Saturday in the Park in a Snowless Winter

Often by Christmas or New Year, here in New England, we would have snow on the ground, or at least frozen ponds.  However, this Christmas was relatively warm, having followed weeks of warm yet cloudless days. No snow or frozen ponds. Finally, on Christmas afternoon, the sun came out.  We took a brisk walk by Pleasure Bay.   

Today, though Saturday, I was heading to my office.  If I get off the train at Charles Street, I have the opportunity to pass through the park on my way.   In the morning sun, the Public Garden proved quite photogenic, even with bare trees, no snow, and an unfrozen lagoon.

That is perhaps the most wonderful aspect of this park - that it remains beautiful in any season!  Here are some photos of a Saturday in the Park, on a snowless winter's day.

Entering the park from Charles Street

The bare willows, weeping gracefully

Duck taking the ramp up to the island in the lagoon

Looking over the lagoon

The Budding Out

Boston's Public Garden

Spring is my favorite of the seasons.  We have the beauty of rebirth to ac-company the warmer days and the end of that season of frigidness and the all-too-many forms of frozen precipitation.

While many consider it a season, but for the observer of the signs in nature, spring consists of many subseasons.   One of the first subseasons is the "Almost Spring" with the first signs of crocuses blooming and  the sign of buds on the limbs of trees and bushes.

Forsythia flowers transition to
green buds.  The forest  prepares
for The Budding Out

Right now we're come to "The Budding Out."  This is a short 2 to 3-week subseason.  Yet it is the most transformative subseason of the entire Spring.  In these few weeks, bare limbs become enveloped in the new greens of spring. 

Once The Budding Out has transpired, we're just about ready for summer.  Lawns need mowing.  There is shade on those days when the temperature gets up there.  There is no question any more:  spring has come!

The wonderful colors of the budding out:  the delicate yellows and deep red buds.

Forsythia flowering amid the early buds, in a field of bare branches.  It is The Budding Out.

A Rising

In the city, they say the buildings rise to reach the sky.  The street-scape is crowded, and buildings touch each other.  The only way to stretch out is up.  And so, from time to time we witness a rising.  Looking east on Massachusetts Avenue, a rising is underway.  Reaching high for the sky, a tall crane lifts up the steel skeleton of this new tower.  Berklee College of Music is constructing "a mixed-use building that will include ... student housing" with "two-story community rooms, practice and ensemble rooms, and a small fitness center. It will also include a 400-seat dining hall and evening performance venue, ground floor retail space, and recording studios and other music technology spaces two levels below grade."

Certainly good for the college.  But its rising will interrup for many generations a view seldom seen of St. Cecilia Church, which was available for a few months  while construction was reaching down to set a firm foundation in the gravely glacial deposits that bordered Boston's Back Bay.  Unlike other nearby towers founded on piles into the muck of the Back Bay, this new tower sits firmly on dry land that's existed since the glacial recession, some 12,500 or more years ago.

Driving Massachusetts Avenue from Cambridge, Boston's two tallest towers rise high above the Back Bay.  The green bridge rail in the forground obscures the height of the typical Back Bay residences.  The contrast reveals what giants these two are, rising so high out of what was once the muck of the tidelands along the Charles River.

The Prudential Tower rises above the tree-lined Commonwealth Avenue.  In the forground, the shorter brick-clad buildings of Back Bay are in the shaddows, while the Pru stretches high and enjoys bathing in the sunshine of a fall afternoon.

The Hancock Tower rises to touch the sky as seen from Bay Village.  Immediately to its right, another rising as Liberty Mutual erects a tower that obstructs the view of the iconic original Hancock Tower, with its lighted beacon.

A View Seldom Seen

Cities like Boston have been around for centuries.  While the urban vistas evolve over time, with new buildings replacing the old.  But, all in all, the view corridors tend to stay the same over time.

But, once in a rare while, a new view corridor opens up, if only for a short while.

This view down St. Cecilia Street in the Back Bay section of Boston was only available for a few months early in 2012.  In the foreground, Berklee College of Music is constructing a new mixed use tower.  With the older buildings demolished and construction focused "in the hole" on the new foundations, there is no obstruction blocking this view from Massachusetts Avenue.  Months later, workers were erecting the steel frame of the new tower and the view was gone.

