"Dirty Old Boston"

Arenacale said:
I was young enough during that time to not have the worst of the old days register, but old enough to see the positivity in the new stuff [...] but that feeling of "the possibilities are endless" is something I miss that will never come back.
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Yeah, this feeling is more about aging than any place-specific characteristics. The world always feels exciting and full of possibility when one is young, then people get increasingly jaded and pessimistic (and nostalgic) as they age. Pretty much everyone points to the decade of their formative years as the "good old days," no matter what decade they grew up in.
 
Here's a painting (artist unknown) of Causeway Street in front of Boston "Gaahden" in the old days:

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Back with the 1990s Prudential Shops hook. Here's an interesting mural that was placed over a mall section that was presumably under construction (the proto-Huntington Arcade, maybe)? This photo's from 1995.

http://www.joshuawiner.com/detail-prudential.php

Here's a link to more photos and closeups of the murals.
 
vanshnookenraggen said:
#thingsthatdontbelongincities
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That's my instinct when it comes to car dealerships, too. But I recently stumbled upon this picture of a Boston Oldsmobile dealership in 1911. As this shows, almost any type of building can be designed with good urbanity.

665_1911-10-28-coba.jpg


This building is still standing today and looks almost entirely unchanged. Anyone want to take a guess as to where it is?
 
BronsonShore said:
That's my instinct when it comes to car dealerships, too. But I recently stumbled upon this picture of a Boston Oldsmobile dealership in 1911. As this shows, almost any type of building can be designed with good urbanity.

665_1911-10-28-coba.jpg


This building is still standing today and looks almost entirely unchanged. Anyone want to take a guess as to where it is?
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Room & Board at Mass Ave/Newbury. One of the best done restorations/re-uses in recent memory.
 
Why can't the already ancient building at center in DTX 1906 get in our hall of fame?
 
Man, I only have a few vague memories of the Central Artery as a kid, mostly from Aquarium trips. What an awful thing it was.
 
George_Apley said:
Man, I only have a few vague memories of the Central Artery as a kid, mostly from Aquarium trips. What an awful thing it was.
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I remember my very first trip to Boston...1st-grade class going to the Aquarium. The biggest city I'd ever seen at that point in my life was Hartford...and at that age Hartford seemed pretty frickin' immense when you were barreling through the Aetna Viaduct on I-84. So I was already stoked for epic sights. I remember our Dattco coach bus making the turn off the Pike onto 93N, and seeing those ugly-ass green guardrails of the Artery rising to the side as we slowly crawled our way on. My face was glued to the window in awe.

"Wow! It's so big and shitty!"


Like...seriously...84 thru Hartford was a frickin' Jetsons Shit marvel compared to the toilet-on-stilts the Artery was. It blew my tiny little mind that Great Big Cities of the imagination could ever put up with such awful infrastructure. And that was 1986...nevermind after it had aged another 15 years.
 
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