You Can't Sight City Hall

I was asked to go to City Hall today, or, as it is also known, as the sole challenger to the Tower of Terror in the effort to be recognized as the ugliest building ever in the city of Boston.

But to this point, I had never been inside City Hall. As a general rule, I tend to avoid ugly things. Given the Blade-Runnerish ugliness of the façade, I have avoided going near City Hall much in the same way old sailors avoided dangerous-looking caves, rocky coastlines, and the Jersey Shore.

But today I had to go to the Office of the City Clerk and find some filing papers. And so to the Belly of the Beast went I.

I tried to steel myself during the walk over. This is City Hall, after all. Just because nothing short of dynamiting can be done to the outside of the building doesn’t necessarily mean that the inside of the building has to be horrible.

Surely the public officials of the City of Boston, knowing they have to spend a third of their life there, would make an effort to dress up the insides. Make it pretty. Somehow engineer things so that public officials only have to confront the ugliness when they’re walking up to the building. So that, once nestled safely betwixt its walls, they are able walk down peaceful hallways bathed in soft lights, and be reminded all day of the peace and tranquility that is normally attendant to a mental asylum.

Per usual, I was wrong. The inside of City Hall, if you’d believe it, is even uglier than the outside. While the outside is only an affront to the sense of sight, the inside is an assault on every sensory means of input.

The inside is dark, dank, and full of shadows. The ceiling is, somehow, only about a foot over your head, and brings back the claustrophobic memories of bunk beds. The “ceiling,” in fact, is made of fluorescent bulbs, honeycombed by black steel grates. Everywhere you turn you can find unnecessary corners, stairs to nowhere, and random abutments. It seems that windows are prohibited.

Let me put it this way: If I was the set director for a post-end-of-the-world movie, and was scouting for locations, the inside of City Hall would be the evil Emperor of the Eastern Allied States’ fortress.

Either that or a futuristic dungeon patrolled by ubiquitous flying nano-robots that make your brain explode if you so much as smile.

And how do they make your brain explode? Why, by screening a slide show featuring pictures of the building, of course!