BOSTON. Mayor Michelle Wu lashed out angrily today at an on-line poll that ranked Boston’s City Hall the fourth ugliest building on Planet Earth, demanding a recount and saying “We take a back seat to no one when it comes to municipal ugliness.”
“It’s upside down–right?”
The on-line poll asked respondents to rank public buildings in major cities on a twenty-point scale that included variables such as brutalist architecture and general homeliness. “Boston’s City Hall is a smorgasbord of ugly that makes the Russian Ministry of Agriculture look like a snack,” notes judge Alton Birdsell, who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation but forgot to say “off the record” when speaking to this reporter. “I’m pretty sure when the architects handed the plans to the contractor they were upside down. The plans–not the architects.”
Boston is guided by the aphorism attributed to Oscar Wilde, namely, “Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.” Boston’s City Hall was built in 1968, and is thus nearly three times as ugly as a typical married woman.
Walk for Ugly
Wu, a native of Chicago, defended her adopted home town, which promotes its world-class teaching hospitals and many colleges and universities in order to divert attention from its boxy downtown architecture. “People come here for the culture,” she said, “but they stay for the ugly.”
Wow … they wuz robbed.