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A little eye fooling in Cambridge
By adamg on Tue, 08/29/2017 - 11:02pm
Nothing about the windows or the door on this building on Main Street at Portland Street is real.
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Comments
Its
It's been that way for years
But why?
This is prime real estate. Is it empty?
It is owned by MIT. They've
It is owned by MIT. They've been developing lots of other parcels they own nearby, so this presumably will eventually get done.
MIT
Land banking. That whole block is prime for some development
Google Map
Trompe-l'œil
There is a great example of this art in Beacon Hill, called the Scarlett O'Hara House.
http://www.unlimitedsir.com/blog/2016/11/28/scarle...
Thanks, Ludsan. That house is
Thanks, Ludsan. That house is at the end of Rollins Place, off Revere St. According to Walter Muir Whitehill, the "house" is maintained by the owners of the buildings along Rollins Place. This is a wonderful stop (on an otherwise not overly-distinguished portion of Revere St) -- it will take anyone unfamiliar with the place a few minutes to realize that the antebellum house that looks lovely, if a bit out of place, lacks a front door.
No front door
I noticed that! Specifically, I noticed that the linked article said something about neighbors caring for the planters in front and putting a wreath on the door in December, and I was puzzled because I didn't see any door.
Vilna Shul is behind it
Directly behind this house is the Vilna Shul synagogue on Phillips Street. There is a noticeable drop-off due to the hill, and if the faux house weren't there, you'd be looking at the upper floor or roof of the Shul.
Contrary to the linked article, it is not a trompe l'oeil painting, but a full three-dimensional wooden construction with "window" frames, columns, and all. But there's nothing behind the wooden wall other than the drop-off. It was built maybe 70 years before the Shul was.
1850s?
Did you mean 70 years before the Vilna Shul, or 70 years after? It seems hard to believe that it dates all the way back to the 1850s.
Obvious yuppie post ....this
Obvious yuppie post ....this building BEEN the same for years ...y'all discover 'rich cultural Spanish food at Izzy's' on the same day ....it's Puerto Rican, just an FYI..... SMH
This post offends you?
I took a picture of something I thought was cool; didn't say it was new or anything.
The sun has been rising and setting over Boston for all of recorded history, and yet I continue to post photos of sunrises and sunsets.Guess I'm just a yuppie gentrifier. SMDH.
1984 called. It wants the word "yuppie" back.
And congratulations on having discovered Izzy's way ahead of the rest of us. I didn't stumble across it until 1993. You must be one of those "foodies" I keep hearing about.
Actually born and raised with
Actually born and raised with Izzy's even before they were at Windsor and Harvard... Don't get your panties in a bunch people ... The word Yuppie will be around as long as Bostonian Massholes remain like me lingering around in the shadow of ugly condo buildings, cafes and culture-less taverns
Yes, I heard you: you were into Izzy's before
it was cool. You sound just like a newly-arrived Somerville hipster.
Some of us have lived here for 30 years, too, and don't go around airing our pretensions to greater authenticity than more recent residents, or sneering at people who weren't born within the city limits.
Many aspects of gentrification can be terrible, but that great anti-gentrification hobbyhorse, shitty Old Man Bars closing, isn't necessarily one of them.
Since you like to dig up superannuated slang, why not trot out "Barny" once in a while, too?
There's dives and then there's dives
Great article on old man bars. Dives can be pretty comfortable places to hang out, but the Boston area never seemed to have much in the middle ground. Any dive that had been there a while usually didn't have much to say for itself. I went to Paddy's on Walden in Cambridge when I lived in the neighborhood. As I sat there with my beer, a guy at the end of the bar stared at me sneering and kept repeating, "Yuppie, yuppie, yuppiee," (seemingly a favorite insult in the area) over and over. I had a second beer to see how long it would last. It lasted two beers. I thanked him for his nice song and went on my way. Maybe I'm comparing them too much to the workingmen's taverns my dad brought me to as a kid in my hometown. Too much nostalgia can be bad.
I used to like Bukowski but then saw their exclusionary door policy in action. Pretty shallow to bar people based on not looking scruffy enough. (I made the cut.)
And to your comment on the B Side, which I miss, It reminds me of ordering a Manhattan in an "upscale" Newton restaurant and specifying rye. The waiter brought me my drink saying the bartender made it with Canadian whiskey because rye doesn't work too well in Manhattans. Oh well.
On canvas, not a mural
This is decidedly odd, because it's not a mural on a blank wall, but a painting on a canvas tarp that covers the facade (including real windows and a door.) Note the grommets all around the edges, and the wrinkles in the lower left corner.
Using the time-hop feature on Google Maps Streetview, you can see that it went up some time between September 2013 and July 2014. The building was apparently the original home of the Squirrel Nut Company, from 1903 to 1915, when they moved to the better-known building at 12 Boardman Street. This building also later belonged to the Olmsted-Flint Corporation - I'm sure some of us remember the
belt and pulleys on the front of the building. As of 2004 the property belonged to MIT.
Buggy-whip industry?
I was very fond of the Olmstead-Flint display, with its endlessly turning belt.
Think about East Cambridge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Think about the number of machine shops and small manufacturing facilities. Think about the number of machines, each with a leather belt connected to an overhead shaft, with one big motor turning that shaft and powering the entire shop. Multiply that by the number of manufacturing facilities across the US. There must have been an enormous business in leather industrial belts. .... and then, along come small, powerful, relatively cheap electric motors, and the leather belt industry is history.
http://www.core77.com/posts/58982/How-Did-Factorie...
Replicates...
Interesting that this canvas replicates the original brick facade underneath it, down to the asymmetric placement of windows and odd-sized doorways. I had passed by here several times in the last few years and didn't realize it was a canvas, since it looks just like it always had been (minus the belt and pulley display).
Yes, I'm old enough to remember the belt and pulley sign.
On a related note, the cast iron building at 120 Fulton Street in the North End was originally built in the 1860s for the McLauthlin (or McLaughlin?) Elevator Company. All sorts of machines on the upper floors -- lathes, drill presses, and the like -- were powered by belts and pulleys from a steam engine in the basement. Later they converted to electric power, instead of steam, but used one (or several) large electric motor(s) and kept the individual machines powered by pulleys. To turn a single machine off, you would slip its belt onto an idler wheel.
The elevator company moved to East Cambridge in the 1970s (and then went out of business a few years later); but the belt and pulley system, and some of the machinery, was still intact in the old building as late as 1982, before the building was converted to condos.
If you want to see a belt and pulley system still in operation
visit the Old Schwamb Mill in Arlington Heights.
Part of the charm of that area
It's been that way for a number of years. It's just one of those things. It's part of the sort of deserted charm of that area. That stretch of Main Street reminds me of the days of yore of the 70s and 80s when Kendall Square and surrounding areas really were deserted.
It also makes me think of that company that put up fake displays in windows of vacant storefronts in DTX and Faneuil Hall for a while to make them look more hospitable.
Last time I was in Central Square, Lynn
about half the buildings had fake painted facades on them, including the former McDonalds (historical note - first restaurant in the chain that was closed (in 1981) because it financially failed.)
Charming?
This building isn't charming, it's annoying. Where is the charm in deserted city blocks? There is so much unfulfilled potential with this site. I'd rather see a real building being useful, than a fake façade.