The poetry and prose we find today on monuments along the Orange Line were meant to enhance the Southwest Corridor communities twenty years ago, after its citizens successfully protested against a highway project that had threatened to damage their neigbhborhoods. Twenty years later, the art remains; but divorced from its orginal historical context, its purpose becomes vague.
We see this as an opportunity to raise questions about rhetoric in prose and poetry. Does it cease to be effective or engaging as times change? Are today's passerby affected by these stories, songs and verses? In our work on this website we hope to learn--and then to show--how these eighteen texts, etched in stone along the Orange Line, are percieved by the Boston community, and whether or not they still make a positive contribution to the sense of community along the Southwest Corridor.