The tower on the right is St. Cecilia Church, one of the largest in the Back Bay.  St. Cecilia's is Catholic and, when built, it served the maids who worked for the wealthy Brahmans of Back Bay, who worshiped at churches prominently located on the main thoroughfares.  But for a few months, St. Cecilia's is in clear view of all traveling along Massachusetts Avenue, the arterial separating the Back Bay from the Fenway neighborhood.

Summer Strolls in Back Bay

Summer is my favorite time in Boston.  I take every chance to stroll around at lunch or after work.  Also, being a few blocks from my church, I've taken to walking over and playing the organ when no one's around.  It's a wonderful 15 to 20 minute stoll.

Here are three daytime photos plus one evening photo at the Christian Science Center.

The original John Hancock tower from the street next to the glass-clad newer Hancock tower.



Copley Fairmont Hotel on Dartmouth Street.



Trinity Church presides over Copley Square, while itself in the shaddow of office towers.

Curved building beautifully lit and reflected in the long pool at the Christian Science Center.

Views from a Platform

One of my favorite views of Boston, Cambridge, and the Charles River is partly of my own making. These are photos from the end of the platform at Charles Street on the Red Line, a rapid transit line in metropolitan Boston.

Back in the early 1980s, I was the project engineer for the project that extended the station platforms. The original station could only handle 4-car trains, and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) wanted to run 6-car trains. The solution was to extend the platforms to and onto the Longfellow Bridges, which carries traffic, pedestrians, bicyclists, and the Red Line over the Charles River to Cambridge.

At the time, the original concept was an open platform, with only a tall picket fence. At one point, some in the MBTA were favoring a canopy over the platform and a wall, but we did not accept that recommendation. The advantage: many wonderful views are available for those waiting for a train. Also, standing out on the end of the platform, it's almost like being in the Esplanade, the parklands along the Charles River.

A young woman waits for her train to Cambridge, late on a summer afternoon in Aug. 2008.  It's a Saturday and I'm headed to Kendall Square to see Woody Allan's Vicky Christina Barcelona.

Above:  The Hancock and Prudential, Boston's two tallest buildings, tower above the trees of the Esplanade.

Sailboats dot the Charles at dusk in August 2012

A blimp floats over the Charles towards Fenway Park, where the Red Sox will be playing on this August evening, 4 years after the picture of the young woman.

Urban Evening

It is evening when my workday is finally over and I can leave my environmentally controlled office (visually isolated from the world outside) and enter the urban environment of this great city where I am employed. Many days, I'm rushing home and take everything for granted. Other evenings, when I have some time, I stroll, taking in the scenes as though I was a tourist here for the first time.

Here are some evening photos. All but the park were taken just last Thursday.

Above left: The classic Boston Back Bay skyline reflecting into the Charles River, as seen from the Massachusetts Avenue (Harvard) Bridge. The tower on the left in the Hancock and on the right it's the Prudential (the results of a rivalry for tallest building in Boston between these two insurance companies in the 1960s). To the left of the Hancock tower is the old Hancock tower with its lit single spire.

Below: A view across the lagoon at the Public Garden as the shadows of evening fall.



Below: Up close, the Hancock tower's glass facade reflects its plaza and the buildings around it.

Below: A view down St. James Avenue, with the Hancock tower to the right.



Below: The evening setting sun backlights clouds over the Boston Public Library and the Old South Church.

One Building or Two

Driving around Boston recently, I saw this interest-ing view. Taken from Travelers Way in the South End, looking from Harrison Avenue towards Washington Street, one sees this slender tower in Back Bay.

On the top, the glass and steel Hancock Tower, at 60 stories, it is New England's tallest building. But, it looks as though the lower floors are of a different design consisting of a masonry facade.

But what is it? Well, it's a new building called "The Clarendon" located one block closer than the Hancock Tower. But from this angle, the width of the two buildings exactly line up, as though they were one building, the product of a somewhat scitsofrenic architect!