The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, "The West Ends" from While We're at It (The Last Angry Rude Boy)
Skammentary: "The West Ends" is about one of the most shameful instances of bipartisanship in American history, the compulsory evacuation & destruction of Boston's West End, a thriving working-class neighborhood, in the 1950s & '60s to create apartments for the upper middle class & Government Center, a collection of buildings in the dehumanizing Brutalist style that would look at home in Fascist-era Italy. The "urban renewal" of the West End was carried out under the auspices of the Housing Act of 1949, an unholy collaboration between Democratic president Harry Truman & Republican senator Robert Taft that gave the federal government more sweeping influence over local governance than had ever been envisioned by the Framers, & that was irredeemably corrupt from the beginning, both financially & morally. The Housing Act was targeted at the poor, providing for "slum clearance." In Boston, the city government declared the West End a "slum" only after halting garbage collection & street sweeping; in one documented case, a photojournalist dumped out a garbage can onto the street & then took photos of the mess he made as proof of the West End's "slum" status. The razing of the West End was a brazen government-sponsored assault of the rich upon the poor, for which the Boston Redevelopment Authority later apologized, for all the good that did to the scattered & emotionally shattered evicted residents of the formerly tight-knit West End.
"Urban renewal, demolition,
And the Act of Contrition,
'Why would you live here in this condition?'
'Why would you say that? This is our home!
The West End's the best end,
Why won't they leave us alone?
Why won't they leave us alone?'
"This is not squalor,
It's dollar to dollar,
We don't care about status,
Or color or collar,
This is not poverty!
We don't live in the slums!
We are the working-class poor
And we're not just derelict bums!…"
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