The elevated origins of a lowly building in Chinatown

At least as far as I've tried in Chinatown, still tends to be New Saigon Sandwich on Washington St. The one downfall about New Saigon is that there's no place to sit down and eat. I made the mistake of getting a banh mi to eat at my desk at work one day. It's a great way to get ants. The one good thing about 163 is that they do have a few small tables you can sit at, but I didn't think the sandwich was better.

Chau's Bakery in Fields Corner is the real spot. A Vietnamese-American co-worker was surprised that I knew to go there. The bread is made on site and the sardine banh mi is my favorite (advice, if you aren't eating it soon get the tin of sardines on the side and add them when you're ready to eat so the bread doesn't get soggy from the tomato sauce).

It's just up the street on Harrison, other side of Beach. Strongly recommend the steamed pork buns.

it survived 33 years before it closed in 2015. I took its disappearance as an early omen that Boston's Chinatown would likely eventually surrender to the same forces of gentrification that greatly shrunk its Manhattan analog.

In the Before Time, I often pointed to the untenable-rent-driven closings of good, traditional Chinese restaurants in Chinatown and their new strength in Boston's suburbs (notably but not exclusively Quincy and Malden) as similar to NYC, where all the real action has moved to Flushing, Queens and other relatively farther-flung neighborhoods. I got more worried when the high-rises started sprouting up like tall, skinny mushrooms.

Boston restaurants in every neighborhood face an existential crisis. It's soul-crushing to me: dining out at every level of the Boston scene, and to a lesser extent writing about it, has been my obsessive leisure hobby for decades. But for now I can only fret about the many people I love in the industry who are facing grievously-crimped career prospects, financial ruin. Fuck my privileged, frivolous epicurean entertainment and increasingly obsolescent professional food writing: I can't think of anything more trivial at this moment.

I would like to think that the new reality might slow the gentrification tide in Chinatown, but a lot of those places are small and cramped, among the many fine indie restaurants everywhere that might prove less viable in an era where indoor dining has to somehow conform to social distancing.

They were supposed to preserve Thompson Square station in Charlestown after they took down that el, maybe for conversion to a restaurant, but it burned down before that could happen.

The only real el remnant left now is the Dudley (soon to be Nubian?) bus station.

... one of the stations was relocated to the trolley museum in Kennebunkport.

Abandoned piers in the Mystic River, next to the Route 99 bridge. The Orange Line used to cross the Mystic River on its own bridge, using these piers.