A City Without a Middle

...At work, Colin grew skeptical about Mayor White's commitments, and frustrated in his efforts to implement programs for the needy...

...Highly educated, professional, suburban wASPS, they had a freedom the Twymons and McGoffs lacked...

...Lukas reveals in his where-are-they-now epilogue, however, that their talents were dissipated...

...Basically, however, the book's name is ironic: There was no sense of shared purpose among Boston's patchwork of insular communities...

...The current laissez faire "solution," gentrification, promises merely to make matters worse, pushing the poor out to God-knows-where while creating Yuppie reservations...

...Then in 1975 the model public school they were sending their older son to was undermined by the identical integration plan that was causing havoc in Charlestown...

...Both were well-intentioned, su-perconfident achievers, imbued with the ideals of public service and meliorism...

...A Citizens Association established to find middle ground acceptable to " all South Enders of goodwill" had no more success than the mediation committees trying to keep the schools from exploding...

...His wife Joan, after giving birth to their second son, found work with a foundation, enabling her to devote her considerable energies to funneling money where it seemed to be needed most...

...Repeated efforts to establish networks of communication and mediation failed...

...Commond Ground is profoundly unsettling, showing us problems without solutions to which solutions must somehow be found...

...The book begins and concludes with them, and the curve of the narrative is traced by the choices they made...

...Conservatives reading Lukas' book may shrug, declaring they already knew what the Divers had to learn...

...Lukas writes that "by the 1920s, Boston's black community formed a triangle, with Brahmins, Homies and Turks all protecting their prerogatives and regarding each other with ill-disguised suspicion...

...The subsequent arrival of ambitious West Indians, known as "Black Jews" or "Turks," aggravated this split...

...He fought to retain his idealism, now shriveled to the conclusion that'' even with diminished expectations, one should do what one could to reduce social injustice...

...Because they deserve better than they got, their fates stand as an indictment...

...Having purposely moved into a mixed neighborhood, the Divers were disappointed to discover everybody kept pretty much to his or her own kind...

...Public leaders and major institutions—Mayor Kevin White, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros and the Catholic Church, the Boston Globe—all sought to calm passions, only to be weakened and besmirched by the effort...

...One evening, wielding a baseball bat, Colin personally chased down a purse snatcher, and in a later confrontation with a judge he exclaimed: " It's a jungle out there...

...Things quickly went sour...

...We might as well get gun permits and barricade our doors...

...But the Divers, too, were ultimately forced into privatization...

...Billy, a four-letter man in high school, co-captain of the football and basketball teams and editor of the yearbook, is today an electrician...

...The title can be taken as referring to the school system, a piece of turf fought over by rival gangs in the guise of neighborhoods, or to the city itself, the arena where the contending factions carried on their battles...

...Tout comprendre, c'est toutpardonner—except that as long as America's cities fester we cannot afford to pardon...

...If their defeat was more Jamesian (it consisted of moving to the suburbs), it is, in its way, also more telling...

...Although at least one of her sons was adept at street crime, her children showed enormous promise...

...Eventually, he left city employment, worked a while for the state, and finally accepted a teaching appointment with Boston University...

...In 1970, they made the decision to move to the integrated, heterogeneous South End to participate socially and culturally in the city they were dedicating themselves to...

...Charlestown's congressman, Majority Leader Tip O' Neill...

...Rachel supported her six children as best she could, once attempting to run a small business with the help of an SB A loan...

...and the state's most prominent politician, Senator Edward M. Kennedy...

...If busing appeared to pit blacks against whites, particularly Boston's Irish, just as lethally it pitted the Irish against themselves...

...articulate, imaginative Lisa, president of her class and a force holding her school together when everything threatened to fly apart, works in the billing department of a Charlestown milk company...

...In 1976, after the pressures had become overwhelming, the Divers surrendered, moving to the comfortable suburb of Newton...

...Writers & Writing A CITY WITHOUT A MIDDLE BY BARRY GEWEN Anthony Lukas' Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three A merican Families (Knopf, 659 pp., $19.95) is a depressing, rich, painful, absorbing, almost novelistic account of the mid- 1970s Boston busing crisis...

