Monday, November 29, 2004
Monday, November 29, 2004
The storm that blew through yesterday and last night has stripped all but the most stubborn foliage and even the red maples have given up at last. At Framingham Station mere clumps of oak leaves linger among bare birch and sugar maples. A visage of impending winter doom surrounds the train.
Heading farther east I notice a three-and-half-day-past-full moon hanging 15 degrees above the northwest horizon clipping across distant smoke stacks and winking through the limbs of naked trees. The air is clear, and I can easily distinguish dark mare from older and brighter regolith. For me the moon is yet another sign of winter. Only this time of year in New England does the moon set this far north this time of day.
And for a moment I contemplate another bit of lunar trivia.
To the eyes of the ancients, the maria of the moon – seas in Latin – once appeared as great rippling bodies of open water, while the lighter-shaded highlands seemed more like dry land. We see what we want to see, I suppose – although they weren’t entirely wrong. The maria for a time were oceans, but not of water – rather of giant lava flows filling deep basins blasted out billions of years ago during the age of relentless asteroid bombardments. After yet more untold eons the time of the great lunar lava flows ebbed and cooled into dark basaltic rock – the same sort of rock crushed and laid into the roadbed beneath this very train and throughout the railroads of North America.
At Wellesley Square it is still Monday morning after a short Thanksgiving break. And even with the brightly lit sky and warm surrounding air I’m none too excited about the renewed routine aboard an eastbound train and soon thereafter on foot above the Fort Point Channel into South Boston. But it does allow time to think and to write.
When I write about the train stations of the Boston and Worcester Line I most often envision their most obvious feature – a quarter-mile long platform with continuous two-foot wide safety lines obvious enough to appear in images made from orbit. These lines are constructed from two by four foot inlaid yellow fiberglass sheets set end to end. With half-inch bumps on a one-inch grid – they are also dimpled for better foot traction, I suppose – though likely as much a hazard to those in men’s dress shoes and women’s high-heals. Stenciled alongside, similarly yellow block-lettered text warns passengers to “Stand Back” – though the flaming two-foot wide line pretty much renders this text irrelevant except to those at the MBTA’s legal department.
Yet there are unique features to stations as well. At Wellesley Farms, for example, I pass an original brownstone stationhouse with its over-sized roof forming a solid umbrella-like awning to protect and overshadowed the old sidewalks surrounding the building. Perhaps this was once a place to buy tickets or even grab a bite to eat. But now it feels entirely retired and unused, though well maintained on the outside as though a sacred burial crypt.
Other stationhouses dot the line, some closely associated with the current train station platforms, and some not. At Framingham there is a much larger crypt, and until the mid-1980s it too stood mostly abandoned except for pigeons wintering in it’s attic. A certain Mr. Horton spent a million dollars renovating the building for his dream restaurant – not a small portion of the cost involving the removal of bird droppings in some places piling more than three feet thick – a notion most appetizing.
Horton’s was a highbrow place located in a lowbrow part of town and it finally succumbed in the late 1980s. Then along came Ebenezer’s, more of a bar and grill sort of joint piling continuous references to Scrooge alongside the food – perhaps an indirect counterpoint the previous incarnation of the building with its absurd ostentation. Eb’s lasted through most of the Clinton administration, perhaps killed off as the ‘dot-com’ internet bubble blew out or perhaps when 9/11 fears blew in to consume any desire for public pleasures ostentatious or otherwise. Whatever the reason, the latest place is a vegetarian Indian restaurant that might seem fairly tempting if I were a vegetarian.
Until the new Framingham station was finished just two years ago, the awnings of that old stationhouse restaurant acted as a refuge for waiting passengers. Now the new station sits a quarter mile to the west taking the familiar modern form of those long yellow-lined platforms with warning text and a galvanized steel wide open skeleton complete with crossing tower standing over the rails and concrete wheelchair ramps. Only a glass-encased elevator breaks the motif.
In multicolored brownstone and slate roof matching the old Framingham stationhouse stands the original Route 126 railroad-crossing gatehouse – now enclosing a Fleet Bank cash machine. This is probably the most elegant freestanding ATM branch in Massachusetts.
At about the same time as Horton’s restaurant, the old Ashland stationhouse was renovated and put back into service as well. I have vague memories of Siegfried, our first cat – hauling him there to what was then a veterinarian’s office. After the vets moved their animal hospital farther to the east, the building was converted to the office of a general practitioner for human health. The last time I noticed he’s still there, but I haven’t been inside to see how the stationhouse converted to an animal hospital has now been converted to a doctor’s office.
The MBTA originally tried to locate their new Ashland station nearby, but downtown businesses put up a stink about commuters eating up limited parking. Finally after a tense standoff the transportation authority offered to build the station a mile to the west along Pleasant Street behind Burham’s restaurant. To be of any use to half the town this required a special access road routed through woodlands from the south. Yet this now threatened to reroute traffic (and potential customers) through what would then become a handy shortcut between Route 135 and Pleasant Street – bypassing the downtown business district altogether. So other than a pedestrian crossover there is no connecting bridge across rails at the station to complete the shortcut.
Approaching South Station the air is still clear overhead, though the moon has by now drifted into the muck soon to set in a few minutes behind the foundations of giant buildings. Idled cranes slumber above unfinished Big Dig construction sites. Cars, busses, trucks, and trolleys patrol the concrete, asphalt, and steel-supported roads.
Monday has arrived, and now the work continues.
