I love the Mudcat.

Just read my way through this thread.
I spent eight consecutive years at
Boston University on Commonwealth Avenue,
on one of the trolley-branches of the Green Line.
I was on and off the "T" an awful lot in those days,
although I also pounded the sidewalk pavements many a time.

The information about Boston's Red Scare is new to me,
and at the same time, it comes as no surprise whatever.
None of it is surprising: not the Kennedys lionizing McCarthy,
nor the professor who threw himself out of a window,
...

I take that back.
I didn't know that
'Government Center' was a cleaned-up former neighborhood of ill repute,
and at first blush it was startling to read this.
It has sense the more I reflect on it.
In my time,
Boston's "Combat Zone" overlapped the theatre district,
and was at an entirely different corner of the Common
than was 'Government Center'.


In my first-hand experience,
"MTA" in conversational speech always suggested distance and detachment,
somebody who knew about the city but
neither traveled through it nor studied in it.
If you were there every day, you called it the "T," period,
it was shorter and more convenient
and you didn't have to stop and think about it.
(that's to answer Joe Offer's question)