How did this happen?

At a time when the MBTA seems to be falling a little bit further apart every day, I thought it would be nice to give a little credit where credit is due. The new Maverick Square Station on the Blue Line (above, photographed by yours truly) has just opened in my neighborhood, and it's pretty wonderful - far better than anyone had a right to believe it could be (below left, the modernist bunker it replaced, which looks like something that crawled out of Government Center - truly, a building only Robert Campbell could love!). How was this allowed to happen? It's incredible how much the designers got right - even the traffic flow in the square has been improved by the new curb and crosswalk designs. Why didn't some committee within the MBTA shoot this down? How come neighborhood input didn't ruin the design? Clearly someone was not doing their job!

But thank God DMJM Harris (now AECOM), a global engineering outfit specializing in transit, was doing their job - which may be why the design is an unmannered combination of traditional forms, sparkling with lightness and transparency,with a dozen good ideas squeezed into it (the brand-new bike racks below; there's even a tiny clock tower at one corner). It's not, I admit, perfect - the concrete floor down below looks like it may not hold up well, and there's the usual lack of construction craftsmanship here and there. But these caveats seem like nothing before the overwhelming success of the above-ground pavilion. Yes, Virginia, good public design is possible - even in Boston.

Searched on the T?

In keeping with the surveillance themes of the Pet Shop Boys and Integral, this morning I found myself being randomly searched on the T. Yes, you read that right - the T. Not a strip search, alas - the officers were kind of hot - but just the standard, low-level harassment of having my bag searched. I missed my train, yes - but it wasn't the inconvenience that bothered me; it was the sense of an interfering, malignant government once again making its presence known in my life and sewing a general level of fear in its subjects. "Has there been a recent terrorism incident on the T?" I asked the passive accomplices of this policy, but they said they had no idea. "Has there been any terrorism on the T, ever?" I continued. "Has there been 'back chatter' in Pakistan about the Blue Line?" I wondered, but didn't say aloud. Frankly, I was afraid to poke the officers too hard; I was well aware that we have no more civil liberties in this country and that at any time, for any reason, I could vanish down a rabbit hole into the security apparatus. They could only hand me a card which said, "See something? Say something," with a number attached.

Well, I had seen something, so I called the number. There was no answer. I tried again. Ditto. (In the meantime, of course, the escalator could have exploded.) On the third try, I got through, but the sweet-but-bored woman at the end of the line couldn't answer my complaint; when I explained to her that I wasn't citing my treatment by any specific officer, but wanted to complain about the entire policy, she was at something of a loss; who was at the top of the command chain? Finally she gave me the "general" number for the "See Something? Say Something" program, which, of course, ended in a recorded option tree ("Press 1 for Dick Cheney, etc."); I decided on "Complaints about MBTA Service." There was no answer there, either. No doubt they were out torturing some poor Iraqi.