The Fine Print

POLICY FOR THE PEOPLE

First off:

What makes a place feel like ours?

There are places we remember not because of what they looked like, but because of how they made us feel. A record store where you spent your allowance. A corner where you always ran into friends. A restaurant where somebody knew your order. A plaza where music brought strangers together.

Urban scholars have a name for some of these places: third spaces. They are settings outside of home and work where people gather, build relationships, and develop a sense of community. Scholarship on third spaces and place attachment helps explain why our relationships and repeated experiences can shape how connected we feel to our surroundings.

A city, then, is not just its municipal, economic, and physical infrastructure. It is also the gathering spaces in which people see themselves reflected, encounter one another, make memories, and feel that they have a stake in the community around them. This is part of what scholars describe as social infrastructure: the social settings that help people connect and build relationships.

This week, we’re thinking about what happens when we create those spaces intentionally, and what Downtown Boston can become when culture and community are at the center.

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“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

—Jane Jacobs

THE BIG PICTURE

The downtown I remember, the downtown we can create

By Gregory Ball

Downtown is the heart of the city. There is a photograph that still circulates across Boston social media of three young men, including Hip-Hop pioneer Rusty Pendleton, standing downtown with a boombox and dressed in the unmistakable uniform of the 1980s Hip-Hop generation. It captures the downtown I remember: the first place I went to connect with my peers and one of my earliest encounters with a third space. Every Saturday as a middle and high schooler, I would take my allowance downtown, buy records atStrawberries, pick up comic books, and grab a plate from 68 Chinese. If my pockets allowed, I would sneak in a movie, too. Like generations of teenagers before and after me, I was participating in community before I even had the language to describe it.

Third spaces give people somewhere to gather outside of home and work, places where relationships are formed, culture is shared, and community takes shape. Downtown Boston was that place for me. It was where young people could spend a Saturday, encounter new music and ideas, see themselves reflected in the city, and simply be together. Creating those kinds of spaces still matters today.

That same power to turn a public space into a place of connection is at the heart of José Massó’s work. José Massó has spent more than five decades proving that music can do more than move bodies. It can connect generations, preserve memory, build community, and turn a public space into a palace where people create true connection.

During a recent conversation on Embrace’s Good Trouble podcast, Mr. Massó discussed that enduring legacy and how it inspired the next chapter of Embrace Massó “¡Con Salsa!” as a free block party that brings the sound, spirit, and soul of Boston’s Afro-Latino community into the heart of Downtown Crossing.

The move to downtown for this year’s event is more than a change of scenery. As Embrace Boston establishes a permanent home in downtown Boston, the event is our chance (thanks to our partnership with our good friends at Downtown Business Alliance) to host a “housewarming party” in our new neighborhood. It also offers a vision for what revitalization can look like when culture leads the way.

José Massó addresses the crowd at Embrace Massó “¡Con Salsa!” International Music Festival in 2025. (Photo: Embrace/Soul Solid Visual)

A thriving downtown should not only be measured by new buildings, office occupancy, or commercial activity. It should also be measured by who feels welcome, who is represented, and whether the city’s public spaces create real opportunities for people to connect. Music, food, dance, and joy are not extras in that equation. They are part of how strangers become neighbors and a district becomes a community.

On NBC10 Boston’s Hub Today, Mr. Massó and Embrace President and CEO Imari Paris Jeffries, Ph.D., offered a preview of the block party that will fill Downtown Crossing with rhythm, movement, and community this Saturday from 3 to 7 p.m. It is a block party, a homecoming, and a declaration: our cultures do not belong at the margins of the city. They belong downtown, out loud, and at the center of Boston’s future.

So join us on Summer Street in Downtown Crossing this Saturday. Put on your dancing shoes for DJ Armando the Truth and El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, the legendary orchestra that has carried Puerto Rican culture across borders and generations for more than six decades. Have a few drinks with us at the beer garden. And most importantly, bring your joyful spirit.

Because downtown has always been a place where Boston comes together. For me, it was where I first discovered music, culture, and community with my peers. On Saturday, we have an opportunity to create that same sense of connection for another generation, and to remind ourselves what a downtown can be when people have a place to gather, celebrate, and create memories together.

LET'S EMBRACE THE WORK

Grab a book

September is Black Reading Month! The man who founded the observance in 1980, Malik Yakini, tells you how it started, explains why it’s especially important today, and gives some book recommendations. Cut the TV off, and crack some books open.

Breaking the “Chain”

Join author and professor Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D., for a celebration of his most recent publication, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age at JustBook-ish in Dorchester on Tuesday, September 15 at 4 p.m. And while you’re at it, revisit our conversation with him from July about his book and the 250th anniversary of the United States.

Honoring History. Inspiring Action.

Don’t miss the first anniversary of King’s Chapel’s unveiling of its memorial to enslaved persons, Unbound, which will be celebrated on September 26 with a program and keynote address by historian and writer Kellie Carter Jackson, Ph.D.

THE READING ROOM

A living legend

Lonnie Bunch III, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, announced this week that he’ll be retiring at the end of the year. Rather than focusing on the battles he and his team have fought with the Trump administration, read this piece from the Smithsonian on Bunch’s 38 years of excellence and advocacy in his career as an educator and historian.

A multilingual message

Melissa Trovato, Embrace’s Director of Digital Strategy and Communications, offered some poignant thoughts in this Boston Globe piece on how being bilingual can simultaneously feel enriching and isolating, and how her journey to Boston from Ecuador helped her appreciate the importance of English and Spanish to her identity.

Retroactive disenfranchisement

In his latest piece for WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Donathan Brown, a professor whose work focuses on the intersection of race and policy at Northeastern University, names a new threat to voting rights now on display in southern states—one in which legally cast ballots are simply erased after the fact due to evolving district maps. Learn about what he calls “ghost ballots” here.

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(Header photo by AP)

The Fine Print

​First off:

THE BIG PICTURE

LET'S EMBRACE THE WORK

THE READING ROOM

First off: