Ornoth

Every so often, curiosity impels me to check out my former homes on Google Streetview, to see how much they’ve changed over time. Usually it’s nothing dramatic, but today’s exception left me stunned, shocked, and incredibly grateful.

Back in 2001, I bought my first – and to date only – property, a condo unit on the second floor of the historic former Hotel Vendome, located in Boston’s trendy Back Bay.

By far its most dramatic feature – and the reason I selected it after viewing seventy others – was a sweeping view of the neighborhood. The living room’s south-facing bay windows not only offered tons of delightful sunshine, but overlooked an empty lot that had served as a parking lot since 1958. It was the only unit I’d seen that had such a wide-open vista.

That panorama included many of Boston’s notable buildings: the Hancock tower, the Prudential tower, the New Old South Church with its distinctive Italianate campanile, 500 Boylston, 222 Berkeley, the Boston Art Club and the 1884 headquarters of the Massachusetts Bicycle Club (both now part of the Snowden School). I could watch shoppers walking along trendy Newbury Street, catch glimpses of Boston Marathon participants as they finished in Copley Square, or admire the colorful DuBarry trompe d’oeil mural that decorated the exterior of one of the buildings facing the parking lot.

It was truly a fabulous view, and I enjoyed it virtually every single day for the fifteen years that I lived there. Here’s what it looked like around the time I moved in (as always, click through for a larger version):

Of course, there were also days when it looked a little more like this:

It was no secret to me how great a blessing it was that no one had built anything on that lot. In fact, it was kind of a mystery why it never happened. Although I never heard rumor of any plans, it was something I always feared. But nothing ever materialized, and I moved out and sold the unit in February 2016.

So you can imagine my shock when I happened to check my old place out on StreetView. Here’s the closest equivalent to what you would see out my bay windows as of September 2022:

Yeah. Wow.

The lot was purchased in 2019 by L3 Capital in Chicago, who filed a project review in 2020 with the Boston Planning and Development Agency for a five-story, 43,000 square foot building containing retail and office space. A building permit was issued a year later, and construction appears to have moved along rapidly.

So that accounts for my “stunned and shocked” reaction.

As for “gratitude”, that comes from having enjoyed that unsurpassed view for fifteen wonderful years, and for the blind luck of having sold when I did, just four years before this development project came to light, on land that had been a parking lot for the previous sixty years!

My Back Bay condo was a truly amazing place to live, and that panoramic view was a huge, irreplaceable part of it. But that treasured view is one that I truly can never again experience.

I’m not a packrat, but I have an eye for memorabilia, socking away strange little keepsakes that would otherwise land in a dumpster. Examples include circuit boards from the PDP-11 system I managed in college, and the brass corporate mission plaque from MediQual, my first post-college employer.

Another such item is a poster-sized oil painting that hung over Sapient’s front desk back in 1995, when I was first hired by the nascent internet consulting company.

It was an original composition by Courtney, Sapient’s receptionist, who had recently graduated with a bachelors degree in studio art at Dartmouth College. Painted a year earlier, it depicts a streetscape of brownstones in Boston’s South End, where she lived.

During her years at Sapient, Courtney left the front desk and led new employee orientation, then ran Sapient’s People Strategy Organization (aka HR), and finally took overall responsibility for corporate culture. Over that time we had several moves and refreshes of our office space, and her painting was thrown into permanent storage and forgotten.

When the Dot-Com bubble burst, Sapient needed to shrink its physical footprint. Being a curious little opportunist, one day I accompanied our Operations team as they cleaned out one of the storage areas. Unearthing Courtney’s painting, and knowing that she was no longer around, I received permission to adopt it.

That was around 2002, toward the end of my tenure at Sapient, and just after my purchase of a condo in Boston’s Copley Square. When I brought the painting home, it took pride of place on the brick wall in my front entryway. And there it hung.

Years later, before I left Boston, I reached out to Courtney and offered to pay her or give the painting back. Despite initial interest, she never made arrangements to pick it up, and I never heard from her again.

The painting has been with me for nearly two decades, and now graces our Pittsburgh dining room. It is a treasured reminder of Boston, my time at Sapient, and the Back Bay condo I loved.

