The South End Is So Over

Considering the Beehive is run by the owners of nearby hipster-endorsed stalwarts Bob’s Southern Bistro and Pho Republique, you might expect the subterranean space beneath the Cyclorama to draw patrons resembling the ones spotted at those joints: the black and white jazz lovers of the former, the tattooed artists, off-work musicians, and stylish gays of the latter. Instead, the scene is distinctly white, straight, suburban (or buying there soon), and likelier to be sporting khakis, golf shirts, and sweater sets than skinny jeans, indie rock tees, and body art. These are people who do well enough to pay $11 for a cocktail without blinking, and would not look out of place at Back Bay hangouts like Clerys or Abe & Louie’s. They are also the faces of the new (but not necessarily improved) South End.

You wouldn’t know it from the thriving businesses or the still-hot real estate market, but there is a growing chorus of Bostonians who believe this has been the year the South End as they knew and loved it died, became hopelessly passé, jumped the shark. These critics—disaffected current or former residents, mostly—contend that the neighborhood has rapidly declined from an über-hip, multicultural melting pot into rich, white-bread uniformity, a shift that proves our city deserves its reputation as an unstylish, provincial burg irredeemably stratified by race and class. This scathing perspective is perhaps best expressed on The South End Is Over (thesouthendisover.blogspot.com), a year-old blog penned by a gay longtime South End resident under the tagline “If you lived here, you’d be pretentious by now” (and from which the title of this article is, with apologies, borrowed). If the South End was Boston’s last great chance to put a star on the national coolness map, the argument goes, then we blew it, quickly overdeveloping everything wonderful about it into oblivion.

And that’s because those prosperous, conventional-looking types lining up to get into the Beehive aren’t just visiting the neighborhood in ever greater numbers. They’re moving in—and, by God, they’re taking over.