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His favorite building in all of Boston
By adamg on Sun, 01/28/2018 - 4:50pm
North Station, well before the war.
Jack Goldman explains why he loves North Station. Yes, North Station.
North Station postcard from the BPL collection. Used under this Creative Commons license.
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Comments
Nostalgia is one thing
Waiting for a train in a dark, colorless, usually too cold terminal with some very uncomfortable benches is another thing.
It *never* looked like this
At no time was there a huge open parking lot on the other side of Causeway Street. And there was always an elevated rail line (Green Line to Lechmere) obscuring part of the facade.
elevated rail line
I remember the elevated rail line had a trellis and flowers painted on it, for years at the end. Who was the artist?
And I remember going to the circus at the Garden in October. We called it "The Garden"
40 years ago and I still call it "The Garden" or "Boston Garden." The name should be
officially changed back to Boston Garden.
Naming rights
I have often thought that if a soulless behemoth with a meaningless name like TD North were to announce "we have obtained the naming rights to this facility. We are naming it Boson Garden," they would instantly establish a clearer, and more positive, corporate identity than the logo on the building has ever given them.
Personally, I'd prefer Photon
Personally, I'd prefer Photon Garden over Boson Garden.
I used
to watch games at Photon Garden, but they were too fast to follow.
Old Garden neighborhood/Madison Hotel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJYImWB2rNk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml8Vkr0ARu0
Originally the Hotel Manger
built and leased out to the Manger chain by the Boston & Maine. When the B&M took it over completely, it became The Madison. The Beatles stayed there when they played The Garden. And the so-called “Father of American Studies” Harvard’s F.O. Matthiessen, jumped out a window in the 50’s but not before carefully placing his Skull & Bones pin on the sill. Lingering depression over the loss of his lifelong partner, the painter Russell Cheney, and the mounting stress caused by the circling jackals of McCarthyism likely contributed to his decion to end his life at the age of 48. He was an outspoken progressive, styling himself a Christian Socialist- fascinating individual worth knowing more about.
Originally the Hotel Manger Ooops!
Sorry for the double post. Have no idea why that happened and just noticed, so substituted this apology,
The Hotel Madison was taller
That would be the building to the left of North Station in the picture. It was blown up in 1983.
The building to the right, 150 Causeway Street, was the headquarters of the Boston and Maine Railroad. I forget what year it was demolished.
150 Causeway Street
was one of the very few buildings demolished for the Big Dig, in the late 1990s. (Another was the old Registry of Motor Vehicles, behind the Garden.) For reasons I don't understand, it was by then called the "Analex Building".
Looks like the type of image
Looks like the type of image they'd have used on letterhead and railroad stock certificates.
Confusingly written
The writer says the original Boston Garden was demolished eight months before he was born and then goes on to talk about how he grew up there and how much he misses it. It eventually becomes apparent he is talking about the new Garden, but it's written in a confusing way. He also says it's increasingly hard to find an "actual" Boston accent. You have to go to the north and south suburbs for that, where the Boston accent migrated to. Lynnfield, Peabody and Saugus to the north, Braintree, Mansfield, Milton to the south.
For the record, I too miss the old Garden. I saw many great concerts there in the un-air conditioned 70s. It was a horrid old barn of a sweatbox with terrible acoustics, but it's just one of those urban places you miss.
yeah
I remember watching on TV (not there) a bruins playoff game when the rink was shrouded in fog.
For the record
I also miss the old Garden, from the old scoreboards to being right on top of the action. Been to FleetCenter for a couple C's/B's since 1996 and it's just a cookie cutter arena. I hate it.
Counted the rows once
The first row of the balcony was only ten loge rows back from the ice. Best seat hockey ever had.
Old Garden scoreboard
was, until last month, hanging over the food court of the Arsenal Mal in Watertownl. The second-floor food court closed at the end of 2017 and is now blocked off, so I can't tell if it's still there without trespassing. The mall management says it isn't staying, but won't tell me where it is going.
