Piedmont Park wants your input on 2 options for its renovation plan
Visitors riding, running or walking call the park a gem in the middle of the city.
'We love having it here. One reason we live here,' Tim Fellow said.
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The Piedmont Park Conservancy is working on its first comprehensive plan in the last 25 years, taking feedback at in-person meetings and a virtual session last week.
Jack Shen lives nearby and would like to see the park kept more natural.
'Stick with a wild feeling,' he said.
There are two options. One adds more recreation while the other amplifies more nature and scenic views.
Both would add more seating with benches, trees in and around the active oval and new basketball and pickleball courts near the current tennis center. Both plans also add a new north entrance with concession stands and restrooms. It would expand the park to the intersection of Piedmont and Monroe.
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Each reimagines and beautifies Lake Clara Meer with one adding paths and even boardwalks over the water and the other more passive trails.
'I don't go down there very often, cause it's not easy to get to... but yeah I would,' Fellow said.
A final virtual session will be held Wednesday night before the public is asked to review both concepts and give their input. You can submit your thoughts on the conversancy's website through March 8.
The final comprehensive plan will be revealed at Piedmont Park's Landmark Luncheon in April. The actual work will take the next 10-20 years to complete the vision.
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Boston Globe
17-07-2025
- Boston Globe
Meet the Retrologist, a man on a mission to document America's fading roadside attractions
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up By day, Pujol is a journalist at WABC-TV in New York, but by night, weekends, and pretty much any other spare moment, he devotes his time to documenting midcentury roadside kitsch. Most of Pujol's tales begin with road trips seeking out a drive-in theater or a pair of 12-foot hot dog statues, and then quickly build into adventures as he explores the country, collecting images and stories about a dying slice of Americana known as the roadside attraction. Advertisement He's perhaps the only person who can convincingly begin a story with: 'I was driving to see an old Ben Franklin store around Millbury, Vt., and then I saw a 20-foot concrete gorilla named Queen Connie, so I had to pull over.' Advertisement Retrologist is a term he's coined to describe his obsession. It's also the name of his Sometimes the attractions are saved (such as the Shell sign from 1933, located in Cambridge), but more often than not, communities don't see their value. Pujol included the now-defunct Twin Donuts in his book, but frets over the fate of its iconic and eye-catching sign. 'I was heartbroken to see that go,' he said of the 70-year-old donut shop, and then immediately asked, 'Do you know if the sign is still there?' Twin Donuts in Allston closed after 70 years. The diner's last day was March 23, 2025. Brett Phelps for The Boston Globe From the 1940s to the 1970s, roadside attractions were an essential part of the landscape in the United States. Eye-catching neon signs, glistening chrome diners, and 40-foot metal fishermen were intended to entice motorists to pull over, shop, or eat. When you see an ice cream shop shaped like a cone or a massive geodesic dome painted blue to resemble a blueberry, chances are, curiosity will get the better of you, and you'll stop in for a look. At least that was the logic back when family vacations involved getting in a car without iPads and cellphones. Pujol, 52, said he first became enamored with these gems of Americana during family road trips in the 1970s. He would look out the car window at the bright orange roofs of Howard Johnsons or gaze with amazement at Muffler Men, the term used to describe 20-foot-tall, fiberglass statues used for advertising in the 1960s. Advertisement The Modern Diner in Pawtucket, RI. Its owners placed it on the market earlier this month. Rolando Puloj/Handout 'From a very early age, I was transfixed by roadside attractions,' Pujol said. 'The first road trip we took as a family, I was 4, and we drove from New York to Miami. 'There are so many interesting stops along that route. But the one that, of course, comes to mind is good old South of the Border in South Carolina. That made an impression on me even as a 4-year-old. For those who have never witnessed its splendor, Go ahead and call it tacky. Pujol finds no shame in the word. "Queen Connie," a 20-foot concrete sculpture of a gorilla, hoists a Volkswagen over her head at Pioneer Auto Sales in Leicester, Vt. Christopher Muther/Globe Staff While South of the Border is still in business, many famed roadside relics haven't survived into the 21st century. Quirky old motor lodges and cheese wheel-shaped stores are continually razed to make way for more characterless square box stores. Neon signs that beckoned motorists for decades are tossed into the landfill or wind up in private collections. 'It is heartbreaking. And you see that happen all the time,' he said. 'Sometimes these old stores get almost manipulated by sign shops into updating their look. They're told they need a new sign, and then they'll replace their beautiful vintage sign with a banal plastic sign or bland awning.' Advertisement For his book, Pujol traversed the entire country in his quest to find some of the best attractions and sights, and New England did not disappoint. He fell in love with kitsch icons such as the giant orange dinosaur in Saugus that was saved from near-death after the miniature golf course where it resided went out of business. The famous "Leaning Tower of Pizza" in Saugus is one of Rolando Pujol's favorite retro roadside attractions. Pujol refers to himself as the Retrologist. Christopher Muther/Globe Staff In addition to Twin Donuts, he also included Donut Dip in West Springfield, the Golden Rod in York Beach, Maine, the Weirs Beach sign in Laconia, N.H., the Teddie Peanut Butter Factory in Everett, Dairy Witch Ice Cream in Salem, and Modern Diner in Pawtucket, R.I. Like many of his favorite places, the fate of the Modern Diner is also unknown. Its owners have decided to sell, and it's now on the market. 'What makes these things so appealing is that they invite you and encourage you, almost force you to get out of your phone and stop doom scrolling and get out there and see things and, God forbid, talk to people,' he said. 