I also recently plowed through Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”.

This is an imposing book. The text runs to 470 pages, and there are no less than 60 pages of back-notes. It’s quite a lengthy read.

On the other hand, the reviews I’d read were all effusively positive, calling it touchingly personal, citing its approachability, and even using the phrase “page-turner”.

I generally agree with that assessment. It’s very engaging and readable, deftly melding the author’s first-person experiences in his oncology residency with interesting stories of man’s early history with this disease. It goes on to add more depth to cancer’s more familiar recent narrative and solid insight into the current state of the art. Although the later chapters tend to rely a bit more on technical jargon, Mukherjee keeps things moving so that the reader doesn’t lose interest.

Part of the reason why he undertook this work was because as a neophyte oncologist, he was so buried in the tactical concerns of fighting the disease that he was unable to answer his patients’ more strategic-level questions about where we are in the overall battle and whether the increased attention of recent years has translated to improvements in prevention, treatment, and outcomes.

Throughout its long course, the book hits on most major forms of cancer—lung, breast, leukemia, Hodgkin’s Disease—and several obscure ones. For a time it follows the search for a single root cause, touching on carcinogenic chemicals like Asbestos and cigarette smoke as well as the cancers precipitated by viral infections like HPV.

But if I had to single out the primary theme of the book, however, it would have to be the hubris of physicians throughout the ages in misunderstanding and underestimating cancer, as well as overestimating their ability to cure it with a single, massive intervention.

In Rome, Claudius Galen attributed the disease to an overabundance of an unknown and unobserved liquid called “black bile”, setting our understanding of cancer on a wrong track for the following 1500 years.

Next up were the surgeons, whose simplistic answer to recurrent breast cancer was to cut deeper and deeper, until the standard preventative practice was to remove the entire breast, the lymph nodes, the muscles of the chest, the clavicle, several ribs, and part of the lung. Better to cut too much than too little, right?

As surgery began to give way to chemotherapy in the 1950s, the next group of oncologists fell for the same old “more is better” fallacy, prescribing massive doses of multiple drugs, eventually concluding that the best policy was to completely destroy the patient’s ability to generate new blood cells, then rebuild it by transplanting new stem cells (either one’s own, harvested before treatment, or transfused from a donor).

Even today, with the mapping of the human genome and gene therapy providing an historical breakthrough in cancer treatment, geneticists have once again fallen into the same mental trap as Galen did 2000 years ago, of thinking that this new technology would spell the end of cancer. Cancer is an incredibly deft, diverse, adaptive, and opportunistic disease, and its defeat is just not going to be that simple.

Despite all these unfortunate missteps, each generation of treatment has produced significant improvements in outcomes. Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, gene therapy, targeted drugs, and combinations of these can each be the right treatment for the right patient.

And Mukherjee’s book does do a wonderful job depicting some of the fortuitous coincidences that led to the discovery of these new treatments. For example, who knew that a humble jar of Marmite was the key that unlocked the broad spectrum of chemotherapy drugs that have saved so many lives?

Aside from the knowledge that cancer was the result of uncontrolled growth, it wasn’t until the past twenty years that we actually began to understand exactly how and why cancer works at a cellular and genetic level. Before 1970, oncologists could only develop treatments by trial and error. But armed with our new understanding of what cancer is, researchers can now identify cancer’s specific biochemical vulnerabilities and start developing therapies such as Herceptin that precisely target those weaknesses.

In the end, the reader comes away from the book with a much better understanding of why cancer is so difficult to combat, and that each person’s instance of cancer is so unique that it requires an entirely individual treatment.

As a Pan-Mass Challenge rider, I was proud to discover how central Sidney Farber, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Jimmy Fund have been. They take center stage in much of Mukherjee’s narrative, as does Mass General, MIT, and the American Cancer Society.

Before I picked up the book, I saw Dr. Mukherjee at an author talk he gave at the BPL. I took the opportunity to ask him whether the recent discovery that the human genome is not identical in every cell had any implications for gene therapy.

