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Singles, young families infuse new life, if not new style, to once-aging city QUINCY - To Patty Toland, Quincy at the start of the new millennium
feels not unlike Boston's South End circa 1993. Toland, a 35-year-old writer,
moved back to her South Shore hometown in May, having spent a couple of
years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. Her previous stop, in the
South End, had come at a time when the neighborhood still had a few cheap
restaurants and you could actually find a place to park.
Now, living in an $800-per-month, one-bedroom apartment in a Quincy
Victorian - her similarly sized apartment in Boston was renting for $1,200
a month when she left - Toland is finding her way into a comfortable semi-urban
neighborhood laced with the likes of Burke's Seafood, Purdy's Ice Cream
Parlour, and the Renaissance Coffee & Tea Emporium. Her neighbors include
Asians, Greeks, and Irish. People are learning her name, and they're saying
hello. ''And I have private outdoor space, '' she adds, speaking
slowly and with reverence.
There's something else. Having recently begun working at an Internet
start-up company in Boston, four stops north as the Red Line rumbles, Toland
is feeling her way around a new office, too. ''And it's funny,'' she says.
''It seems that every week I find another employee there who's young and
who lives in Quincy.''
Wait now. Is it actually possible that Quincy - hardworking but unassuming
Quincy, a city of some 88,000 souls that's long on convenience but short
on style - is drawing goodly numbers of folks in their 20s and 30s to its
tightly knit neighborhoods? ''We've traditionally been a city of
older people,'' admits city clerk Joseph Shea, but many such residents
often end up selling their homes to a generation-in-waiting. For 27-year-old
Tackey Chan, a lifelong resident, the shifting sands of his street in the
Wollaston section of the city are best noticed come Halloween. ''The kids
on the street grew up and moved away, and there were no trick-or-treaters
here for a while,'' Chan points out. ''Then a lot of parents sold their
houses to younger families. So now the trick-or-treaters are back.''
Data provided by Shea shows that Quincy's 25-to-39-year-old population
has grown 12 percent during the past four years, a remarkable statistic
in light of the fact that, according to federal estimates, the group has
been declining in number across both the Commonwealth and the nation. Many
of these youngish people who've come to Massachsetts' ninth largest city,
located only 7 miles southeast of downtown Boston, are singles who've hunkered
down inside its estimated 20,438 renter units and 4,224 condominiums. Others
are young families who helped Quincy's public school population grow 13
percent during the 1990s. ''Our increase in the school-age population is
definitely due to the move-in situation,'' says superintendent of schools
Eugene Creedon. ''Our birthrate hasn't jumped up.''
Quincy?
Yes, Quincy, which claims its fame primarily as the home of John Hancock,
the presidential Adams family, and Howard Johnson's 28 flavors. Quincy,
where granite quarrying and shipbuilding have given way to subdued white-collar
trades such as finance and insurance. Quincy, where newer apartment and
condo complexes intermingle with aging homes in more than a dozen neighborhoods
and pocket neighborhoods, from the shingled Victorians of Wollaston Hill
to the former summer cottages of Hough's Neck. Quincy, wherein the nightlife
consists largely of neighborhood saloons serving cheap beer. Quincy, which
is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, bisected by the Red Line, and squats
squarely between the bright lights of the big city and the shopping malls
of the true suburbs. Quincy, the only one of the 20 Quincys in the United
States, according to the city's Web site, which declares itself to be ''Quin-zee''
rather than ''Quin-cee.''
Quincy?
Some of the recent arrivals are true newbies. ''I had no strong impressions
of Quincy before I moved here,'' says 32-year-old Michael Eisenstein. Eisenstein
and his wife, Kay Hanley, who were members of the now-defunct rock band
Letters to Cleo, moved from Boston into a two-bedroom apartment in North
Quincy last year. ''I knew Quincy's reputation, which is sort of like,
as Kay's sister puts it, `chintzy,''' continues Eisenstein, who grew up
in suburban New Jersey and later lived in Boston for 14 years. ''And it's
not really much different than I anticipated in that regard, except that
it's surprisingly easy to adapt to. It's livable.'' Adds Hanley, with more
than a touch of surprise in her voice: ''We're actually growing things
in a garden!''
Others have simply come home. Deborah Bedrossian, a 28-year-old customer
service representative, was raised in the Montclair section of the city.
She and her husband, Brian, a 30-year-old airline pilot, tried Somerville
for a while, but two years ago they settled into a three-bedroom Cape on
Quincy's Squantum peninsula, once a summer cottage colony. They live on
a dead-end street where there are plenty of kids with whom their 2 -year-old
daughter can play, and where Deborah Bedrossian extolls the classic virtues
of suburbia: safe neighborhoods, decent schools, and a supermarket not
far away. The Boston skyline can be spotted from the family's front door,
and it's a sight they do not mind seeing from afar. ''We have the best
of both worlds,'' she explains. ''We can see the city without actually
being in the city.''
Others are Asian. Despite the fact that city figures indicate that Quincy's
Asian population, which exploded during the 1980s and early 1990s, has
leveled off at about 16,000, young people like Juliana Yu keep coming.
Born in Hong Kong, Yu came to the United States a dozen years ago while
still a teenager. She moved into the 156-unit Edgewater Place condominium
development in North Quincy in 1998. Quincy, she says, gives her a ''comfort
feeling,'' but not necessarily because she finds herself among so many
other Asians. ''I'm here more because my friends live here, and most of
them happen to be Asian,'' she says. ''Malden has a lot of Asians, but
I don't know any of them, so I don't live there.''
A few have even come to Quincy to live at Marina Bay. Sarah Dickerman,
a 30-year-old sales director, has landed in a two-bedroom condominium at
Chapman's Reach, the newest component of the high-end waterside development
that looms unto itself on Quincy's northern tip. ''I like the marina here,
the boardwalk, the whole atmosphere,'' Dickerman says. While Chapman's
Reach, a gaggle of 152 spiffy new townhouses and condos, would seem to
be a haven for well-heeled empty nesters, 28 percent of its buyers so far
are, like Dickerman, under 40. And also like Dickerman, folks at Marina
Bay tend to consider themselves Bostonians first and Quincyites a distant
second. ''When people ask me where I live, I say `Marina Bay,''' Dickerman
says. ''I don't say `Quincy.'''
But Marina Bay notwithstanding, the 20- and 30- somethings who are arriving
in Quincy do not fit certain stereotypical notions. They are not super-rich
techies, for one thing. (Only one home in the city ever has sold for $1
million.) Nor do they tend to be members of the after-dark crowd. (Perhaps
the city's best-known year-round nightspot, the Beachcomber, opened in
1959 and looks it.) Whether they've moved into a high-rise condo at Marina
Bay or a Levittown-like cape in the Pine Island neighborhood, they recite
the same short litany of practical reasons for choosing the ''City of Presidents'':
affordability, accessibility, and, especially, proximity to Boston. To
many,
Quincy's 3.5 miles of Red Line, which includes four stops, is more of an
attraction than its 27 miles of coastline.
Money clearly matters. Of the 12 other communities that border Boston,
only three - Chelsea, Everett, and Revere - can currently claim a lower
median sales price for houses than Quincy's $220,000. The city's average
single tax bill of $2,386 for fiscal year 2000 is only slightly higher
than the state average of $2,297. Quincy's rents - estimated at an average
of $800 for a one-bedroom apartment and $1,000 for a two-bedroom - have
been rising, but they're considerably less than those found in most areas
of Boston and Cambridge. And the fact that house and condo prices in the
city are up nearly 19 percent this year over last - more than neighboring
Weymouth and Braintree, though less than adjoining Milton - would suggest
that Quincy is a good investment.
What does not seem to matter much is nightlife. Or lack of it. OK, nearly
$2 million has been invested in X&O, a downtown trattoria. And Marina
Bay features a trio of yup-scale eateries, as well the seasonal Waterworks,
an erzatz-tropical hangout for prettyboys and prettygirls. The funky Yard
Rock blues club is tucked into industrial Quincy Point, and you can always
raise a brewski or two along Wollaston Beach at the venerable Beachcomber.
But otherwise...
''It depends on what you mean by nightlife,'' contends Simon Chan, a
local real estate broker. ''If you mean Irish pubs, we've got nightlife.''
For many younger people, then, Quincy is a trade-off. They get necessities
but not luxuries, as befitting a place that has as many fire stations (eight)
as movie screens. When Catriona and Craig Andrews, 33 and 35, respectively,
moved from a small Cambridge apartment to small Squantum Colonial shortly
after their only child was born two years ago, they knew they were getting
the Big Two: affordability and accessibility. (Since the couple is from
Sydney, living near the ocean made Three.) They found, as Craig Andrews,
an industrial designer, puts it, ''Playgrounds and kids and dogs and a
place you can borrow a ladder from your neighbor.''
But they acknowledge they've given something up in return. ''In Cambridge,
there was lots of stuff to do,'' Catriona Andrews, an artist and art teacher,
says. ''Parties. Places to eat and drink. Cinema. Nightlife. It was very
lively and diverse. This is not. It's really a lifestyle change. We've
turned a corner. The energy and vitality are gone.''
Which, if it sounds like good reason to pack the family onto the Red
Line and back to the bistros and cafes of Cambridge for good, shouldn't
be taken that way at all. ''I would not move back,'' she says emphatically.
Quincy may not be hip, but hip may not be everything.
This story ran on page E01 of the Boston Globe on 9/26/2000.
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