Pink hotel

My usual morning walk circuit takes me up the W&OD trail, where just before I hang a right, I see what the People’s Republic of Boston Properties is pleased to call Reston Town Center. It’s an appalling sight—an ugly, badly-designed conflation of concrete high-rises pretending to be meaningful. 

That ugliness is not helped by the knowledge that every retailer and restaurant in the place is part of a chain; like the “center”, they’re nothing you can’t find in scores of other places. Really, it's a gigantic middle finger thrusting up out of the quasi-wild greenery that used to be this whole area. And it's so full of itself. There's a pink-ish hotel, the afore-mentioned chain-store boutiques, but no swinging hot spot. The People's Republic does not do swinging hot spots.

So of course today’s earworm is Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”.

Man, Joni called it right way back in 1969.