...Yet they apparently have nothing to substitute for the couple's moral concern except cynicism, the attitude of the wealthy gentleman in the Tony Auth cartoon who stands on his terrace overlooking the rotting metropolis below and, drink in hand, says to his wife: "You're wrong, dear...

...In the end, they too failed...

...Still more important, Common Ground compels us to ask ourselves if public service is a viable option today...

...On one side of Lukas' story were the anonymous Kerrigans and Flynns of Charlestown, fighting to preserve the integrity of their working-class neighborhood, on the other, as much by force of circumstance as by conviction, the community's putative representatives—White...

...Events at homefolloweda similar course...

...Beginning around the turn of the century, old-time proud black Brahmins with roots back to the Revolution or before were unhappy about the wave of "Homies," or down-homers, from the South...

...Like a Flemish Primitive, Lukas paints with a love of the concrete, accumulating detail upon detail until all easy generalizations evaporate, preconceptions both generous and unkind dissolve, and we are left immobilized in a rubble of grim specifics...

...Lukas is quite good, too, at presenting the historical conflicts in Boston's black community and their impact down to the present...

...Colin Diver, Amherst College, Harvard Law School, Law Review, turned down an offer in the late '60s from one of the country's top law firms to take a position as assistant to the Mayor of Boston...

...They lived in a housing project in the South End that had begun to decay the day it opened, an instant slum made worse by the depredations of some of the residents...

...At about the same time, a crime wave hit the area...

...Among nonethnic whites the turmoil took other forms...

...It describes a city without a middle, caught between decay and gen-trification...

...Rachel's defeat, agonizingly recounted through the latter part of the book, came as her sons turned to mugging, car theft and, in one case, rape, while her daughters either left home or got pregnant...

...Twymon youngsters were bused into Charlestown, where McGoff youngsters participated in, and occasionally led, protests against the outsiders...

...Even the various divisions were divided...

...Presiding was W. Arthur Oarrity Jr., the judge who made the decision for busing and, until this fall, enforced it...

...In one of the neighborhoods Lukas examines, the gentrifying South end, unity was shattered by fierce arguments over housing and crime that set the socially conscious " urban pioneers" against the recently settled Yuppies, unconcerned about causes . It was called a dispute between "the self-righteous and the self-interested...

...The Divers made an admirable choice compared to the legions of doctors, lawyers and MBAs who get their degrees already wondering how they are going to invest their first million...

...The ghettos are a solution...

...Both women were strong-willed, dignified, independent, determined to protect their children from the brutality surrounding them—and both failed...

...Yet these two female-headed families shared a common unhappy condition: They lived on the edge of America's social abyss...

...For this reason, they are the true "heroes" of Common Ground...

...Their experience raises several challenges, beginning with the question of whether it is possible for a middle-class family legitimately worried about the quality of public schools and the safety of the streets to live in a modern American city...

...About the Divers, at least we can say they tried...

...Charlestown was declining, ravaged by urban renewal and a dwindling economic base, but it remained a community in the true sense of the word...

...Reading it is like grasping a razor blade...

...A society that does this to such talented and well-meaning people is not healthy...

...At present, we seem to have evolved urban environments hospitable only to the very rich, the very poor, and young singles willing to pay outlandish rents for rabbit hutches...

...This kaleidoscope of embattlement is organized by Lukas around three Boston families, whose histories he traces with rigor and compassion...

...Alice McGoff, a widow with seven children, worked at a variety of dead-end jobs from hat-check girl to telephone op-eratorto keep herfamily going...

...The ghettos are notaprob-lem...

...Possessing little else, sheprized the easy familiarity of the neighborhood where she had spent her entire life...

...The two families are victims of our times...

...Alice's defeat was perhaps more subtle...

...The Divers are another story...

...people of different races, classes and backgrounds battered and defeated by forces beyond their control...

...The Twymons did not have even that...

...A crippling disease kept her in the hospital much of the time, though, and she was dependent upon welfare...

...The Irish McGoffs and black Twy-mons were direct combatants in the drama...

...When the case was heard in Federal court in 1974, the opposing attorneys had names like Flannery and Sullivan...