Bubbles over Kenmore Square

My friend Lacy tossing bubbles to the wind over the crowd gathered to watch the marathon, circa 1992-ish.

Happy Patriot's Day Boston!

(Don't forget it's a holiday, trash/recycling pick up is a day delayed, we forget every year...)

Rise Stevens Robert Merrill Roberta Peters 1952 Boston Music Company

These documents and photos are from my Great Aunt Katherine McIntyre's collection from her time spent working as a secretary for The Boston Music Company. I found these photos a bit out of order and it was hard to determine who the obvious persons of intrest were with only a couple of photos that were blank on the back to work with. Another relative recently passed on some photos and other items of family intrest that contained a file folder with labeled photos and other infor enclosed that solved the mystery of just who these people who appeared to making some sort of celebrated personal appearence were. As an amusing footnote, during my career with Borders Books, I have emassed a small collection of my own photos, and other assorted ephermera (A They Might Be Giants signed album being amongst my favorite things...) from store events at the location in Braintree where I now work, I wonder what will become of my personal collection 50 years from now, who knows? I just know that I feel a little more connected to my Great Aunt knowing that she may have typed her summary of store events on paper and may have sent my own to my bosses by email but essentially? We have done the same exact thing in our own time, in persuit of our own career ambitions. The photo below is of Mr. Merrill, Miss Peters (Mrs. Merrill in her personal life) and Miss Stevens. The man behind them is unknown to me but the woman in the back is my Great Aunt Katherine McIntyre. The men in the are unknown to me but I can assume they must me Boston Music Company executives with Katherine McIntyre beside them admiring the window display. Miss Peters, Mr. Merrill and Miss Stevens on Boylston Street outside the store: A batch of newspaper clippings about the event from The Boston Herald, The Boston Post and underneath those, a clipping from The Boston Globe: I really want to find out more about this restaurant next door to The BMC, how long was it there for? Does the facade of the building still look the same? What is the story behind that? More newspaper clippings advertising the event, I wish we could have gotten this kind of publicity for our events in Braintree but then, we never hosted Opera stars....

Magnavox Display Boston Music Company

I posted a couple of other shots from this series a bunch of posts ago but recently was given this one by my aunt, I like how the crowd has changed a little from the other shots but still stand relatively transfixed by what appears to me as a pretty bland and boring window display.

The back of this photo is marked "Television display at Boston Music Company, 122 Boylston Street Boston, probably Magnavox 1947-48-49???"

So what the crowd is looking at is most likely the Magnavox display from a few posts back but those Magnavox items shown in that picture do not appear to be televisions to me...

Hmmm...

Here are copies of the pictures from the older post:

Just goes to show you, you never know what's going to capture the imagination of passers by...

Blinstrub's Village

The woman at the end of the table closest to the waitress is my Great Aunt Catherine McIntyre, in searching for more information about this picture I found this really great informative web site:

http://blinstrubas.com/blinstrubsclub/blinstrubs.htm



This South Boston nightclub had a major fire in the late 60's and I find it fascinating that although the Cocoanut Grove fire is so well known, I never even heard of this one before dropping in on this web site by chance.

You never know where hidden history is going to be found, perhaps even in a dusty box of forgotten family photos...

Union Station / North Station

This is a modern (sort of) postcard produced by Dover publications in 1977. It's from a set titled Thirty-Two Picture Postcards of Old Boston. I found this one in a dusty box of about a million postcards from all over the world buried in the back of a New Bedford (MA) antiques mall.

I was thrown a little bit by the description on the back of the card that labeled it "Union Station in the 1890's (courtesy of The Boston Public Library)". Something about it looked a lot like North Station to me.

This link gives more detail about why I was both right and wrong at the same time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Union_Station_(Boston,_Massachusetts)


It is indeed a building that was on the land where the current North Station stands but apparently it was demolished to make way for the Boston Garden which in turn was demolished to make way for the "Whatever" Center (currently Fleet Bank)that stands there now.

My Father lived in Andover for decades and I took trains out of North Station pretty frequently to go visit him, in high school I went to concerts at the old Boston Garden and worked stuffing envelopes for The Yankee Group just a block away. In my 20's I drank at both The Penalty Box and The Harp, even tho I haven't really been in that area with any frequency in quite a while (A Springsteen show at the "Whatever" Center a couple of years ago might have been the last time...) but even so many years later, something about this image clicked "North Station" in my head.

A fun find that definately makes me want to go back to North Station and look around, maybe even look up, something I can't recall ever doing when there in the past...

An early spring stroll down the Arborway...

Not quite Lilac Sunday yet but circumstance had me looking for a parking sot at the Faulkner Hospital a couple of days ago and with both garages full to the brim, I parked over on the Arborway and walked back. No harm done as even if the flowers aren't yet in bloom, there was plenty of neat things to look at along the way.... I really liked this tree with the branches growing strait up from the big sideways branch: Kinda perplexed by the war memorial that leaves enough room for many more wars to come, that doesn't seem very hopeful... The Poor Clare Nuns have an annual summertime yard sale style fund raiser that is always full of great stuff from surrounding attics and garages great and small, they also have a November fund raiser that is exclusively religious themed ceramics and such. If you are looking for a Christmas gift for Grandma, this is the place to go. This monestary was originally built in 1934 but it seems to have gone through quite a few renovations since then, I think that would be a neat kind of thing to look up and learn more about. For being so poor, the nuns really know how to keep house, the building looks great but the very lovely (and expensive to live in) condos further up the hill look far older than this building. I didn't take pictures of the condos as they are behind fences and people live there and such so it seemed kind of rude to walk up thier driveway and start taking pictures of thier house. Tho, the nuns live here and are intenesely private themselves, they don't have a big tall fence around thier home so I can only figure they are ok with a few snapshots from passerby. Blogging photo ethics, looks like that's something else I'm gonig to have to look up when I find the time...