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That fear congealed around a discomforting uncertainty: what would the opening of the Red Line extension mean for Davis Square’s future? While the community looked towards “Slumerville’s” reputation makeover, residents and city officials alike worried about the palpable tension between the interests of new developers and community institutions. Kaufman reported on this tension in his Boston Globe coverage:
As both Tyler and Brune acknowledged yesterday, the sculptures are supposed to make a statement about the future of Davis Square … as well as about its past. With the MBTA Red Line scheduled to begin operation underground in Davis Square next year and rents in nearby Cambridge rising rapidly, the area appears poised for rejuvenation and development. Already, nearby condominiums are commanding $89,000 for two bedrooms. ‘We don’t want to turn this into a commercial district where the people who have lived here for years will be turned out,’ Brune said.
Davis Square of the 1980s
Unfortunately, these fears were well-founded: throughout the 1980s, Davis Square experienced a massive scale of urban transformation as local homes and businesses gave way to condominiums, office spaces, and commercial real estate. Just four years after the opening of the Red Line extension and the cheerful celebration of Ten Figures’ unveiling, resident Floyd Henderson was left wondering in the Somerville Community News: “Will Davis Square be Overdeveloped?” Henderson noted that “for many years now Somerville has been a haven … for the families who have lived here most of their lives,” but with the urban transformation resulting from the MBTA connection, “it was only a matter of time before the developers and property managers stood up and took notice.”
In the very same issue, Robert Newman covered the bleak state of the Somerville housing market for increasingly desperate longtime residents. Newman reported that the market had fundamentally changed eight years previously, when “rent control was abolished, the Red Line extension neared completion, and a ‘high-tech’ boom in the Boston region drove up housing prices.” Interestingly, rent control was abolished in Somerville in 1979—the very same year that the MBTA voted to authorize ‘Arts on the Line.’ Newman reported Jack Hamilton, director of the Community Action Agency of Somerville, as stating that, since then, “rents have increased 250%—275% while wages have increased only 40%—50%. A house in Somerville costs four times what it did in 1970.” This rapid scale of change priced out residents who had lived there their entire lives, and left them feeling devastated and angry. Dora Tevan, longtime director of the Ethnic Arts Center of Somerville, remarked: “I grew up in Somerville my whole life, on Whitfield Road. Now I live in Watertown because I can’t afford Somerville on my salary. I don’t have a neighborhood to come back to! I had a neighborhood as a child. Now there’s nothing there!” (Newman).
Original image caption reads: "The site of the new Somerset Savings Bank corporate office building. Photo by Floyd Henderson." | Image coutesy of Somerville Public Library Archives.
Original image caption reads: "John Taylor, executive director of the nonprofit Somerville Corporation, addresses the Somerville Housing Forum. Photo by Theresa Strong." | Image courtesy of Somerville Public Library Archives
"I didn't understand that the new subway would eventually change the neighborhood;
I was just excited by the art."
Bill and Alice Mosho were themselves displaced from Davis Square due to surging prices and the development associated with the Red Line construction. Interviews with sculptor James Tyler reveal that he reflected on the predicament of the Moshos, essentially forced into an early retirement, as he worked on the statues. Speaking of their recently-shuttered Fish Market, he remarked that, “It was a great little local seafood place. When they started [building] the subway, they essentially drove them out of business. The construction shut them off from the square” (Doncaster). In her reporting on the statues, Lynne Doncaster remembered how as a child, she had had little idea of the precipitous domino-line of development and displacement threatening to come crashing down on Somerville: “Even at that young age, I was sensitive to my home city’s bad reputation. I didn’t understand that the new subway would eventually change the neighborhood; I was just excited by the art.”
