In 2002 Red Sox owner John W. Henry invited A’s General Manager Billy Beane to lunch and made him an offer that he couldn’t refuse, but did. As as preamble Henry led Beane through the august stands at Fenway Park, a scene that’s recreated gorgeously in the movie Moneyball. We see the men strolling through the empty stadium in the rain under a big umbrella, like young lovers in Paris. (In the movie Beane is played by Brad Pitt and is, unbelievably, single.) Beane turns down the Red Sox and their 12.5M offer, but remains appropriately enchanted. He says, “It’s impossible not to feel romantic about baseball.”
Well it’s impossible not to feel romantic about Fenway Park. The little wood seats, the great green fence, and the lopsided, low-lying field shape what might be the most singular sports venue in the country. If the old Yankee Stadium felt like it was raised in the sky, and the old Shea Stadium felt like it had been dropped in a parking lot, then Fenway Park feels like it’s embedded in the earth, as if it’s geological. A great deal of its charm comes from the outrageous and also, somehow, gentle irregularities of the field, especially the way Landsdowne Street tears through the stands and clips left field. The resulting asymmetries leave spectators feeling as if they’re steeped in the realities of history and the city rather than detached, omniscient spectators, as they do at some of the new stadiums. Fenway, instead, makes a peculiar picturesque.
There’s no time when music meant as much to me as it did when I was in architecture school in Cambridge. The endless stream of pop music pumped through my Walkman was as essential as oxygen. Boston was a good music town. There were small clubs, student radio stations, and stores selling secondhand records and tapes. The Pixies and Tracy Chapman had made it big. The day I packed up and left Cambridge, that is, the day my adulthood began, was the day Kurt Cobain died. The boy behind the counter at the copy shop who was helping me with my resume that afternoon looked a lot like him, with the same stringy blond hair, clear blue eyes, and ghostly pallor. Each time I spoke to him he fixed me with his stare and nodded slowly, as if to say “Yes, of course, but what’s it all for?”
Sometimes on weekends I walked all the way down Massachusetts Avenue to the Tower Records on Newbury Street in Boston to hunt for music. The store filled the first two floors of an old warehouse building that had been converted to luxury condos by Frank Gehry, who added penthouses and canopies with signature flaring outriggers. The building always seemed a bit overdressed for the surroundings, as if it had been flown in from SoHo. As a high-minded student of architecture, I dismissed its deliriously over-scaled decorations – its hat and skirt – as empty gestures. But seeing the building again last week, on a grey afternoon, it struck me as a perfect urban folly. It still feels a bit too flashy for the surroundings, and the record store has been replaced by a discount appliance store. But its kooky, soaring profile brightens the city, and brightens the day.
What’s going on? Our train stations look like shopping malls, and our art museums look like office lobbies. The new glassy wing for American art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, by the great English architect Norman Foster, which opened last year, is rendered in the kind of blandly handsome corporate architecture that’s become de rigeur for museums who want to tart themselves up a bit without committing to something as big, as bold, and as costly, as the Guggenheim Bilboa. The addition, which consolidates the MFA’s considerable holdings of North American art, contains four stacked galleries connected with an open stair. The stair hovers over an entrance hall that’s about the size and height of the main hall at Grand Central Station. However banal the character of the architecture (and it’s banal), in the hall the MFA possess a space of considerable grandeur that’s flooded with natural light… and they’ve put a cafe in it. Why don’t they use it as sculpture garden? Or a theater? Or just leave it empty?
A friend who lives in the city says that she liked the old MFA better, where she had to wander through a mess of old, small galleries to find particular artworks. After I’d gotten my fill of the American wing, with its astounding John Singleton Copley and John Singer Sargent collections, I wandered through the old wings stuffed with Greco-Roman, Asian, African and Oceanic art. These parts of the museum, with their humming fluorescent lights, groaning mechanical fans, and stodgy, linen-lined showcases, had a warmth entirely lacking in the new wing, whose architecture is glossy, flawless, and inert.
What’s the difference between a townhouse and a row house, and does it really matter? Both types of homes are fitted between high side walls and offer slender, discrete facades to the street. But “townhouse” conjures images of well-heeled urban living, with all the attendant pretensions, while “row house” implies something altogether less formal and prepossessing.
A visited a friend who lives in a three-story brick row house near Frederick Douglass Square in Boston, and now I’m convinced that it’s the best kind of house. A row house balances the privacy and freedom of a detached house with the security of an apartment. It grants an inveterate urbanite his own street entrance, rooftop and yard, while keeping him connected to neighbors and the city. And the spread of space inside, a straight shot through from sidewalk to back yard, offers both compressed urban energy and a sense of suburban ease.