I love that dirty water

A couple relatively Boston-related links for you all.

## The Globe's Braniac blog offers up this post about conflicting schools of landscape architecture thought on Boston's City Hall Plaza. Apparently, the Cultural Landscape Foundation has designated City Hall a "Marvel of Modernism." Problem is, the local architectural community doesn't really want City Hall Plaza put on any pedestals. You know, because they hate the place. Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know my true feelings about the City Hall building. By logic, these same strong feelings should extend to City Hall Plaza. And they do! This was all true, even before I learned that the plaza was designed by I.M. Pei. How can you not preserve a space designed by the only non–Frank Gehry contemporary architect that anyone can recognize by name? Ridiculous!

## This isn't as much about Boston as it is about New York. But by comparison, it makes the Hub of the Universe look wicked good. Here's a report from Rolling Stone about my former favorite radio station, 92.3 K-Rock. You can click the link for all the detes, but quickly: 92.3 is switching formats from mostly-classic-rock-and-some-contemporary-stuff to Top-40. This is after switching to mostly-classic-rock-and-some-contemporary-stuff from mostly-talk-and-rock-on-the-weekends. And this was after switching to mostly-talk-and-rock-on-the-weekends from just straight up contemporary alternative rock. Sad times for the rock faithful in the tri-state area. Apparently, the only rock station left in New York (not counting classic rock station 104.3) is something called 101.9 WRXP. I listened to the radio every day for something like 13 years in Jersey, and I ain't never heard of 101.9.

What does this have to do with Boston? Not too much, except for the fact that the Cradle of Liberty is blessed with at least three alternative rock stations: 97.7/107.3 WAAF, 104.1 WBCN, and 92.1 WFNX. Now, I'm sure there are a lot of demographic factors involved with 92.3's change in format. However, comma, I kind of have a hard time processing the idea that Boston has more quality rock stations than the greatest metropolis in the galaxy.