whighlander
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Re: The Boston Arch (Aquarium parking garage)
Tim -- the numbers are made-up -- but the metric is real and it is highly non-linear
Look at any number of "Cultural Elite Events" formerly known colloquially as Brahmin photo ops -- the list above is the pecking order [given a few ambiguities where the person's interest in say a hospital might supercede the adjacent museum ranking]
The top of the list is unassailable -- check out how many galleries and curatorships are named at the MFA*1 and how many chairs are "endowed in perpetuity" at the BSO
Younger and less Brahminish [some might even be more moneyed] types have to be satisfied with lower level associations
Any dissent would mostly involve:
The temptation to derail with arguments to that math is extreme...but are those numbers just made up or is there some metric to your argument that we might look at in a separate thread?
Tim -- the numbers are made-up -- but the metric is real and it is highly non-linear
Look at any number of "Cultural Elite Events" formerly known colloquially as Brahmin photo ops -- the list above is the pecking order [given a few ambiguities where the person's interest in say a hospital might supercede the adjacent museum ranking]
The top of the list is unassailable -- check out how many galleries and curatorships are named at the MFA*1 and how many chairs are "endowed in perpetuity" at the BSO
Younger and less Brahminish [some might even be more moneyed] types have to be satisfied with lower level associations
Any dissent would mostly involve:
- the impact and cache provided by personal connections of founding and / or long-serving directors and such -- e.g. the small band that played for Isabella and her invited guests Jan 1, 1903, the evening that she opened Fenway Court to the world was her friend Col. Higginson's BSO.
- long-standing family relationships versus the nouveau-riche and out-of-towners -- e.g. Isabella's father was from NYC and so she was never fully accepted in the land of the Lodges, Cabot's, [e.g. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge] etc. However, she did use a Sears [uber brahmin family] to design Fenway Court ironically on a site just down the street from where Guy Lowell would soon design the MFA
As a result of the above kind of machinations some of the specific order can be somewhat ambiguous and may even evolve over time
*1 while the MFA's founders were all Brahmins of some rank or others with equal standing
Founders:- Martin Brimmer as in the street
- Charles C. Perkins as in the school for the Blind
- Charles W. Eliot as in Harvard
- William Endicott Jr.
- Samuel Eliot
- Francis E. Parker
- Henry P. Kidder
- William B. Rogers as in MIT
- George B. Emerson
- Otis Norcross
- John T. Bradlee
- Benjamin S. Rotch
a whole lot of the galleries are named after people who wouldn't have been invited to the party in 1870, 1876, 1909 or even 1920