I live in New York City, “peep show seekin’ on the forty-deuce,” Fugetaboutit, Mean Streets, stick-ball, Hell’s Kitchen, “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!” New York City. Not only that, I live in New York City’s Borough of Brooklyn: Biggie, Bed-Stuy do or die, Do The Right Thing, Brooklyn.

All of that crap has been gone since I moved here.

So, I know a whitewashed city when I see one, which is why I was always so entertained by Boston Noir.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved Boston Noir. I loved Boston. It might be because I was born in Portland, ME, so there’s some residual New England love. Maybe it was because a year after I graduated college, I went to visit my friend Jeff at BC Law and felt the pull of college life. Maybe it’s my own Irish heritage. Maybe it’s because I hate the Yankees. I don’t know. Boston has always held a special place in my heart.

Here’s what I know. I remember the first time I picked up a Dennis Lehane novel. It was a July 4th weekend and it was in a Boston Barnes and Noble. It was Gone, Baby, Gone, a Kenzie Gennaro novel. I read it just because Ben Affleck was adapting it into a movie (the book is better). I loved it. I devoured it. I was enthralled. I read all of Lehane’s work. All the Kenzie Gennaro novels, Mystic River, Shutter Island, and The Given Day (which was boring enough that it made me fall out of love with Lehane but that’s another story).

There was something about the working class Irish-ness of it all that appealed to me. It’s hard to take pride in being English, which I am on my father’s side. We are, if not directly responsible for then at the very least, the role model for the world’s imperialism. Not so with my Irish side. We’re fiery, proud, provincial, and tough.

I ate it up. The true crime fascination started with Paddywhacked by T.J. English which documented Irish gang culture in America and that’s where I first heard of Whitey Bulger. He was on the FBI’s most wanted list, an Irish mobster who was a secret informer to the FBI.

The story is far more complicated than that as I would learn from books like Paddywhacked, Black Mass, and Whitey. Then I would see it played out in the Johnny Depp movie based on the book Black Mass, The Departed, and The Town. There was also the Showtime series Brotherhood. Yeah, it was set in Providence but it was clearly about the Bulger family. I read the book All Souls from an author who grew up in Southie under Whitey’s reign.

It was all so romanticized.

But much like New York, I realized that the gritty story was far from the current reality.

The first time I went to Charlestown was in the early 2000s. In the 70’s Charlestown was the terrain of The Winter Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger’s crew. In the 2000’s, it was the terrain of upwardly mobile college graduates looking to buy property in an up and coming neighborhood. I went to the barbecue of a high school friend’s college friend. He and his wife had a lovely restored shingled townhouse. It was July 4th (I loved Boston on the 4th), the sun was shining. I felt completely safe.

Much like my own easy existence in New York where “the code of the streets” seemed conspicuously absent, Boston also seemed like a city whose dangerous and, frankly, most romantic days were behind it.

And now here we are. The Boston Red Sox have won four World Series in less than twenty years and the high priest of Boston Noir is now dead.

If there’s any consolation it’s that Whitey was beaten to death within hours of arriving in a prison from which he was supposed to be transferred by a mafia hitman who couldn’t stand snitches. He was beaten to death with a padlock in a sock and, when it was over, he was unrecognizable, his eyes out of their sockets.

But that happened in West Virginia, not Boston. It’s the end of an era. Enjoy your sanitized cities.

No, seriously, enjoy them. It’s better than being mugged all the time.