Early last Friday morning, the historic James Hook & company lobster warehouse and seafood store in downtown Boston was demolished in a seven-alarm fire of undetermined cause. The fire gutted the 83-year old iconic Boston landmark and destroyed about $1 million worth of lobster. A few years back, the Hook family refused an offer of $32 million for the prime real estate on which their business sits. The family now vows to rebuild as soon as possible.
When I first read of the fire in the Boston Globe, a profound sadness struck me. The brown wooden James Hook building is dockside, partially set on stilts in the Fort Point Channel across from my office. I pass it as I stroll around the neighborhood on breaks. I have only gone to the seafood store a handful of times to buy fresh oysters and clams, but I have walked by it hundreds, possibly a thousand times.
I have always felt an affinity for the James Hook building. Downtown Boston is crammed full of shiny, polished skyscrapers and highrises, with shiny, polished people flitting around from their offices to their spa gyms, from luxury hotels to seafood bistros, from salons to martini bars. But there, located in between the $500/night InterContinental Boston Hotel and the $500/night Boston Harbor Hotel, is the humble, homey, and smelley James Hook building!
Today I walked to the James Hook building to take pictures of its ruins. In the below picture, you can see men working underneath the destroyed structure, just above the green channel water. There is something beautiful about its falling-down state. Its survival in downtown Boston seems all the more tenacious.
