Sunday, November 6, 2011

Battery empty

i have to be very quick since the battery of my laptop is empty. the charger is in the apartment, but i am in the common room/clubhouse with free internet.... :( yup, still no internet and it is really, really frustrating... :(((((((
above an advertisement you see here very often for the dutch beer heineken. you also see it often on  (free) magazines..... someone once told me that for americans this is rather fancy beer, and something special. but i dont know if i should really believe that! anyways, i dont understand it; drops in holland? how do they become pints here in the usa??
this building is a mystery to me as well. its right behind the TD garden. just this one house. it always has a huge advertisement on it (or i guess 2, 1 on either side), but i dont think someone lives there. were there more houses before? what are they going to do with it?
ok, battery really empty...

3 comments:

biebkriebels said...

I don't understand, either, drops means "druppels" and "drankje" in dutch? So I don't get the point.

Bostonian said...

Hi, I just stumbled onto your blog! This photo depicts the famous/infamous "Last Tenement," one of the few remaining buildings of Boston's West End neighborhood. After WWII, cities across the US and Europe tried to "modernize" via what was called Urban Renewal, which often meant leveling older neighborhoods perceived as dirty and backwards and replacing them with Le Corbusier/Walter Gropius-inspired Modernist buildings and "towers in the park"-style residences spread far apart from one another and surrounded by grass lawns and parking lots.

The destruction of the West End, one of Boston's oldest neighborhoods, was an egregious example of Urban Renewal in Boston -- in fact, many of the buildings in nearby Government Center (where Scollay Square was destroyed to make way for the awfulness there now) were designed by Gropius himself. Pretty much everything in this centuries-old neighborhood was destroyed in the 1950s and '60s to make way for the Corbusier-style "towers in the park" of Charles River Park and other developments nearby.

The Last Tenement was left standing in the West End for reasons that I do not fully understand, and it has since been protected to remain as a testament to the community that the bureaucrats, self-styled philosopher-architects and city planners decided to demolish 50+ years ago.

Hope that helps!

Some additional info if you're interested:

-Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_End,_Boston

-Breathtaking photo narrative of the West End by a local architect and professor: http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?10814-Medieval-Boston-(photos-and-commentary)

-West End Museum (has a photos page of what the West End used to look like): http://thewestendmuseum.org/

-Last Tenement exhibition at the West End Museum (there was also an accompanying book written that can be bought on Amazon): http://thewestendmuseum.org/last_tenement.html

-A site that speculates about why The Last Tenement may have been spared: http://iwalkedaudiotours.com/2011/04/iwalked-boston’s-last-tenement/

CaT said...

thanks! that sure is interesting... !!
i also dont like government center and that awful city hall... perhaps i should show its ugliness here once, but so far i have never felt the urge to photograph it! :)