It’s no big surprise that Bromfield Street, a 500-foot long retail strip in Boston’s Downtown Crossing, has lost its informal designation as the city’s “Hobby Street.”  Once it was chock full of shops catering to camera buffs, coin and stamp collectors, baseball card traders and those folks enthusiastic about fountain pens and wrist watches.

Only a couple of those businesses remain and Bromfield is now known for its vacant storefronts. It’s sad, but I know that things change. But what passes for a hobby nowadays? Holding up phones at a concert and blocking the views of others? Cutting off normal cars in traffic in an SUV the size of an armored personnel carrier? Depleting a family’s lifetime savings via online sports gambling?

Oops, sorry. I don’t know how that soapbox got here. Anyway, we do live in a more impulsive age, where the patience required for stamp collecting or model building is at a premium. And when your pocket-size smartphone can take great photos and texting and email are the main form of written communication, there’s little need for once-esteemed shops like Bromfield Camera or the Bromfield Pen Shop (though the latter made it thru the Covid lockdown and only shuttered in early 2024).

Maybe all hope is not lost. Despite gentrification, New York still maintains a Diamond District, Flower District, Meatpacking District, even a Fur District. Industry-specific zones are a key element to a vigorous city life, despite their diminishment. With the transfer of so much retail to online behemoths like Amazon, places like Bromfield Street need a revisioning. People still need a “third place” beyond work and home. Already, a couple of art-related storefronts have opened on Bromfield and on adjacent Province Street, a few popular places of the eating/drinking variety are adding life to an area that hasn’t totally recovered from the pandemic.

Best of all for this aging “city rat” is Versus, a retro arcade/bar of the type that have been popping up over and over recently. As a lifelong pinball aficionado this has been a later-life boon for someone like me who remembers the large and lively “Amusement Center” that provided many skill-and scheme lunch breaks for us younger office workers back in the day. I’m glad my Gen Z successors are filling those shoes. Now only if someone could resurrect The Littlest Bar, whose shell still sits on Province, even though an obnoxious condo tower sits right on top of it now. I remember going with friends for a pint there after a memorable Pogues concert at the Orpheum Theater, which had a back alley exit that led to Bromfield. Sitting there with the other punters with the place packed to the gills (i.e. about twenty people) is one of those experiences that make the urban experience uniquely special.

Cities never stand still and aren’t meant to. Hopefully, some things that have earned the right to last will last, even if the old Hobby Street is not among them.