I got a kick out of the Boston 2017 feature in The Sunday Globe Magazine. I particularly liked the part where Porter Square is envisioned as some kind of cutting edge 007-style crossroads where romance mingles with danger in an intoxicating mist of international intrigue.



Curiously, the only totally mod, cutting-edge facility in Porter Square The Globe could come up with, aside from the T (har har), was Shaw's Supermarket.

The way The Globe presented Porter Square, you almost ached for them. Poor sods.

But the way they presented the T was truly heartrending. The only way we're getting an "Urban Ring, a necklace of public transit around Greater Boston" is alien intervention. Like that obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Otherwise, not happening, people. Like Capuano said in the article—not in this lifetime, anyway.
We'll be recolonizing Mars by the time Boston gets an urban ring.

Unless we figure out time travel and come back from the future and kick our asses into gear. But then I think that would be considered alien intervention, because my theory is that the so-called aliens are just future beings who've traveled back to warn us that if we don't straighten up we're going to turn into fat, pasty little bug-eyed freaks whose favorite pastime is playing with anal probes.

In the case of Boston, they might visit us to investigate why the T sucks so bad in 3017. And when Dan Grabauskas starts babbling about having been abducted and anal-probed you'll know I'm right.

But most poignant of all is Menino's giant green penis:


When will Boston get that not only is it not New York, London, or Tokyo, but that it's OK to not be New York, London, or Tokyo? It's OK. really. Cambridge can be quaint, quirky and crunchy. Boston can be baked beans and cream pies. Quack quack! It's all good!

I love these architect's renderings of buildings still in the planning phases, by the way. This one's promising all sorts of features and amenities, my favorite of which is the smoker's roof deck. This is Boston, people. The building practically sits on the harbor. A roof deck seventy stories up sounds like a thrill-ride to me.

But what do I know?

The artist's before/after versions of the view from Winthrop Square are pretty convincing:

Before: Lifeless, desolate square, with a few scrawny post-apocalyptic twigs hanging on for dear life, and only a couple of menacing forms, probably level three sex offenders, peopling it.

After: A veritable Eden! A bustling urban garden, bursting with green! Young professionals clad in vibrant colors sprint purposefully across a reinvigorated square! A Corporate Paradise on Earth!

Although one of the buildings that figures prominently in the before rendering made my Top Ten Architectural Abominations List last year and I'll not shed a tear when the wrecking ball's unleashed on it, I do happen to like Winthrop Square, even the little parking garage there:


And I am not a car park apologist. Not in the least. This one's special.

But the real gem in the neighborhood is 75-101 Federal Street. I wonder how construction of the Jolly Green Penis will affect it?

Gotta love those artist's renderings, anyway. They put things in a certain light. There was another graphic in The Globe of the Waterfront that I found very telling, too:


What happened to that great view from the ICA of Anthony's? I guess Anthony's will be a helipad by 2017.

I looked at the rest of the graphic to see if there were only proposed or planned buildings represented, but it seemed like all the other existing structures—I mean, aside from Anthony's, of course—were right where they should be.

The very existence of Anthony's seems to be the fly in the ointment for visionaries of The New Boston, including those at The Globe, who have represented the restaurant here as a stain at the end of Pier Four.

I think it's likely much more of Old Boston will persist than The Globe predicts, certainly more than The New Bostonians would prefer. But then the future is always less futuristic than we think it'll be, and not quite as posh as some of us would like.