Random Ramblings

I was on an architectural tour of the Back Bay this past weekend and did you know that the streets in that area are named alphabetically: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, etc. Not only that, the street names' alternate syllabically between two and three. To top that, it took thirty years to fill in the Back Bay running trains filled with gravel day in and day out. There's water merely 12 feet below the streets and all the buildings sit on top of these wooden poles that have been pounded into the bedrock, but are submerged underwater. Apparently wood doesn't deteriorate as long as it's submerged underwater. When they built the Hancock building downtown, they dug below street level to build an underground parking garage. They had to pump out all this water to build this garage that the water level in the Back Bay dropped a few feet exposing the wooden supports causing them to crumble since they were no longer fully submerged. Fascinating!