Ornoth

So the DuBarry mural has finally come down.

The mural was one of the most famous and popular fixtures of Newbury Street, Boston’s trendy shopping district. It featured a trompe d’oeil facade of a Parisien cafe, filled with dozens of prominent Bostonians. Every day, dozens of tourists would stop and photograph it. The Boston Duck Tours’ ensured their route went by it, and they called it out as they passed. Large buses disgorged Japanese tourists, who staggered obliviously into the working parking lot to admire the sight.

It was erected in 1991 on a wall overlooking a parking lot on the corner of Newbury and Dartmouth Streets. That wall used to divide the building with the DuBarry French restaurant from a second building, now demolished and turned into a parking lot.

My apartment looks out over that parking lot, and the mural formed part of the skyline outside my living room. When I moved into my condo back in 2001, the DuBarry building was vacant and dilapidated, but in 2004 it was bought by local restaurant magnate Charles Sarkis, who had plans to renovate it and open (surprise) yet another new eatery.

In the meantime, the mural was falling apart. I wrote about it last year in this journal entry. The weather brought large chunks of it down, and what the elements didn’t remove, vandals worked on. And the question was raised: whose responsibility is that thing, and does anyone care if it rots?

Kevin Fitzgerald, the wealthy owner of the parking lot, and Sarkis, the wealthy restaurateur, spent years arguing publicly about who owned the party wall, with neither willing to adopt the orphaned artwork. Threats were made to tear it down. Counter-threats were made to restore or replace it. Meanwhile, the mural continued to disintegrate.

Eventually, everyone agreed: there was nothing to it but to tear the fucker down. Despite its popularity, it became such an eyesore that even the arch-conservative Back Bay Architectural Commission and the self-important Back Bay Neighborhood Association both backed its immediate destruction.

And so it goes. For the past few months, men on a portable scaffold have erased all evidence of the mural’s existence, then cleaned and re-pointed the original brick wall. My apartment, and Boston’s fashionable Back Bay, are so easily rendered more mundane, less unique, and less delightful by another victory by two exemplars of narrow selfishness and crass greed.

And all I can think of is the image of two stuffy old Dickensian businessmen scolding a child and taking away her toys as being too frivolous and lacking sufficient import.

Yesterday, modpixie posted to the b0st0n community a list of Boston sights and sounds that no longer exist. It sparked enough nostalgia that I thought it might be interesting to set down a list of the things I’ve seen here that are, sadly, either endangered, going, or gone.

There are two lists. The first column enumerates those elements of Boston that are already historical data. The second column is a list of things which are currently in the process of failing. Most of those are still here—at least nominally—but I think they are endangered species that could disappear tomorrow.

More recent updates can be seen at this post from 2009 and this one from 2013.