as if I thought the only reason a city would fight to retain the title of town was racist and I don’t believe that. Short comments lack room for nuance. There are hundreds of reasons to prefer one title over another.

But let’s not kid ourselves; while some left Dorchester for a bigger house or a change of job, that “high tailing it” to which you are referring is called white flight and many white people left Boston because of school integration fears or they thought having Black neighbors would hurt property value.

During white flight, white families were making the explicit choice of leaving the increasingly non-white city for the almost exclusively white towns. And I don’t think it is crazy to acknowledge that some people still have that same association with non-white city/white town that was codified during white flight.

We know that town/city can be and is often used as stand-ins for white/non-white by people with a range of intents. For instance, if I say “urban” when I talk about the appeal of certain music/entertainment/fashion, we all know that “urban” means Black. Conversely, anyone paying attention in the last 2 presidential election cycles, we all know that the polling terms “suburban women” or “suburban moms” were euphemisms for white women.

City/town. Urbann/suburban. Non-white/white. Is it really that hard to believe that if a person has either a concious or unconscious racial bias, that bias would play into their resistance for calling their community a city instead of a town?

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Their slogan should be "where you move to when you're from Dorchester."

I first realized this back in the early 1990s when my roommate's Haiti born parents moved to Randolph. A decade later, talking to an "old timer" I found out that this has been a trend since the 1950s, when Jews and Irish hit the town during the development. The Haitians were followed by Cape Verdeans, Vietnamese, and now Hispanic former residents of Dorchester. They are proud of their town, so much so that they don't want it to be called a city. Again, both cities you referenced are officially the "Town of..." That's my point.

Dislike of cities goes back and does not necessarily have typical American racial overtones. Brookline is still a town, and they refused to become part of Boston back in the late 19th century, back when there were few black folk in the area. Certainly Franklin is not refusing to cede the Town moniker because of fear of Boston, any more than Newton had a love of Boston when they became the "City of..."

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That’s a good comment and highlights that Dorchester and Mattapan have been feeder communities for Randolph since the Jewish migration from the city in the 50s and 60s.

But, to give a fuller picture, Randolph has not always been racially diverse. The large Black presence in Randolph appeared relatively recently and rapidly. The 1990 census shows Randolph as 85% white and 8% Black. In 2000, Randolph is 62% white and 20% Black. 2010 shows 41% white and 38% Black and, although the official 2020 census day has not been published, if some online estimates are to be believed, the current Black population is above 40% and is now larger than the population of white people who, 30 years before, made up 85% of the population. While Randolph was more racially diverse than Braintree in 1990 (it does lie on Routes 24 and 28 between Dorchester/Mattapan and Brockton), Randolph used to look a lot morelike neighboring Braintree than it does today.

For anyone still reading and wondering, Randolph became a City-but-still-a-town in 2010. It does not vote for mayor, rather the council hires a city manager, so in that way its different than Braintree. I don’t know if the date of the new city charter or the style of city government has any bearing on this thread, but it’s worth noting.

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Notion: Braintree arranged double-fare to discourage "city problems" from riding Red Line out to them.
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Arlington: That's so cute. Call us when you get serious.

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didn't Arlington oppose the red line for that reason? And Dover the commuter rail?

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They didn't want to subject the heart of Arlington Center to an influx of "city people" (if you know what I mean, and I think you do).

I heard the same thing about the Green Line extension 15 or 20 years ago (that it would bring "city people" to the unspoiled wilderness of West Medford).

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but guess what? We're in your town anyway, because of the nice bike path that was built on top of where the Red Line should have gone.

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...brains do not grow on trees.

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Watertown needs to grasp the name and the location and run with it

In particular -- Watertown is just up the Charles from Cambridge -- specifically Kendall Sq. and is competing with Somerville and a few other places to be Kendall Sq 2.0

So here's a 4 phase plan for Watertown

First change the name from Watertown to WaterWorld -- much more cosmopolitan

Second buy some sleek, low slung boats [like on the Thames at London] and start a regular waterbus from the Broad Canal in Kendall Sq to a dock near the Arsenal on the Charles. Of course when the Charles ices up there would need to be some kind of alternative.

Third -- the most expensive -- but also the greatest payout -- dig a canal from the Charles to Sawins Pond [Coolidge Ave. next to Fabric Showplace- Freddy Farkels]

Fourth -- convince some developer to buy up all the nearby warehouses and develop including a branch canal from the main canal. Future development would be encouraged to connect via water by providing incentives for extra sq. ft. or height. Note there is no reason that the tallest building in New England outside of Boston couldn't be in WaterWorld.

There you have it -- the complete transformation from the sleepy suburb city of Watertown -- to the booming city of WaterWorld [more than 1/2 the land area of Cambridge].

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that bloated fiasco of a futuristic action film that featured Kevin Costner with gills, trading dirt as currency. (Still appreciate a typically scenery-chewing turn by Dennis Hopper as the heavy.) If not for overseas revenue just barely pulling it into the black, it could have been a bomb on the scale of Heaven's Gate.

Not exactly my model of a booming 21st-century metropolis. Save that name: in ten years, the Seaport is going to need it.

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I imagine some of our local opportunists will monetize the effects of rising tides by rebranding the Seaport as Sea World New England.

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I vote for Waterworld.

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Aqualandia?
Aqualantis?

Considering the highest point in Watertown is 39', it won't be too too long until it is Underwatertown and this is over with anyway.

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Changing from a town to a city is what brought down Framingham.

RESIST!

I am a huge fan of the markets of East Watertown and of the Danish Pastry House.

Are there other places to get whipped garlic/garlic spread?
Massis is best, bee tee dubs.

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What’s so bad about Framingham compared to when it was a town?

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Ugh like nobody goes to Framingham anymore, its the Framingworst. Gag

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It's the same old Framingham.

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LMAO!

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Change the name of the town to Water. Problem solved.

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Waterwater?

*snort*

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all that New England charm? I thought the preservation of charm is why we must resist any and all change, no?

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formerly known as ... "

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Go all the way in annoyingness, or go home:
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Change the name to City of Watertowne

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