Not that confusing
He's expressing a love for the building that was called the Shawmut Center during its construction but was opened as the Fleet Center and is now known as the TD Garden. He notes how the oldtimers talk about the arena before and how sterile the current version is to them (see most of the comments here) but he still loves it.
I have to say that I haven't been on Causeway Street in probably 4 years, so I haven't seen the changes. Perhaps I will sneak the little one over for some MIAA action in March to see if the changes are as great as this guy says.
Fog game was also the power failure game, May 24, 1988
The most famous Bruins fog game (there may have been more than one fog game if I recall) was in the Stanley Cup finals on May 24, 1988. After the fog cleared, the power failed, plunging the Garden into darkness. The game was canceled and would have been played at the end of the series, if necessary. The series then returned to Edmonton for the next game where the Oilers completed the four game sweep.
Fog games, power failures, slippery parquet, no A/C, no elevator
The venue may have been beloved but it had *so many* problems. Some things are best left in the past.
yep
that's the one
I was at the game, a season
I was at the game, a season ticket holder in balcony 98. It's too bad, it was a great game up to that point, with the ESPN feed petering out during a replay of Edmonton's third goal, which tied the game at 3 late in the second. The Oilers were the ultimate juggernaut back then, so the series wasn't in doubt. The real heartbreaker came two years later in Game 1, a triple-OT loss that did feature a brief loss of one bank of lights. The old Garden had to go, especially after an electrician died in an accident there. Anyone else remember watching the implosion of the Madison Hotel on channel 7?
I was there for that one too.
There were a few fog games, some worse than others. It just happened whenever the Bruins played that late into the post-season, which wasn't that often. The black-out happened after the Bs were up 3-1 on the Oilers. They tied it up 3-3, and as they were lining up for the ensuing face-off every single light went out. Legend has it that a drunk maintenance guy did the deed. There were also games that had long delays because banks of mercury vapor lights winked out and took a long time to get back up to full brightness. I loved the old place, but it was time for it to go. When you can't use your own stadium and they move a home game to Edmonton it's time a new place.
I prefer the ORIGINAL North
I prefer the ORIGINAL North Station:
http://www.shorpy.com/node/6981
Grandeur
Buildings had such a grandeur to them back then.
Terribly written article
From one Jack to another, step away from the keyboard.
It’s lackluster, unoriginal, and more importantly it’s incorrect.
This is what a BC education gets you? Right from the start “21 years is a long time” compared to? the longevity of the old garden or the new one? If he claims it is a long time then why would he say the new one was opened eight months before he was born? The image for the article is incorrect. The green and the orange lines run through the station, not the red. The type face is wrong. The MBTA uses Helvetica bold and the following Pantone standardized colors, which took me all of 30 seconds to look up.
Red - 485C
Orange - 144C
Green - 348C
Blue - 293C
Silver - 429C
Bus - 429C
“A convenience store! In North Station!” A useless point that doesn’t strengthen or even make a point of someone who clearly never actually uses North Station beyond The Garden.
“there’s less swearing, more rich drinks, fewer racial slurs. I miss the old days”. I think this line is my biggest problem
with this article. Excuse me? Fewer racial slurs? That’s what you’re going with? Ok well that’s offensive, borderline racist and teetering on mansplaining what’s wrong with this modern Boston.
He admits in he beginning of the article to not actually being a Bostonian, then by the end he magically is an unbiased, enthusiastic one?
I could drag on but I really have an issue with this kids writing. It feels like one long, dragged out and beaten message to a tinder hookup who lives in a different city.
Lighten up
Lighten up Francis.
The kid isn't espousing racist comments, you selectively quoted him out of context. The sentence before mentions how things got better in that sense, and that is what most who read the article would come away with.
I may not agree with the assessment of the "new" new Garden either, but Millennials are allowed to be nostalgic in their time frame too.
Let the kid develop his writing skills; I have read far worse from seasoned Herald and Globe reporters.