The Chapel Of Our Lady Of Good Voyage sits near the waterfront in Boston Harbor, across from busy Logan Airport. It has, for generations, been the refuge and spiritual retreat of the many sailors who have come through Boston’s harbor. It is almost invisible now, dwarfed and surrounded by giant apartment towers and even bigger office complexes and giant cranes everywhere.

I wonder if there is any place in America that does not abolish the past to make way for the future. Boston, like New York, is becoming too expensive for normal people, they can’t afford million dollar condos with doormen and waterviews. Must we all work in financial services to survive? But walking through South Boston today, I mourned the old rich and atmospheric neighborhoods of South Boston, it’s dingy bars, many characters, seafood restaurants right on the water, rowhouses and rooming houses, it was like a scene out of Moby Dick, and the chapel was where the sailors came to think of home and pray and find some food and connection.

Like the carriage horse stables in New York, I think sometimes that we have lost our connection to the past, to ourselves. Nostalgia is a trap, I believe, but the past is precious, it means something. I wonder where all of the real people go? I imagine when I next come to Boston, the chapel will be gone, a luxury apartment tower rising in it’s place, right over the shadows of the working people and sailors who lived there for hundreds of years.

I remember every person I ever interviewed in South Boston, I cannot tell one office building from another.