I live right off the Minuteman Trail—like, literally, a minute away, but had never been on it before today.

It's a really wonderful thing to have in the city, first of all. And the fact that you can bike from city to city on it with minimal contact with motor traffic is fantastic. I rode up to Arlington Heights today. Sublime.

On my way I spied these abandoned greenhouses from the trail:


They're at the corner of Whittemore Ave. and Magoun St. in North Cambridge, and I'm sure someone out there must know something about them, eh?

I have also never been to the end of the red line. I've seen the hideous Alewife Station from other angles, from a car, but had never seen this part of the complex:


A masterpiece of desolation, innit? It attains a kind of grace through purity of bleakness.

It reminds me here of some kind of ancient tomb the first riddle of which is to find a way in, or one of those buildings designed to last a thousand years with warnings to the future (all in stick-figure symbology, of course) not to disturb the earth beneath it, where radioactive waste is buried:


The signage on the lamp posts is in keeping with this theme, somehow. There are four signs (two on either side to maintain symmetry) with the number of the MBTA Police on them, and one directing you to the right (though you clearly can't go to the left) to Fresh Pond.

The juxtapositions of very simple shapes in the complex is sometimes too busy, usually in its more "public" faces, like this one:


...but at other times it achieves a frankness utterly free of affect:


But then there are interstices—secret spaces between juxtaposed shapes you would not see from anywhere in the structure, and which are not in plain view from the street, that seem utterly intentional when you do stumble upon them:


In themselves these structures are like big building blocks:


The playground here at the base of the exit ramp of the parking garage is probably the strangest, saddest, most incongruous touch of them all. Here's this post-apocalyptic concrete landscape—there's nothing around—and then, at the base of this concrete monolith is this weedy fenced-in parcel with its brightly-colored plastic jungle gyms, swings and slides.

You'd have to pity the children who played there.

And yet, there's something about it all. From the mute simplicity of the scattered forms, to the seriousness that symmetry confers (I'm thinking of the radioactive tomb here, of course), certain parts of the complex are like stumbling upon a Chichen Itza right here in your own backyard.

The rest of my ride was pretty uneventful, but nice. I'll be exploring more of the Minuteman Trail in coming weeks, I can tell you.