One way in which we can understand the inextricable tie linking the opening of the Davis Square MBTA Station, the promotion of the ‘Arts on the Line’ project, and the urban change and painful displacement experienced by Somerville residents in the 1980s is through the theory of critical spatial development created by art historian Rosalyn Deutsche. In her book Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Deutsche argues that ideologies of aesthetic and urban development are used to facilitate the removal of lower-income residents from a given community. Deutsche notes that she began research into this topic in the early 1980s, when she noticed “the coincidence of four phenomena in New York City: massive urban development, intensification of official rhetoric about new public spaces, an explosion of interest in the aesthetics of urban planning, and a sharp increase in public art commissions” (xxiii). Through her research, Deutsche found that public art commissions and city-sanctioned aesthetic development were heavily correlated with gentrification—a term oft-debated in urban and sociology studies, but which she defines by Smith and LeFaivre’s simple summation: when “the economic function of the neighborhood has superseded the broader social function” (54). Deutsche narrows in on the development of Union Square, New York, in the 1980s, which transformed the “deteriorated yet active precinct consisting of a crime-ridden park, low-rent office building, inexpensive stores, and single-room occupancy hotels into a luxury ‘mixed-use’ neighborhood” (12)—an example clearly analogous to the transformation of Davis Square in the same time period. This transformation, focused on maximizing real-estate profits, was accompanied by a promotion of public art by city officials, which Deutsche argues helped to “secure consent to redevelopment” (56). Through the ideological promotion of aesthetics and revitalization, the city “engineered the dispersal of that ‘immobile’ population with no place in the restructured economy” (17).
In Deutsche’s view, therefore, the “chicken-and-the-egg” question of Somerville’s development has a clear answer: new high-income residents didn’t flock to Davis Square because of its aestheticized revitalization (and, as an unfortunate by-product, push out the original lower-income residents). Rather, the aesthetic revitalization served as justification for the removal of those economically “undesirable” original residents. Developers had a plan for the new, profit-generating Davis Square—and they used ‘Arts on the Line’ to help sell it.
Davis Square Now
Since the 1980s, Davis Square has only continued along this path of aesthetic gentrification. In 1997, the magazine UTNE Reader named Davis Square, which they described as “a blue collar suburb awash in artistic energy,” one of the 15 hippest places to live in North America (Kraker and Walljasper). Those $89,000 condominiums, reported on by Kaufman in 1983 as an ominous symptom of the looming real-estate boom, would (adjusted for inflation) sell for roughly $172,000 today. However—condominiums in Davis Square aren’t selling for a few hundred thousand dollars in 2024. According to Zillow, the median price for a 2-bedroom condo in Davis Square currently hovers around an eye-watering 1.2 million dollars.
And serving as the backdrop of this staggering capitalistic development is the neighborhood itself, now a highly-curated arts and food scene filled with shiny-new restaurants and funky boutiques. Boston Magazine describes “vintage stores, an indie movie theater, and lots and lots of bars: Davis Square is the textbook definition of a liberal-arts-student magnet.”
Sociologist Sharon Zukin would contend that the city of Somerville purposefully courts this artsy, hip vibe, as gentrified cities attempt to re-create the “authenticity” which was lost in the displacement of their original residents and institutions. In these cities, “authenticity has taken on a different meaning that has little to do with origins and a lot to do with style” (Zukin 2). The city attempts to recapture the experience of its origins by “preserving historic buildings and districts, encouraging the development of small-scale boutiques and cafes, and branding neighborhoods in terms of distinctive cultural identities” (Zukin 3). This authenticity itself becomes a “tool of power,” which replaces the aesthetic of the city’s original residents with “a 24/7 entertainment zone with safe, clean, predictable space and modern, upscale neighborhoods” (Zukin 4).
And so, we get the Davis Square of today: a typical summer day in the square finds a group of college students sharing a pitcher of sangria at an outdoor restaurant patio in the center of the plaza, while two young men who work in the biotech industry make their way to the newly built, state-of-the-art gym installed over the CVS. A high-priced, curated vintage store is slowly edging out the market from the Goodwill right next door. A new Korean corn dog restaurant has just opened up, with TVs installed vertically along its walls to better display videos from TikTok influencers espousing the values of the neighborhood. And all along Elm Street, there are the shining signs for Capital One, Bank of America—bank after bank after bank.
In the center of it all stand Bill and Alice Mosho, frozen in crumbling concrete, the fish detailing on their clothing the only testament to the long-gone Davis Square Fish Market (the building which once housed the Fish Market is now a trendy brunch spot). Zukin notes that developed cities are still marked by traces of the residents who originally gave the city character: “Walk around the remaining cobblestone streets: they are ghostly reminders of a neighborhood’s modest origins” (243). These clean, safe, gentrified cities are nonetheless filled with the ghosts of the residents that they have displaced
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