Ugly, The Sequel

I’m stuck on ugly.
A person can be ugly, a crowd can turn ugly, even a cow – according to the American Heritage Dictionary, can behave ugly.
Plymouth is, in civic terms, ugly.
How can you not love ugly?
Actually, I think you can – love ugly: I’d even venture to say that Americans make ugly love every day.
So in the positive spirit of ugly I am going to spend my words this week on a description of what I think are the ugliest buildings in town.
Come on, you know you have your favorites.
Let’s start off in the eastern part of town – the Far Eastern.
A little bit of old Beijing, in Cedarville: that’s my impression of the new MRI facility in Cedarville.
For weeks I held off making a final judgment, as this behemoth rose in to the air on a hill off Hedges Pond Road.
I tried to guess what it was going to be. The location seemed odd for your typical strip mall. The height seemed all wrong for a restaurant. The Qing Dynasty had ended in 1911.
I would never have guessed that we were getting our very own magnetic marvel. No wonder my fillings ache every time I drive by!
The only thing keeping this building from being certifiably ugly is that it’s out of the way. If you don’t see the ugly, how ugly can it be?
The John Carver Hotel is another story altogether: another two or three stories, actually.
The entrance to the John Carver – with its 30 foot white faux columns, is the pseudo-colonial equivalent of the Hilltop restaurant’s giant cactus on Route 1 in Saugus. But whereas the kitsch of the cactus and the herd of plastic cattle at the Hilltop fit in with the rest of Route 1’s over-the-top Americana, The Carver’s massive columns are preposterously out of proportion to its surroundings, not to mention our historical milieu.
But are they – the columns, really ugly?
Historically, yes. Architecturally, definitely. Taken out of context, probably not.
The same might be said of another hotel – the Governor Bradford on the waterfront.
I studied this building for quite a while, and was not quite able to figure out what the architect was trying to say. I definitely see the influence of the Swiss Chalet style of hotel design, a trace of Tudor, a hint of colonial clapboard and.. then there’s a lattice-work brick wall culminating in a turreted hot dog stand.
Maybe they had big plans, and a small budget. The structure does remind me of the David Lynch film, Dune. Up to a point, Dune had some great effects – but then the money ran out and the penultimate scenes of the Fremen riding the giant spice worms look preposterous.
(Then again, dignified giant worm wrangling might just be an impossible feat for any director, at any price.)
If the Pilgrims had seen the Bradford when they first came in to the harbor, they would have dog-paddled back to Britain.
And what do you think of the latest restaurant to stake a claim in the economically muddy waters of Court Street – T-Bones Roadhouse?
Within a block of Burial Hill, and practically overlooking the Plymouth Rock, T-Bones built a steel metal store front with a giant letter slot facing the street.
On the hot summer night that I first saw T-Bones I felt it looked like a garage for a hovercraft, or something you’d stick on top of the Enron headquarters in Texas. I’d say it doesn’t really fit in with the historic architecture of Court Street, but then again - architecturally speaking, Court Street lost its way long before T-Bones rock and rolled into town. And on a second drive-by on a cold, wet day, I discovered that they could cover that mail slot with a large metal shutter that has the appearance of a traditional paned window – a much more appropriate look for Court Street.
Whatever seasons we are in, I don’t want to single out T-Bones. There have been many pseudo-modern store fronts downtown on Court Street in the last 25 years – CVS and Puritan Clothing to name two that come to mind. And I could come up with many more structures – both modern and faux colonial, that I believe should never have been built in historic Plymouth, like Jordan Hospital’s Pop-Art Concrete Slabs and the Fire Department’s Headquarters on Sandwich Street. I think it’s a shame that when tourists first reach the historic intersection of Old 44 and 3A that they are greeted by your standard, out of the box, pump and run Gulf and Mobil Service Stations. And if you came from Mars and landed in the middle of any one of our new ‘retail prairie towns’ off Long Pond Road and Commerce Way, you wouldn’t know if you were in Indiana, Arizona, or Maine. Massachusetts? Impossible!
In a forest of ugly trees, which ones do you take the axe to first?
I could go on, but I don’t want to seem mean spirited. And I have to hold back a few of my favorites for Ugly, Part 3. So let me be constructive. My sense is that we desperately need an Ugly Planning Board, or at least a subcommittee dedicated to either bringing a consistency to the ugliness around us, or eliminating it altogether.
I thought we had that covered.
I had assumed that there must be an adjunct committee of some board that was supposed to safeguard the town’s image.
Maybe Mayor Buechs will beautify things.
Or maybe we should just accept that – with a few notable exceptions, architecturally at least we are Weymouth-bound.
And anyway, who am I to talk: I’m stuck on ugly.