A ceremony to officially rename the city’s massive convention center for the late Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino drew nearly 1,000 people to the building on South Boston’s Summer Street on Saturday morning. It was a veritable “who’s who” of notable Bostonians past and present, with a heavy complement of “Team Menino” alums, many of them now accomplished leaders in their own right, like the current mayor, Michelle Wu, and her stalwart ally and powerful Massachusetts House Ways and Means Chairman Aaron Mickliewicz of the North End.
The two-hour-long speaking program was heavy on nostalgia and genuine warmth for Menino, who died in 2014, not long into his retirement from public life. But he lived long enough to know that the convention center and much of the Seaport district that has grown up around the facility have largely fulfilled his forward-looking vision for the neighborhood and the city at large.
In fact, if there was a subtext to Saturday’s festivities it was “Tommy told us so.”
More than a few speakers reminded the assembly that Menino was widely criticized for pushing for the “megaplex” that some in the media predicted would be a boondoggle and a “white elephant.” A recording of Menino during an interview with the late WBZ radio voice David Brudnoy featured the host teasing and even ridiculing the Hyde Park man’s faith in the project, dubbing it “Menino’s folly.”
The mayor, never known as a wordsmith, nonetheless offered a simple, but prescient rebuttal, promising that the city and state’s investment would prove to be a giant stimulant to Boston and the region.
Gloria Larson and Jim Rooney, two of Menino’s allies and key players in advancing the project in concert with the state authority that runs the center, credited Menino’s “damn-the- torpedoes” style for steering the project even as a sequence of Republican governors threw wrenches in the works, most notably the Commonwealth’s carpetbagger-in-chief, Mitt Romney.
The mayor’s daughter— Dorchester’s own Susan Menino-Fenton— delivered moving personal remarks addressed to her dad that summed up her family’s still-profound grief. Tom Menino is missed. And, she noted with great gusto: He was right.
It was not lost on many of the bold-face names in the giant lobby on Saturday that Tom Menino’s current successor faces some of the same taunts and barbs from political foes and media critics that Menino stared down during his time in charge.
There are clear echoes in the way Michelle Wu’s vision for Franklin Park’s White Stadium is getting roasted by her chief nemesis, Josh Kraft, and the unaligned, but deep-pocketed and omnipresent digital campaign against the stadium project.
But, as Saturday’s naming ceremony for Tom Menino reminds us, sometimes mayors take their lumps for tough, but inspired decisions that others don’t have the foresight or guts to tackle.
Menino wasn’t right about everything in his two decades in charge, but he was certainly spot-on when he put his full might into the shepherding this convention center that now bears his name into reality. That his name now adorns the façade should be a reminder that taking calculated risks in politics in the pursuit of the public good is a noble and requisite quality in our best leaders.
