How We've Changed

IT BEGINS WITH AN INNOCENT RECOMMENDATION, passed along by a preschool headmaster to the parents of one her pupils. You've got to check out the Quabbin Reservoir, she says, and so they do, and because they are devout Muslims, the mother wears a headscarf on their hike. A few dozen bald eagles nest in the surrounding forest, but to someone watching the couple that day, the sight most worth recording is this black woman and her Middle Eastern husband. The family returns home. Then, days later, a knock on the door: government agents — FBI, apparently — wanting to know exactly what they had been up to during their visit to the aquifer that supplies Boston with much of its drinking water.

We all know all too well what happened last September 11. What is harder to define is how we've been affected by what has happened in the year since, how the surveillance and the ever-present security and the stubborn uncertainty alter the experience of living in Boston. John Roberts, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, offers the story of the Muslim family's trip to the Quabbin as a parable about the dark side of our heightened vigilance. But there are others: about private citizens volunteering to patrol the harbor, or the neighborhood watch group in Hyde Park that felt the need to expand its purview from keeping an eye on one anothers' houses to distributing tips for surviving terrorist attacks. About material the government has yanked from the Boston Public Library. About Mohammed, who now believes he's safer being known as Mike.

Maybe your race and religion don't make you a candidate for profiling — and maybe you've noticed it just the same. Maybe you're like Boston Police Commissioner Paul Evans, and you've measured the drop in tourism by the minutes it has shaved off your daily commute. Maybe you've taken in a game at Fenway, and it's seemed that there are more cops on the concourse; maybe you've been like Peter Welsh, the city's chief of policy and planning, and you've caught yourself wondering between pitches: What if something happens here?

"That never happened before," says Welsh. But then, before this year, the preparations for the Boston Pops' Fourth of July concert never included welding shut manhole covers on the Esplanade. For some, it's those little details that remind; for others, the difference is felt every day. For all of us, Boston has changed.

We learned right away that the terrorists hijacked two of their missiles here, and it wasn't long before we found out that some of them had also lived among us, blending in, plotting. As other cities scrambled to defend against unseen threats, our reaction was shaped by Boston's direct connection to the hijackings. Grief for some of us came with a measure of guilt: If the tragedy was supposed to bring communities together as families, then ours was the one that had left its gun cabinet unlocked.

We rushed to erect makeshift fortifications, using concrete dividers, wooden police barricades, old bicycle racks, whatever was handy. That few complained about the handmade signs directing foot traffic at the entrance to City Hall — or the cheap card tables and metal detectors inside — doesn't suggest that their effect was insignificant. "People don't like City Hall, but many architects do, because when it was initially conceived, it was considered a very bold attempt to create a modern spirit of publicness," says George Thrush, chairman of the architecture department at Northeastern. "Now, with this ramshackle security assembly, the lobby resembles a garage, as opposed to the vestibule of a house. It removes the possibility of catharsis or transcendence by making these spaces serve purely practical purposes."