Changes at Longwood

Two items that are emblematic of the constantly changing landscape in the Longwood area of Boston -- home to BIDMC, the Joslin Diabetes Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Children's Hospital Boston -- not to mention several colleges, schools, museums, and religious institutions.

The 1873 brick building is at the corner of Longwood and Brookline Avenues, and I wanted to document its nice detail and placement before it is razed in the coming weeks to make way for a new research building for the Joslin and other tenants. People in the neighborhood knew it mainly as the home of a Rebecca's Cafe, but as its age suggests, it has been a fixture for well over 100 years.

The glass and steel structure is the new Center for Life Sciences, on Blackfan Circle, which will house several hundred thousand square feet of research space for BIDMC, Dana Farber, and Children's and perhaps others. It is built on land previously owned by the Judge Baker Children's Center and BIDMC. You can see in its windows reflections of the Harvard Institutes of Medicine and the HMS New Research Bulding, and just visible in the background is a small portion of Merck's Boston research laboratory. Actually, Blackfan Circle should be renamed, because it no longer ends in a cul-de-sac, but is actually a full-fledged street that nicely divides the superblock bounded by avenues Brookline, Longwood, Louis Pasteur, and the Fenway.