Boston BOOMS
Not really. Boston boomed. Maybe back in the early 70's. It shrank from about 1974.
My take on it was that it was cool to do weird cultist stuff back in the 60's. Peace marches, communes, hitchhiking across the country were all cool. Meditation was cool. There were lots of people out on the streets just looking for neat experiences. The huge college population of Boston just ate Scn up and people arrived in droves. An LRH Command Team with Kerry Gleason and Alex Sibersky and Bill Franks and Jon Eastman pushed the stats up for real. I'm thinking that around 1977, the Cambridge Mission and New Haven Mission and Worcester Org were pushing people into Boston. Here's where Scientology began to be Scientology. I mean to say that Scientology will find a way to mess up a good thing. Reality slowly began to set in. I think it was in 1978... with all the new books, body routing 12 hours a day, films, tons of mailings, huge events, you get the picture, big promo going on non-stop. All this energy and activity resulted in a whopping 1 new public doing a major service. One person. In 1978 or thereabouts, there were something like 40 people in the GO fighting all the big bad SP's. Imagine all the SO recruiting missions and SO ripoffs of the best staff and the GO recruitments and staff blowing and getting comm ev'd and declared, well, by the mid 80's things were looking bleaker and bleaker. My guess is that from the perhaps 300-400 on staff in 1973 the 1988 number was closer to 50 or 60. Quite a drop from the best technology on the planet.
The new org building is in Roxbury, which is the Boston version of Harlem. The good news for the org is that it's in a growth area and the property could be worth a lot of money in maybe ten years. But I've seen the building and it looks decrepit to me. For now, the neighborhood is unsafe and anything but gentrified (unless you consider storefront churches and check cashing places and liquor stores gentrification) There's a methodone clinic one block away and a homeless shelter about 5 blocks away and I'm not sure who they are catering to in the new building. It's close to the highway, so that's a plus.
Welcome Myrklix! There's strength in numbers. Keep posting!