Boston may fancy itself the country’s oldest city, but its earliest inhabitants would not recognize it today. Few cities have changed more in their history. Hills have been leveled, swamps and oceanfront have been filled, residential and commercial buildings have been built, demolished, built anew and so on. We may pride ourselves on our history, but our true virtue is our dynamism.

Change has been a constant. At its best, those changes build upon Boston’s strengths, respecting the geography, architecture, neighborhoods and business that are there but also extending beyond them, reaching for something more.

1997 will see much debate about two major changes. One is a proposed hotel and entertainment complex over the Mass Pike adjacent to the Fenway and Back Bay. The second is a stadium for the Patriots, a currently popular football team now stranded in Foxboro.

When Millennium Partners suggested to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority that it was interested in conducting a feasibility development for a $300 million project over the Massachusetts Turnpike, the story made the front page of the Boston Globe. If Millennium does in fact decide to go forward with a development, it will be the Turnpike Authority itself who will be the proponent of the deal. The Authority will have a strong vested interest in seeing a large deal done, because the revenues it collects will almost certainly be related to the project’s size. Someone will have to be watching over the Authority as it proceeds forward.

Resident groups have met with the Turnpike Authority and generally expressed support for the notion of developing the air rights over the Pike. It has been hard to react to the Millennium Partners proposal, because there are few specifics. Instead, the community groups have proposed that the Authority initiate a planning process similar to the PruPAC, the large community and business advisory group that successfully worked with the Prudential Center on its redevelopment plans.

Back Bay and Fenway’s reaction to the Turnpike project differs markedly from the initial response to Robert Kraft’s proposed stadium in South Boston. There, political leaders jumped out in front with a strong and unequivocal “no.” They refused to discuss compromising on the matter and for some time resisted allowing other residents in South Boston to meet with the Patriots.

Yet as details of the proposed stadium emerge, it does not seem to be the kind of project that could never be tolerated. The stadium, expected to hold 70,000 people, would be used eight times a year. For residents of Fenway and Back Bay, who endure 80 plus baseball games a summer with 34,000 people a game, along with a host of marches, walks, marathons, concerts and First Nights that shut down the area on numerous days all year, this does not seem an unmanageable burden. Located away from residential areas, the stadium would be a source of jobs and money for a community that needs both.

Change may be tough, but it happens. An axiomatic rejection of any new proposal is foolish, for residents and for the city. The right response seems to be the response by Fenway and Back Bay to the Turnpike proposal: look at it seriously and work with it to try to make it into something that complements the communities in which it will lie. It may very well be that, after discussion and debate, neither the Pike proposal nor the stadium proposal pan out. But they are both worth listening to.