I had an appointment in town today so I brought my camera along thinking I might have a chance to shoot a little Boston
on the way home. My Boston friends got the benefit of this when I was in London, so perhaps my London friends can get
the benefit of this now that I'm in Boston.
I was lucky to be going to South Station. My wife dropped me off at the Alewife T Station during the school run and it's
a straight shot, no line changes into South Station. I love this part of town for a bunch of reasons, at least one of which
I'll get to later in this post. But for a photographer, there are lots of old brick warehouses and bridges and canals and
stuff and it's generally quaint. A bit cold today, but quaint.
So today, I chose to walk across the Fort Point Channel from South Station, into South
Boston and along
the
Harborwalk for a short while. If you do this and you walk back along the side of the channel, you get this view of the Boston skyline:
There are a few interesting things in this picture. The first two buildings on the water from the left are both part
of the United States Postal Service Annex in South Boston. Those white blocks in front are all 18-wheel USPS trucks.
The second interesting thing is the white building with a black square in the top in the center of the frame. This is
the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Rumor has it that the
Big Dig excavation of the central artery (right next to the Fed building) caused the building to lean to within an inch of being
shut down. Who knows, it's probably apocryphal.
Anyway, there is something even more interesting here, but it's not in this picture. It's just to the left of the USPS
Annex and it is this:
This charming structure is known as 'Vent Building 5' and serves to illustrate a dirty little
secret of The Big Dig. The underground traffic needs infrastructure: venting, power, etc. So there are these massive vent buildings
associated with the Big Dig scattered across Boston. During the first, oh, I don't know, decade or so of Big Dig crap (remember,
this began in the 80s with the ground breaking in '91) the focus was all on bridge and tunnel routing, for lack of a better
term and the root of most controversy as I recall was the Charles River crossing. Nobody anticipated being stuck with the
crappy vent buildings in their neighborhood, though.
OK, so the last interesting thing about this is not in either picture, and in fact, is not even there anymore. Some of
you may know where I'm going with this. You see, years ago, behind me in a parking lot here, stood a great music club - The
Channel. I don't know what all the proper historians will say, but having been to many wild shows there, I think it deserves
a prominent place in Boston music history.
