Storrowed
Friday March 7, 2025
This Friday’s theme was originally going to be Boredom, but then Lindsay’s field trip bus got Storrowed.
Boston sometimes feels like a sociopsychological experiment.
It’s a city that punches well above its weight in the national psyche, ranking 11th in population but somehow Bostonians are all over your TV (Conan at the Oscars), influencing popular culture (DunKings), and behind virtually every important invention of the last 200 years. Logan Airport is literally a shrine to the city in which it resides — everything you see there is about Bostonians (or those with connections to Boston) and what Massachusetts has given to the world.
I lead with this because, despite the extraordinary civic pride and outsized contributions to the world, Boston is one of the dumbest fucking cities on the planet. All this brilliance, this global resonance, and we cannot figure out how to stop doing insanely stupid things. Perhaps the stupidest of these things, as most Bostonians will tell you, is Storrow Drive.
This east-west parkway extends along the Charles River, connecting Cambridge to BU and eventually the Mass Pike. It’s actually fairly beautiful, running between the brownstones of Beacon Hill and Back Bay and the miles-long waterfront park known as the Esplanade, across the river from the glinting towers and Rotunda of MIT. However, it’s only three lanes wide at max, and it’s virtually the only east-west thoroughfare in a metro area of more than 4 million. More incompetently: The road is peppered with low-hanging bridges and tunnels, allowing pedestrians to cross from the Esplanade into the city without risking becoming roadkill. Very nice for pedestrians, but these features make Storrow completely off-limits to any vehicle above 10-and-a-half-feet.
Trucks, large vans, busses, and especially U-Hauls cannot use Storrow, lest they want to get stuck in one-way traffic or, worse, rip the roof off their vehicle. This is called Storrowing.
Everybody in Boston knows this. If there was a Resident Handbook, “Don’t drive a U-Haul on Storrow” would be on page 1, right after “Don’t move on September 1” and before the section on Allston Christmas.
Because we are sick, sardonic people, Bostonians love to ridicule victims of Storrowing, who are almost exclusively new residents or college freshmen — easy targets as foreigners and transients. Bostonians themselves are not supposed to get Storrowed. It’s a mortal shame in the realm of dropping a foul ball from the upper deck at Fenway or thinking crab is better than lobster.
It’s not supposed to happen, which is why it’s so wild that a professional bus driver in the Boston area got caught on Storrow. Fortunately, this driver was aware enough not to drive full speed into the tunnel ceiling, endangering the lives of everybody on board. Instead, he stopped in the middle of the road as horns raged and expletives flew around him. Half Storrowed is better than Full Storrowed.
As the man froze, having likely never been trained on how to act when stuck on a one-way street at rush hour with a bus full of screaming kids, Lindsay and her co-worker (also named Lindsay, incidentally) did what teachers do on a daily basis: Figure shit out that doesn’t fall within the job description.
Fortunately, this particular scenario proved to be the most Boston thing of all time:
Because Boston is the world’s biggest little city, one of the chaperones just so happened to be a former T (local public transit) dispatcher. It is so Boston for the perfectly qualified individual to just happen to be present in the moment of random crisis.
This Hero Among Us called the police to get the bus escorted out of harm’s way and T dispatch to get a route back to Revere that didn’t use Storrow. (Also, incredibly Boston: Google Maps and Waze were completely useless in finding a route that didn’t include Storrow.)
Lindsay and Lindsay kept the children from jumping out the windows or otherwise losing their minds while the chaperone did everything short of climbing on the driver’s head and Ratatouilling him back to Revere.
When a cop showed up, he shut down traffic to get the bus out, berating everybody in sight the entire time. Very Boston: Screaming “Cars only means cars only” at Lindsay and Lindsay instead of the bus driver because everybody is a problem to Boston Police except the actual problem.
Because the city was built for horses and expanded by literally dumping land into the harbor, it is a nightmare to navigate. A 20-minute drive back turned into 110 minutes.
Getting Storrowed is a square no Bostonian wants to fill on their Bingo card. But it’s kooky shit like this that bring out the city’s true colors, for better and for worse. There’s some prevailing wisdom that Bostonians will pull over to help you change a flat tire in the pouring rain but call you a dumbass the entire time. Lindsay’s Storrowing is so true to this adage that I’m almost jealous she got to experience it.
I think I’ll finish life without getting Storrowed, but it’s cool to say I know someone who did.
One Hollywood: The White Lotus, Max
I can’t believe I forgot to feature this show when it came back. Another of our favorite shows, this season had been pretty slow, and I feared they had Storrowed themselves by beating a dead story horse. Episode 3 was a welcome change.
This show has always thrived on character dynamics and these ones had been threatening to be a bit boring. No spoilies, but Episode 3 was electric.
Mike White supposedly wrote the entire first season in one week of Covid lockdowns. Talk about a hot streak.
One History: The World’s Fair
The world really Storrowed itself by letting this event fall out of fashion. The World’s Fair used to be an incredibly aspirational global event that harnessed civic pride to create extraordinary things. The Eiffel Tower was built for the Paris World’s Fair. The first Ferriss wheel appeared at the Chicago World’s Fair, which was also the first fair lit solely by electricity. Every host city built ornate cities within cities that celebrated antiquity and looked to the future. The Palace of Arts in San Francisco is one of the few holdovers from World’s Fairs past and a great example of what these carnival cities looked like before they were all torn down due to the expense of maintaining them.
If only they knew how colorless and drab the art and architecture of the future would be. Maybe most cities would have thought twice if they could have looked into the future. (Especially St. Louis. I mean, goddamn St. Louis.)
One Book: Devil In the White City by Erik Larson
Now we’re talking about the World’s Fair, this book about Chicago World’s Fair serial killer H.H. Holmes is an immersive depiction of the pageantry and brilliance of the fair and the savagery of a sadistic innkeeper torturing visitors in plain sight.
(Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese are also making it into a movie.)
One Page: Culture_Crit Twitter
Man, I can’t help myself. The reason I got into the World’s Fair this week is because I stumbled across this Culture Critic thread. I’ve popped into Culture_Crit from time to time over the years, but this one captivated me, and I’ve been reading a lot more posts recently. It’s one of the coolest accounts on the internet if you’re interested in art, history, antiquity, or, you know, culture. There’s an Instagram page and a Substack if you’re not an Elon lackey.