Recent content by Spatch

Re: Driven By Customer 'Service' Parte Dos This is what is known as a Damn Dirty Shame. (Coming from the man who sometimes watches The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 just to look at the nerve center Walter Matthau's character works in)

It's pretty bleak inside, natch. The "Hippodrome" (formerly the Paramount) used to be a gorgeous theater, but rock shows and a conversion into a dance club (and a church at one point in the past 20 years) pretty much ruined it. Springfield's seen much, much better days. There's some parts of...

I noticed all the new signage, system maps and whatnot around South Station heralding the Super Duper Brand New Silver Line this week. I'm glad that at least they got rid of that horrid black-and-white split logo that was unreadable at a glance, but at this point all the signage reminds me of...

Yeah. When Charles Laquidara (and Duane Glasscock) got phoned in Upton, Mass. by management, it pretty much marked the end of BCN As It Was (And Always Should Be.)

Re: Suffolk Dorms / Modern Theatre Mixed emotions here. Seeing the beams approximating the slope of the seating, with some auditorium accents above, was very sad. But the whole building was in an unsavable state, wasn't it? So it goes. The sight of the completely gutted auditorium above the...

Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011 That glass-enclosed (nearly enclosed, at least) Lechmere platform will be hell on a hot sunny day. I hope Northpoint likes what they're getting.

I used to commute in and out of Wellington in 2004-2005 and remember that system quite well. Each car was cable driven and the trip gave you a great view of the Wellington yards. The two cars used to run simultaneously, one at each end to minimize your wait, but by the end of my job only one...

Who has any love for the Hotel Commonwealth? (And was that a rhetorical question?)

I'm going to sidestep the piles of 19-year-old undergrads just this once because I realized I never knew why the original HoB closed in Harvard Square. Why did it? I have fond memories of certain dotcom companies in the late 90s holding excellent private functions upstairs.

That one goes to eleven!

Re: Fogg Art Museum at Harvard Well, it's nice that they're saving the original Fogg building and the courtyard, but Otto Hall is a brilliant place for the German expressionist and Bauhaus stuff. I'll miss it. I guess I'll have to withhold judgement on Piano's plans until I see something that...

Re: NorthPoint Cambridge I guess if you don't want to live in the suburbs but miss the charm of soulless office park buildings, Northpoint is the place for you. Man. I don't know whether I should be scared of the people who'd look at that and go "That's where I want to live!" or if I should...

Back in the 90s when I was going to school at UMass Amherst, the town floated a proposal that would have prohibited freshman students from driving a car. This was obstensibly proposed in an attempt to alleviate traffic problems in the amazingly congested Route 9 corridor between Northampton and...

I can't think of the last time I heard it had opened, and I know I would've been down there with a camera if I had. It does have clearance with the Moakley bridge so close, right?

Yeah. The Congress Street drawbridge had its counterweights removed last year, which was fascinating to watch; the Northern Ave bridge hasn't swiveled in many a moon, and I don't know when the Summer Street bridge was affixed, but there we go. And the Seaport Boulevard bridge was dropped in...