'I love that. And you can't have those experiences locked up at home. That's why it's sad to see another one on the endangered list.' While places continue to close or remodel, Pujol is encouraged that he's seeing a growing community of people who seem to care about the fate of these places. He's hopeful that an increase in retro appreciation will mean a brighter future for some of his beloved destinations. The sign for Howard's Leather Shop in Spofford, NH, harkens back to the days when mom-and-pop stores used over-the-top signs to attract motorists passing by. This is featured in the book "The Great American Retro Road Trip." Rolando Pujol/Handout 'I don't want to overstate the point and call it a trend, but there are some indications that a revival of interest in this stuff is beginning to manifest,' he said, choosing his words carefully as if speaking too optimistically might jinx the future of these attractions. 'At some point, I'd like to think that people will get tired of everything being bland and beige. These attractions are not only historic but they're a window into our collective history, how we used to live, and what brought us joy.' Advertisement Christopher Muther can be reached at


Atlantic
30-06-2025
- Atlantic
Of Course Jeff Bezos Got Married in Venice
The Gritti Palace was built in Venice in 1475, with no expense spared. Its chandeliers are made of handblown Murano glass, its bathrooms of polychrome Italian marble. Its terrace looks out over the Grand Canal onto a domed basilica. For years, it was home to Venetian nobility, but now it's a luxury hotel, where suites can cost €14,000 a night. Last weekend, it was booked solid by a new kind of nobility, in Venice for a new kind of no-expense-spared spectacle: the wedding of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and fourth-richest man in the world, and Lauren Sánchez, a former TV presenter. The Trumps have Rome; the Bezos-Sánchez family, apparently, has Venice. In at least one way, the city is an apt wedding venue for one of this era's most successful merchants. It's an archipelago of sandy islands in shoal waters that, largely thanks to Venice's placement at the head of the Adriatic, became one of the Mediterranean's dominant ports and one of civilization's first centers of global commerce, through which the world's spices, silk, fur, and jewels flowed for centuries. It was, in other words, a city that became important not because of what it made but because of what you could buy there, the beneficiary of right-place-right-time magic that someone like Bezos might today call synergy. For many years, it was one of Europe's richest cities, defined by its ostentation and swagger, the spoils of all that wealth: mansions filled with art, basilicas filled with stolen artifacts, marble and gold everywhere you looked, impossible magnificence rising from unstable ground. Today, Venice's primary industry is tourism, and its primary export is its own mythology. The Renaissance-era tradesmen are long gone; in their place are people there to gawk at what the Renaissance-era tradesmen bought. Modern Venice is 'an amusement park,' as the historian Dennis Romano, who recently wrote a book on the city, told me. It's a living museum of obscene wealth. It's whatever the opposite of quiet luxury is. It's big and literal, unapologetic and unrestrained, a type of old-world vulgarity newly back in style, at least among people so powerful that they don't need to care about taste. (Should Ivanka Trump, a wedding guest, have happened to look up while killing an afternoon at the Gallerie dell'Accademia this past weekend, she might have recognized something: The gold-leaf ceiling in the living room at Mar-a-Lago was explicitly modeled after one at the art museum.) The wedding festivities began with a foam party on a $500 million superyacht, continued with a welcome event at a church whose walls are lined with Tintorettos, and culminated with a Friday-night ceremony on the same secluded island where the G7 once met. The Gritti and other high-end hotels were filled with guests including Leonardo DiCaprio, Oprah Winfrey, and several Kardashian/Jenner sisters. Estimates have placed the cost of the whole event at somewhere possibly far north of $20 million. If the vibe of the wedding was, at least to some observers, tacky, that's beside the point. Venice is rich—world-historically rich, one of the richest places money can buy. It's a place where even the bathrooms are exquisite, where every square inch is drenched in beauty, where a wedding guest or a former TV news anchor can feel like royalty. Of course Bezos and Sánchez wanted to marry there. Still, there's something funny about it all: a couple whose wealth is derived from modern convenience tying the knot in a place so thoroughly, proudly antiquated; Bezos, a man responsible for unleashing thousands of delivery vehicles onto American streets, getting married in a city with no cars. Sánchez recently climbed into a rocket ship and flew to the edge of space, but for one of the most important days of her life, she chose a city where the most efficient way to get around is to hire a guy in stripes to locomote you using a method that has existed since before Jesus was born. Venice is now a sinking place, a place being destroyed by modernity and consumption—pollution, climate change, mega-tourism. Moto ondoso —'wave motion'—from large boats is eroding the centuries-old foundations of the city's buildings. Venice has about 20 million tourists a year, and fewer than 50,000 annual residents. Many of those in town protested the Bezos-Sánchez wedding: They papered over the city's ancient stone walls with flyers suggesting that Bezos leave, sent effigies of him floating down the canals, and unfurled a massive banner that read, If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax. Romano predicts (as do I) that the wedding and its attendant publicity will likely just drive more tourists to the city. Everyone, after all, loves an amusement park—especially people with plenty of money to burn.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Yahoo
St. Marys Bridge to close daily beginning Monday
The Florida Department of Transportation is warning drivers to prepare for detours, with full daytime closures of the St. Marys Bridge planned in June. >>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<< U.S. 17 over the St. Marys River will be completely inaccessible to drivers for several hours a day from Monday, June 16 to Thursday, June 19. From 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., drivers will instead be directed to I-95 to cross the river between Florida and Georgia. The closure will allow for workers to conduct routine maintenance on the nearly 100-year-old manual swing bridge. [DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks] [SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter]