Concerning old archBOSTON posts...

[briv]

As I said before, I do have several old database back-ups of the old archBOSTON board. But, because several very important sections were missing, they were pretty much useless and could not be restored.

What is included in these databases, however, are all the posts from the old board in the form of a very, very long raw text file. They're organized chronologically and have no user, or date attributes (these were among the sections that were missing unfortunately). Theoretically, if I had enough time and everyone that was registered on the old forum re-registered here, it is likely that the old forum could be virtually restored. This will never happen though. There were over 16,000 posts on the old forum and the amount of work required would be staggering. However, if there were any really great posts that someone could remember, and they can also remember some specifics, there is a chance I can find that post and re-post it on the new forum.

A good example would be the old Architect of the Month posts. I was recently able to find Joe Schmoe's complete original post for his Gridley Fox Bryant thread submitted last Oct.

So, if anyone wants an old post re-submitted, and can provide me with some key specifics, just let me know.

 

[ablarc]

I've always regretted the loss of my Washington Street El post; can't even remember the title anymore, but it had illustrations by John Sloan and other members of the Ashcan School. Can you find it and re-post it, briv?

 

[briv]

Is this the one?

So there was an elevated Orange Line down Washington St., right?

Yeah, was there ever.

But you had to be a connoisseur of grit to appreciate it. To my warped mind Washington Street was one of Boston?s crowning glories. It was the umbilicus, the pathway of life, the milky way.

It was undeniably Boston\'s main street.

To my fevered and impressionable consciousness it was Urban Boston?s finest hour. It trumped North End and completely blew away the stuffy decorum of Beacon Hill. But you had to tolerate a certain amount of litter?

Like Ashcan painter John Sloan, you had to enjoy the \"drab, shabby, happy, sad and human.\" Life beneath the El was all of these.

Sloan documented New York?s version, but Boston?s was pretty much the same:

On Washington Street, however, the faces were mostly black.

Glorious Washington Street! Northern terminus of Boston Post Road, which --before the Interstates and stretching back to Colonial times-- was Boston?s lifeline to New York. Also known as Route 1 (Route ONE, if you please: what else could you possibly call it?!). An enthralled traveler-?nose pressed to the window glass-- could watch parade past on this grand trunk highway a near-endless cavalcade of variety and sameness.

There were chrome diners and animated neon signs, buildings shaped like milk bottles, well tended lawns with blackface jockeys and ?Tourist Home? signs, plaster effigies of giants, bad hamburgers palmed off by moms and pops who knew they?d never see your face again and didn?t care; there were chocolate chiffon pies, a googol of telephone poles, used car lots, and small towns fast expiring of parkinglotitis.

Served up by Roadside America and Smalltown America, there were two hundred or so miles of mostly sleaze and raunch of the kind now nostalgically theme-parked as ?Route 66.\" But the best parts were at the two ends, where you got the City editions. Roxbury was the natural terminus of all this, and it lived up to its role. The other end, in the south, was the Bronx, where a similar and possibly even more animated Elevated scene waited to greet the weary (and wary) traveler -?but then, everything is bigger in New York.

Main Street of America, that?s what you were traveling, and on the whole it was pretty ugly.

When you got to Boston, the folks in Roxbury played an unofficial role as Greeters to Metropolis; they put on a show. And though the highway engineers and the Chamber of Commerce tried hard to shift you to JamaicaWay (they even named it Route 1!), plenty of folks came in the direct way, the short way on the map, the sleazy way, the Big City way.

Never before saw so many black folks outside New Orleans. And they were all out on the street!

On Washington Street, however, the faces were mostly black.

They were shopping for groceries and fedoras and nylons, they were having their shoes shined, they were buying numbers, they were preaching doom, they were parading their booties and the kids were cutting up. Some of the men bopped buoyantly down the street making remarks, others sat in chairs on the sidewalk, and every few blocks brought a dude playing the sax for a dime. It all reached crescendo at Dudley, which was flaneur heaven.

The streetwall on Washington was continuous in those days, but the sense of closure was much more than you can imagine, for there was also a wall against the sky; Washington Street had a roof! A twisting tube complete on all four sides, driving it was like a trip through the small intestine, while riding the El was like veering above the clouds in a plane.

The El hogged all the sunshine, while below in Hades, teeming humanity writhed in the broken shadows of a film-noir world. In the days before universal air conditioning, that was exactly the way you wanted it.

If you liked urban life to come with a side order of grit, nothing else in Boston measured up.

Gritty it was, but also vibrant, vigorous, active, animated, dynamic, electrifying, energetic, spirited, virile, vital, vivacious and vivid.

On Washington Street, however, the faces were mostly black.

