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You would think they would have done a slide show with this....
Boston Globe
Boston Globe
The ugly tour
By Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff | February 20, 2009
Ah, the snow is melting. The sun is out. I can feel another glorious New England spring approaching. And what better way to celebrate the anticipated influx of curious tourists than to offer my first annual ugly tour of Boston.
By ugly, I don't mean architecturally controversial. This isn't a debate about the merits of Josep Lluis Sert's work at Harvard or Frank Gehry's leaky Stata Center. Let's not pile onto City Hall, which just last year topped the list of the website VirtualTourist.com's list of the "World's Top 10 Ugliest Buildings and Monuments."
I want my ugly tour to establish new standards. To qualify, a place must be, as my 6-year-old describes it, marked by "trash, broken bricks, and graffiti all over." The fact that these spots have failed to be fixed by neighborhood do-gooders and the-powers-that-be only strengthens their spot on my list. Remember, we've seen how effective our fine city is when it comes to removing chairs from shoveled parking spaces. These ugly spots, though, somehow remain off the grid.
The tour doesn't stick to Boston proper, though plenty of ugly places exist there. (Will the old Filene's Basement ever be done or should we get used to boarded up construction sites in the heart of Downtown Crossing?) Tourists flock to the Lexington Green, site of that legendary battle of 1775. Hence, I started in a place born during the centennial, the former Faces nightclub on Route 2 as you approach Alewife in Cambridge.
It sits in an overgrown parking lot next to a hotel and bowling alley. Faces closed in 1990 yet the building remains. The authorities appear to have done little in 19 years to deal with the splintered wood, broken glass, and hanging electrical fixtures visible from the street. If only this had been the Tasty, that Harvard Square diner unceremoniously closed in 1997 to make way for a generic chain. They'd have knocked that down by lunchtime.
Ronald Martignetti, one of the Faces property's owners, answered when I called his law office in Woburn. He said that after years of delay, it appeared the site could be developed into housing later this year. "It drives me insane that my name is attached to that property," he said, declining to go into details about why he and his partners have not been able to deal with the eyesore. "I am at my wits' end with this thing."
Residential housing can be important architectural markers of a cosmopolitan city. Think of the Dakota on New York City's Upper West Side or the Greek revival houses in our own Louisburg Square. Or the two buildings leading up to the corner of Linden and Cambridge streets in Allston.
A bent, metal fence protects a small patch of dirt. Trash runs along the curb. Somebody spray-painted the phrase "Neo Nazi Era" on a door.
How dirty is this section of Linden? When I arrived there this week, I saw an Art Institute of Boston student photographing a pile of garbage on the sidewalk for a school project.
A tenant, Damon Davison, 24, chatted with me as he headed off to work. "I'm here by circumstances, not choice," he said, adding that he pays just $480 a month to live with four other people.
Turning right, I was quickly on Storrow Drive. Out there, I passed one of our ugly landmarks, the BU Bridge. Isn't it so nice how rowers spray-paint the names of their alma maters on the rusty metal? Wait. Isn't that graffiti? Maybe Detective Bill, the dude who busted artist Shepard Fairey on his way to an Institute of Contemporary Art party this month, can stake out Head of the Charles.
That brings me to Ferdinand's. The five-story, former furniture building is a towering, central presence in Dudley Square, smack on the corner of Warren and Washington streets in Roxbury. So when will somebody finally fix Ferdinand's? That's not clear. Mayor Thomas M. Menino launched a design competition for local architects - how quaint! - and the winner is going to be announced sometime in the spring, according to a Globe article. But who will pay to turn the 30,000 square-foot building into the planned municipal office space?
In the Globe article, city planner Kairos Shen said the city plans to raise $85 million to $100 million for the project. Good luck.
Why do I have a feeling that Ferdinand's, with its peeling paint, boarded-up windows and a banner that states "Phase 1 - Environmental Remediation + Site Preparation" won't be coming off the ugly list anytime soon?
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.