Between his response and my readings, it was clear that it isn’t the human genome that matters so much as the characteristic modifications cancer makes to it. By designing drugs that recognize and respond to the unique cancerous fingerprint of a particular genetic alteration, it is possible to starve tumors or at least deactivate their growth. The challenge right now is to catalog those fingerprints and discover drugs that match them.

It’s probably true that you need some curiosity about cancer or medicine to get through this book. But those with sufficient interest will find it informative, entertaining, and very readable.

As DargonZine’s founder and former editor, I was asked to make a few comments as they completed their 24th and began their record 25th year of online publication. I thought I’d share my responses here, in case anyone is interested.

Why did you start Dargonzine?

DargonZine, which was initially called FSFnet, really began out of my desire to exchange ideas, tips, and techniques with other writers. I was attending college in the backwoods of Maine, and there really was no one I could have those kinds of focused conversations with.

At that time, BITNET was just coming into being, and several of my peers had founded electronic magazines that focused on computers or humor. But at that time there was really no online forum for fantasy and science fiction fans.

Having edited a fiction-based magazine in high school, I immediately recognized the value of combining this newfound communication technology with my personal needs as a writer. I could attract people like myself, who sought a serious, focused online writers’ group, while entertaining hundreds of fantasy readers by freely distributing the writers’ output online.

Twenty years before the term “social networking” was coined, we realized the power of bringing aspiring writers together and sharing their works with supportive readers, and that formula has been the basis for DargonZine’s success.

Did you ever imagine it would still be running, 25 years later?

During the early years, obtaining enough submissions was a constant struggle, and it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that DargonZine had enough writers to ensure that issues came out on a regular basis. So for many years our focus on getting the next issue out superceded any inkling of how long the magazine would survive.

However, as the few older e-zines folded, by 1995 we had clearly become the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet. At the same time, we had an established core group of long-term contributors who were willing to do whatever was necessary to keep the group alive. Only then did we start thinking about DargonZine having a future beyond the next two or three issues.

What were the early days of Dargonzine like?

Most people don’t realize how primitive the Internet was in 1984. This was ten years before the first public Web browser was developed, before IRC, predating even commandline FTP. The only service available was text-only email.

The “Internet” was limited to a couple obscure places that would pass email between two incompatible networks. The only sites on the Internet were major colleges and large government contractors, and the only people who had both access and the technical knowledge to use it were computer science students and computer center staff.

At that time, there were virtually no public gathering places on the Internet (pun intended). One of the only ways to find people was to register your name, email address, and interests in a central text file that listed a few hundred “Bitnauts”: tech-savvy Internet users. DargonZine’s first two mailings were sent to users on the Bitnauts List who had listed science fiction or fantasy in their interests.

Back then, when connections between universities rarely exceeded 9600 baud (15 minutes per MB), sending a couple hundred emails at once could bring the entire network to its knees. FSFnet was one of the first users of Eric Thomas’ Listserv software, which addressed this problem by multiplexing email and file distribution to make more efficient use of BITNET’s star topology and slow network links.

What advice would you give to others who want to start a long-lived webzine?

There are two crucial elements in making your e-zine work: the subject matter, and your dedication to it.

Because you’re competing with everyone else on the planet, your e-zine needs to be the single best source of information on your topic. If you intend to put out a magazine about Star Trek, your zine has to be really exceptional in order to stand out among all the other sites already out there. That’s incredibly difficult, but I’ve seen it done.

The other option is to focus on something newly emerging, like steampunk fiction or digital video recorders or GPS phones. If you’re the only zine that deals with your topic, it’s much easier to become the recognized authority in the field. This is what DargonZine did back in the early days of the Internet, when there were no other writing groups or fiction zines online. If you do this, you just have to make sure you do it well enough to discourage anyone from starting a new zine to compete with you.

The subject matter is what will get your zine off the ground, but your dedication is what gives it longevity. I’ve see hundreds of zines and newsletters fold after putting out four to ten issues. Usually there’s a honeymoon period when there’s lots of content and both the editor and contributors are very motivated. But in short order the editor discovers that the pipeline of submissions has run dry and there’s actually a lot of technical drudgery in preparing and distributing issues. It’s here where the editor’s passion and devotion to the subject matter makes the difference between a zine that quietly fades away into obscurity or survives and goes on to enduring greatness. And, really, if you’re not working on something you love to do, you shouldn’t be wasting your time on it.

