Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology
From: kibo@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry)
Subject: Re: Boston singled out as "well planned" by Austrian
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John Burrage (burrage@iinet.net.munge.au) wrote:
>
> I meant to send this in ages ago, but anyway, the president of the
> Queensland chapter of the Royal Austrian Institute of Architects was
> being interviewed on Radio National a couple of months ago. He was
> talking about city planning, and then he singled out Boston as an
> example of a city with really good design; especially good around the
> harbour. I thought "Bloody hell! That's where Kibo lives! And I
> thought the entire city had been demolished to make way for a big
> tunnel, or something!"
> 
> So, can this be true?? Is Boston a shining example of sound planning?

FNO!  <-- (pronounced "EFF NO!")

Ben Franklin used to complain that the city was laid out by the cows,
although I think it was actually laid out by people walking around
massive piles of cow flop.

The downtown area doesn't have a single right angle in it.  Get a piece
of safety glass and whack it with a ball-peen hammer.  Then study all
the little irregular trapezoids that are jammed together.  Congratulations!
You've just made a map of downtown!  Now thread a major highway through
it, being sure to make lots of extra zigzags, and add some places where
it narrows to one and a half lanes.  And it's the only way to get from
one side of the glass to the other.  Not to mention the rail lines go to
either North Station or South Station because they can't figure out how
to build a railroad track between two places two miles apart because cows
can fit through places trains can't.

And then there's the Back Bay, which is a nice regular grid, except
that it's built on landfill where squishy water used to be, said squishy
water now being a few inches under the nice firm soil on which the
incredibly heavy buildings are standing.  (Some of them are almost straight.
Incidentally, the new Subway around the corner from me is in the first
floor of a four-story apartment building which is tilted two degrees
to the left.)

Also, all the streets have the same six names over and over.  Especially
the ones which intersect themselves.

So anyway, the traffic pattern downtown is messy and congested and
irregular and confusing and just plain rotten, but because downtown
is jammed into this little peninsula they're having to bulldoze all
of it so that they can rebuild it properly (it's like when you have
to mess up the well-organized half of your Rubik's Cube to be able
to solve the rest of it, except that no part of Boston is well-organized)
because the only conceivable purpose of all these twisty little
streets is to confound invading armies, as if anyone would ever
want to invade a city shaped like a negative image of cow flop.

As far as the harbor goes, there's a pyramid standing in the middle
of it, with giant link sausages floating around it.  Plus some jellyfish
slowly dissolving in the oil spill.

The best architectural detail in Boston is all the perpetually-flaming
gas street lamps on Beacon Hill, which are just there so that the whole
neighborhood will catch fire simultaneously when the settling of the
Back Bay triggers an earthquake.

                                            -- K.

                                               I like the city, but I don't
                                               see why Australian architects
                                               would, unless Australian
                                               architects are bigger bozos
                                               than REGULAR architects!