I Have Scaled These City Walls

[ornoth]

I’ve written before about my condo in Boston’s Back Bay.

In addition to being strategically located, my building has a lot of history. Former luxury hotel where the visiting team for the first ever World Series stayed. First commercial building in Boston to have electric lights (installed by Edison himself just three years after he invented the light bulb).

And on the Commonwealth Avenue mall there’s a memorial to the nine firefighters who died in the 1972 fire and partial building collapse that remains the worst firefighting tragedy in Boston history.

I’ve seen a few photos from the fire. There’s one of people combing through the wreckage looking for survivors after the southeast corner of the building came down. There’s another showing the ladder truck that was buried under a two-story high pile of rubble in the alley out back.

I’ve always been curious about the actual damage done to the building and how much of it collapsed. After all, my unit is on that very southeast corner, on that very second floor, overlooking that very alley. But I’ve never found a photo that showed that very clearly… until now.

The photo accompanying this article was taken ten days after the fire, and for the first time, the fire damage and collapsed area are clearly shown.

Seeing this photo for the first time, I’m awestruck. Click on it and open it up in full resolution while I tell you what you’re looking at.

The building faces to the right, onto Commonwealth Ave. On the left, the back of the building features rows of bay windows overlooking the alley, then a parking lot, and (off camera to the left) Newbury Street.

Zoom into the pile of debris where the southeast corner of the building used to be. On the second floor, you will see a white internal wall with three dark vertical lines. See it? Right behind that wall is my main bedroom.

If you follow the second floor, you’ll see two narrow windows flush to the exterior brickwork, which are my two bedrooms, and then the bulge of my living room’s bay window, complete with the streetlight that remains there to this day. The area to the right of that white bedroom wall is probably my closet and the hallway that runs the length of my unit, and then the common area hallway.

On one hand, it’s nice that my unit wasn’t part of the collapse. On the other hand, you couldn’t possibly get any closer, and it’s a bit eerie knowing that a quarter inch of drywall is all that separates your bed from the place where nine men were crushed to death on the eve of Fathers’ Day.

Although this photo is over forty years old, it’s also disturbing how little the building has changed. Sure, they repaired the stubby central spire and replaced the collapsed section with a horrible slab of modernist concrete. But other than that, this could almost pass for a photo taken recently; it’s scary how familiar it looks.

Sure gives one pause to think.