In the early 70s my family lived in downtown Boston. Our apartment was in the basement of an Emerson College dorm. We had to cut through the Combat Zone to get to Chinatown. My favorite place in the world. (If you asked me then what I wanted to be when I grew up the answer was Chinese and live in Chinatown.) The Combat Zone is still vivid in my memory. You’d get a lot of butt and boobs, lewd and nude, strung out, lurking, homeless, insane, horny, violent, exploited people. Now you get shiny condos and restaurants. These photos are from an exhibition at Howard Yezerski Gallery. They do not inspire nostalgia. But remind me of how much closer the dark and dirty aspects of being human were when we were young. There seemed to be less hysteria and cultural fixation on a kid’s innocence then.

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