9.23.2001 00:16
Boston fears
longlasting fallout
from attacks
• Some worry that the city and its tourism business, will be tainted because two of the hijacked flights originated at Logan Airport.
BY ARIEL SABAR
Journal Staff Writer
BOSTON
-- If you had mentioned Boston before the Sept. 11 attacks, the images conjured might include Harvard, Cheers,
and such chestnuts of American history class as Paul Revere's midnight ride from the Old North Church.
But over the past two weeks, newspapers and TV screens have been awash with images of a different Boston.
The two hijacked jetliners that destroyed New York's World Trade Center towers took off from here, and that has placed a harsh spotlight on New England's largest city. News organizations have carried reports of terrorist networks in the Boston area, donations from the bin Laden family to Harvard University, and a history of security lapses at Boston's Logan Airport.
The Freedom Trail, if it described anything in recent weeks, could apply to the ease with which a man claiming to be an Afghan pilot allegedly obtained a visit to Boston's air control tower -- or to the ability of hijackers to live in this country for years while plotting a course of mass destruction that took shape in earnest one Tuesday morning in Boston.
The potential fallout for Boston's Ivy-fringed image has not been lost on Massachusetts officials, who hastily convened a "Tourism Industry Strategic Response Summit" on Friday. The purpose was to find a way out of what a statement delicately calls "the current situation."
How long that will take remains to be seen. But there is a longer-term question that few here feel comfortable answering: Will Boston's role in the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil leave a lasting stain on the city?
"I felt shame right away for the fact that the planes originated from here," says Ann Deveney, 53, a Boston University graduate student who has lived in the city for three decades. "Immediately, I thought our security must not be as tight as it should be.
"The shame was, 'Oh my God, No. I'm from Boston. Please. Anyplace else."
An executive from a public relations firm that is advising Massachusetts tourism officials says that the Sept. 11 attacks have placed Boston in an awkward position.
"Boston's a victim without being a victim," says Rob DeRocker, a vice president with Development Counsellors International, of New York, which also advised the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce after the 1995 bombing of that city's federal building.
"They don't get the empathy and sympathy that New York does, but they take the hits. In some ways, that's worse from a publicity perspective. And it's patently unfair."
Machine gun-toting SWAT teams now patrol Logan Airport, a shakeup at the patronage-laced Massachusetts Port Authority is likely, and hotels are reeling from a plunge in occupancy rates amid the cancellations of several large conventions.
More bad news came Friday, when the front pages of Boston's two major newspapers carried stories about Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's warnings of possible terrorist attacks on the city over the weekend. Officials later played down those warnings, and nothing had come of them as of last night.
But many Bostonians stayed out of downtown, and security was tightened around colleges, skyscrapers and utility buildings.
MEANWHILE,
tourism boosters have been wringing their hands about how to sustain tourist interest in the city. Aware of the swell of patriotism since the attacks, they have started to talk about how to promote Boston, with its collection of revolutionary American landmarks, as a patriotic tourist destination. But officials acknowledge they will have to tread carefully to avoid any appearance of exploiting the tragedy.
"While we want to make sure that we address the needs of the Massachusetts tourism economy" -- tourism is the state's third largest industry -- "the most important thing is to be sensitive," said Amy Strack, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism.
The attacks came in the midst of the city's busiest tourist season -- the fall -- when a combination of high-schoolers visiting colleges, conventioneers, and foliage-seeking tourists descend on Massachusetts.
And it came as Boston was still heady from a roaring regional economy and from years of increasing business travel and overseas tourists.
Logan Airport is in the midst of a $3 billion modernization. A hotel building boom is expected to add some 4,300 new rooms by 2003. And a $700 million Boston Convention & Exhibition Center is set to open in 2004.
If the attacks have indeed left Boston with a black eye, historians, psychologists and public officials interviewed for this story say that it will probably heal.
In the two days after the attacks, a Florida travel consulting firm, Yesawich Pepperdine & Brown, conducted a telephone survey that asked Americans if they would now avoid any travel destinations. Between a quarter and a third of those who answered yes said they would avoid New York, Washington and the Middle East. Just 4 to 5 percent said they would shun Boston, a smaller number than would avoid either Newark or Los Angeles.
"An awful lot of the globe came before Boston," said a Yesawich spokesman. "That's good news for Boston."
Logan officials have contended that their airport is as safe as any in the country, and have argued that it was targeted by the hijackers simply because it is on the East Coast and offers cross-country trips on large jetliners loaded with fuel.
But the Federal Aviation Administration fined the airport in the late 1990s for a string of security breaches. And some Boston promoters say that the city's image could suffer lasting damage if the investigation faults Logan in any way for the attacks.
"The only way I can see Boston being tarred is if it turns out that this was a failure of Logan Airport security as opposed to the national airport security system," says Patrick Moscaritolo, president of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau and the airport's director from 1986 to 1990.
BOSTON HAS
also seen mud slung at one of its -- and the country's -- premier universities, Harvard. The Ivy League institution accepted $2 million in donations in the mid-1990s from the Saudi Bin Laden Group, a construction company owned by several of Osama bin Laden's estranged brothers, but not -- university officials insist -- Osama himself.
Even so, dozens of Harvard alumni and Massachusetts residents have called the university to complain. Some even accused it of taking "blood money."
"There will be an element that will assume we're somehow attached to terrorism," says Joe Wrinn, the university spokesman, who has spent the past two weeks convincing reporters and the public otherwise.
A longer-lasting repercussion for Massachusetts's many colleges and universities may be the mounting scrutiny of the country's student visa program; several of the Middle Eastern hijackers are said to have used such visas to enter the United States.
Massachusetts has more foreign college students -- 28,000 -- than all but three other states, and that has helped give collegiate Boston a cosmopolitan air and a reputation for tolerance.
But already, critics have questioned whether graduate students from countries hostile to the United States should be allowed to come here to study, say, nuclear physics.
"One of the things that Boston might do is sort of emerge as a test case as to the limits or the consequences of diversity," says Thomas H. O'Connor, a Boston College historian who has written several histories of the city.
In conservative parts of the country, he says, Americans may look at the alleged terrorist cells in Boston and say "'This is what you get with these pinko liberal people in Boston and Cambridge. This is Kennedy country.
"'They welcomed diversity -- Well, see what it got them.'"
But Boston has rebounded from other tragedies over its history, from the Great Fire of 1872 to the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire of 1942, which killed 492 people. Once the history books are written, some experts predict, Boston's role in the Sept. 11 attacks will at best be a footnote.
"When people are writing about this 30 years later," says O'Connor, "they probably will say, 'They hijacked two airplanes out of Logan Airport and perhaps that was made more easy by lax security measures.' I'm not sure it will have much more effect than that."
ON THE STREETS
of downtown Boston yesterday, the crowds were perhaps a little thinner than usual. But people went on with their lives: they pushed baby strollers, read newspapers on park benches, carried shopping bags, fed pigeons.
The warnings about possible attacks on the city were not enough to keep four old friends from the game of nickel poker they play each week on the bleachers at a Boston Common baseball diamond.
"It's the weekend, it's nice out," said Stephen Johnson, 40, a laborer, sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette as the bench beside him piled up with pennies and quarters.
"I'm concerned, sure," he said, though you couldn't tell it from his tone of voice. "You see a plane fly by, you run for cover."
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