And if you’d like to impart any anecdotes or anything else, please let me know!

Although the Internet allowed DargonZine’s contributors to work closely together in a virtual sense, our writers have always been physically isolated, spread thinly across the globe. In fact, during our first decade we didn’t see any value in meeting one another in person. Even when that changed, we spent two cautious years meeting in small groups before inviting all our writers to our first open DargonZine Writers’ Summit in Washington DC in 1997.

The ensuing DargonZine Summits cultivated lasting friendships and generated an unexpected amount of enthusiasm among our contributors. Since 1997, we have held annual meetings each year in different cities around the world. The Summits are a balance between working sessions focused on improving our writing, fostering personal connections between writers, and sightseeing in the host city. Although we were skeptical of their value at first, the Summits have proved to be one of the most rewarding, inspiring, and effective activities we’ve ever provided.

One of the things Americans rarely think about is history. Very few of us have any sense of what has gone on in our town, our neighborhood, perhaps even our building. In that sense, we Bostonians have a bit of an advantage, since Boston is a very small area with a long and rich historical heritage (for America, at least). Walk the streets of Boston and on virtually every block you’ll come across a building that has some noteworthy story associated with it.

I happened to buy a unit in one of Boston’s most noteworthy buildings. The initial Hotel Vendome was designed and built by William G. Preston in 1871 in Boston’s newly-filled Back Bay neighborhood, then greatly expanded in 1881. It is the finest example of the French Second Empire style in Boston, and located on the broad Parisien boulevard of Commonwealth Avenue. In 1882, it was the first public building in Boston to be furnished with electric lights. It was the site of many prominent social functions, and the guest register included stays by Ulysses S. Grant, President Grover Cleveland, P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and John Singer Sargent. In 1903 the visiting team— the Pittsburgh Pirates, led by Honus Wagner—stayed at the Vendome during the first World Series ever held. In a bit of synchornicity, both my mother’s and her sister’s graduating classes from nursing school held parties in the Vendome during World War II.

But that’s all nothing compared to the fire: the worst firefighting tragedy in Boston history, one of the twelve worst in all of U.S. history, getting an entire chapter in Stephanie Schorow’s “Boston on Fire: A History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston” which I recently read.

It happened on Saturday June 17, 1972—the day before Father’s Day—while the Vendome was undergoing a major renovation. The fire broke out in the upper stories, and eventually sixteen engine companies, five ladder companies, two aerial towers, and a rescue company fought the blaze. The fire was under control, and fresh firefighters were conducting mop-up operations when an overloaded beam under the second floor gave way and the entire southeast corner of the five-story building came down, killing nine firefighters, injuring eight more, and destroying a ladder truck. Two of the twenty-five orphaned offspring would go on to become firefighters.

Twenty-five years later, a memorial to the firefighters who lost their lives was dedicated on the Commonwealth Avenue mall. A long, low arc of black granite describes the events and gives the names of the men who were lost. A fireman’s helmet and coat are casually draped over the stone, but forged in bronze. Every year a brief ceremony of observance is held.

As a resident of such a building, it’s hard to forget its history. I live on that same southeast corner, surely within inches of the 40 by 45-foot section that collapsed. I live on the second floor, surely within inches of the resulting pile of debris, which was noted both as 26 feet and two stories deep. I live within inches of the place where eight men died.

Knowing that you are living in the middle of the site of such an infamous tragedy would probably be enough to freak a lot of people out. It doesn’t bother me, really. After all, I’m proud to live in a building with such historical significance. But there’s another reason why it doesn’t bug me: it’s because even though I wasn’t here way back in ’72, I still remember and honor those men, and I view my presence here not merely as just some place to live. I consider myself something of a steward of this very important landmark, and want to do my part to see that it is kept for future generations, and not forgotten in our uniquely American ignorance of who and what have come before us.

For more information and photographs about the Vendome fire and memorial, go here or here, or read “Boston on Fire”.