Hats off to the Hurley brothers and Improv Boston for a job well done.

Then there was The Real World: Boston, where a charming firehouse was renovated to house seven self-important, immature  strangers.  This was one cool renovation:

Another famous firehouse is Fire Station Number 4, by Robert Venturi in modern mecca Columbus Indiana:

Last week’s  featured a firehouse renovation in Rhode Island, which is what made me start to think of all the firehouses I love:

Note the hole where the pole was (I cannot imagine ever getting rid of the pole, but I suppose it is quite a danger to have a big hole in the floor):

This is the before/after bathroom shot.  I rather prefer the before, though they did save a lot of the features from the original room:

I must say, my VERY FAVORITE firehouse renovation was featured in O At Home magazine this month.  It is John Dickinson’s renovated firehouse in San Francisco.  This is how it appeared in 1981:

My personal favorite is the firehouse that lodges the Rescue Me crew.  To give to the Denis Leary  Firefighters Foundation, click here.

Ghostbusters Firehouse picture from here.

Real World: Boston firehouse from realworldhouses.com /Bunim-Murray Productions

Fire Station Number 4: from greatbuildingsonline, photo by Don DiBernardo

NYTimes photos by Francis Dzikowski. Click on photos to link to article.

John Dickinson photo from 1981, as seen in O At Home magazine.

Back to the point:  This cinematic view of Boston in Gone Baby Gone was so familiar. It’s been done to death lately – the parts around Boston where everything is gray, from the shingles on the houses to the sky to the skin color of the tired and jaded characters. Whether it be Southie, Chelsea, Charlestown or Dorchester, movies like Mystic River (to be fair, this is also a Dennis Lehane adaptation), The Departed, Good Will Hunting and now Gone Baby Gone all seem to spotlight the same exact view of the city. Were they all filmed on this street we see to the left?  I call it “Code of Silence Avenue.”  We never see nor hear about the yuppie takeover of Southie or the mega-expensive Shipyard of Charlestown. Even Dorchester has experienced gentrification in the past decade. Instead we see the same old Irish  dive bars full of depressing characters (some get the accent right, some completely butcher it into some pseudo-JFK accent mixed with a New York accent), asbestos-shingled three family houses and Code of Silence Avenue  in all of these films. The only other views we ever see of the near-Boston area are across the river in Cambridge, when painfully lame movies like Soul Man or With Honors pretend to film at Harvard. Last I heard, the Harvard campus does not allow filming, so the only authentic view we ever see is of it the usual aerial one before they zoom in on Elle Woods sitting under a tree next to a fake dorm that is not in Harvard Yard.

Here’s the requisite depressing as hell brown and yuck Boston movie apartment.  Have you really ever seen two such heroic, young and good-looking people living with cabinets and wallpaper like that?  I don’t think so:

I’m rambling. My question is, when was the last time we saw picturesque Boston Proper in cinema?  I can’t think of the last time I saw The South End, The North End, the Financial District, Back Bay, Rowe’s Wharf, Comm. Ave., et. al. in a movie. Can anyone remember a film that highlights the rest of Boston and not the surrounding depressing areas? Cambridge doesn’t count, that’s its own city. Please leave your answers in the comments and let me know!

Remember when I told you about Rebar’s PARK(ing) Day last year?  This year, it has continued to spread nationwide here in the states and even oversees (the above photo is from London in 2006). PARK(ing) day will take place on on September 21st.

This just in from The AIA New York Chapter – The prose is a bit archi-speaky (what else is new), but you’ll get the gist. It sounds pretty interesting and looks like it counts toward continuing education points.
A Lecture Tonight at 5:30:

Changing Places: Redefining the House as Machine for Living In, with Kent Larson

Monday, 03/05/2007, 5:30–8:00pm (RSVP)
Kent Larson, Architect and Director of MIT’s House _n Research Consortium, will present a new “open source” model for residential design, fabrication, and technology integration where: (1) Buildings are disentangled layers of integrated assemblies, (2) Manufacturers agree on interface standards and become tier-one suppliers of customized components, (3) Builders become assemblers, (4) Architects create design-engines to create thousands of unique environments (playing a role on more than a tiny percentage of new housing), and (5) Customers (home-buyers) become “innovators” at the center of the process by using sophisticated design interfaces and receiving personalized information at the point of decision. He will also discuss a series of prototype homes his research group is building, and a unique living laboratory called the PlaceLab.
Speaker: Kent Larson, in addition to his academic and research roles at MIT, practiced architecture for 15 years in New York City in partnership with Peter L. Gluck, and more recently as Kent Larson, Architects P.C., with work published in Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Global Architecture, the New York Times, A+U, and Architectural Digest. His book, Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks, was selected as one of the ‘Ten Best Books in Architecture, 2000,’ by the New York Times Review of Books. Related work was selected by Time magazine as a “Best Design of the Year” project.
Organized by: AIA NY Housing Committee and AIA NY Technology Committee
Sponsored by: ABC Imaging
Location: Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place (Directions)
Price: free
CES LUs: 2, CES HSW: 2
More Info: Reception, 5:30
Program, PROMPTLY at 6:00

photo from greatbuidings.com