It was also pulsating, resonant, zestful, gaudy, even lurid, jazzy and (yes) gay. And it throbbed. Even in the rain.

Then descended the aesthetes. They thought (correctly) that the El was ugly, and what the po? folks down on Washington Street needed was a little beauty to lift their spirits. They ignored that spirits down there were actually pretty high already --just unaccompanied by lucre-- and positively stratospheric compared to say, dour Back Bay.

And oddly the good folks in Roxbury heartily agreed: don?t see elevated trains in Suburbia.

So they tore down the El to beautify Roxbury, and because the El was its aorta, Washington Street promptly died.

* * *

In the South End it was a different story. It was run down alright, and the rumbling El emphasized the area?s dishevelment, but Washington Street in the South End was already somnolent as a Hopper painting of a Sunday.

And anyway these were mostly white folks; more of them seeped in all the time to ogle the architecture and homestead their way into what they opportunistically recognized as a cut-rate Back Bay.

Besides, the South End was close to Downtown and its (then) numerous department stores, and the Tremont Street Car Line provided quick and easy access to Park Street via a slyly-concealed little subway portal. These folks not only didn?t need the El; they needed it gone.

They didn?t want the \"drab, shabby, happy, sad and human\" life that Sloan found under the El --and I, as a young kid.

\"Forget about art!\" Robert Henri told his classes, \"and paint pictures of what interests you in life.\" His best students, like Sloan, did not forget about art, but they did portray life with a new boldness and vision. For their subject matter they took to the streets.


Can I interest you in a latte?

On Washington Street, however, the faces were mostly black.ostly black.

 

[ablarc]

Wow, thanks!! How did you do that so fast?

Comes with peculiar typos, though...

 

[briv]

I still have an incomplete database of the old phpbb board. All the posts are there, but the user info and some other key tables are missing. If I know exactly what to look for, it isn't too hard to find specific posts.

I still think I can approximately restore that old database, though. I just have to figure out a couple of things first and get a little time to do it. When I do, I'll add it to the board as an archive or something. There were some great posts that were lost and it would be great to get them back, for posterity's sake.

 

[JohnAKeith]

ablarc, pardon me for the confusion, but the prose is yours, about Boston, or is it about New York City, edited to fit Boston? The drawings are NYC, yes?

 

[ablarc]

^ The artists, as always, lived and painted in New York; try finding paintings (or even photographs) of life beneath Boston's El.

The memories of Boston are mine. The paintings near-perfectly convey the contents of the memories.



(And the typos, I guess, are the result of the surgery required to extract the post from whatever stew of computer symbols it has languished in.)

 

[briv]

After almost 3 years, I am proud to announce that I have (mostly) restored the old crashed board!!!

I plan on some day integrating it back into the current board, but for now I have put it up online in a separate directory for anyone interested to browse.

Unfortunately, the search function still doesn't work, and I still have to figure out many usernames, but all of the forums, topics, and posts have been totally restored and are readable. Also, the board has been locked for posting and logins are effectively disabled.

Here it is:

http://archboston.org/archive/index.php

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

Everything goes back to March 2005, was that when you started the board? I don't even remember that.

Also I think I like the old logo better.

 

[statler]

That's awesome. Great work, briv!

 

[Beton Brut]

Brilliant!

 

[statler]

^^Beton, were you not a member of the old board or are you a user_xx?

 

[statler]

I was just going through some old threads. The old Photo of the Day, Boston Style is a treasure.

Remember Bowwest?:

 

[vanshnookenraggen]

I do. Heard he moved to NYC but he seemed to fall off the face of the earth.

 

[statler]

After some people bitched about him posting NYC pics in the Boston photo thread his last post on this board was:

Would everyone rather I not post an occasional NY picture in this thread? Made more sense to me than creating a new thread but if you rather I not post, thats fine.

Our loss.

 

[Beton Brut]

^^Beton, were you not a member of the old board or are you a user_xx?

After some exhaustive research, I believe I'm user_34.

At lease it isn't Client 9.

 

[briv]

I matched your ID, Brut.

Originally all users were called user_X. The old names were left where others quoted them within posts though. I manually went through some of the longer threads and matched the quoted name to their posts.

The join date of all members was set to the time of the very first post made on the board. If and when I reincorporate it into the current site, I'll set the join dates to the time of each member's first respective post.

If anyone else can match themselves to an unnamed user_X, let me know so I can fix it.

 

[Beton Brut]

^ Right on -- thanks!

Lot's of good stuff in there...You could get lost...

 

[statler]

Wow, that sounds like a lot of work briv.

It is a fantastic resource to have though. Thanks!

 

[blade_bltz]

Just looked through Kz's wonderful Brookline photo thread from May 2006. It's the phototour I always intend to do whenever I go home...