Somewhere Near Boston

If buildings Could Talk

I write stories when I find them. Sometimes they are stories asking to be told. Sometimes they are stories they tell me. I was in Boston and Worchester Massachusetts recently. They told me a story about people, so I'm going to pass it on. It is a story of assumptions, change, arrogance and wealth. It was told by the buildings there. The buildings spoke of a time when people though the world would never change. They told of faith and of different people in the cities. They told of power and wealth and arrogance. They told of change and failure to change. They tell of forces that shaped the people that built the city. The story is for those that don't know it because they have never been there and for those that naturally take the city for granted and so don't see the story it tells. I found the story fascinating. ... I hope I can make this interesting. I'm not cheating. You never know what it will be like until it ends.

Let me tell you a little about Boston. I had never seen it before, though I have seen New York, Baltimore and Washington DC. Boston is an old city by American standards that was started in Colonial times. When it was started is irrelevant, because it has continued to grow since then. It is on built on the large Massachusetts Bay and the Charles River runs through the city. In its early histoy, the bay did much to feed the city of Boston. The bay helped provide the wealth that came from trade. The inland rivers supported the development of mills and manufacturing. The city grew by filling the bay.

So that's where it came from? What did I see that told me such a story? It's not that deep...

I saw amazing wealth. A lot of the architecture showed that and the weather. Buildings, especially the older ones were built tough. They were meant to last. These folks were building for centuries and spare no expense. I'm not knocking that. I expect more societies to develop that kind of wealth based on automation and other forms of wealth I expect to see become more common in the future. Still, the permanence of the buildings was a great contrast to what I am familiar with from the West Coast. It aged well, but I don't think it was very adaptive.

I'll just put pictures and a few comments to show what I was seeing.