Posts Tagged “north station”

I tried to exit North Station this morning and found two of the doors padlocked from the outside.  Not that it would have mattered if they were padlocked from the inside.

Vandalism or overzealous security, it’s hard to say.  7:30 is not exactly the wee hours of the morning for commuting.  In the rare (ok, not so rare on the MBTA sometimes) event of a fire or emergency, reducing the exist capacity by half seems a pretty bad idea. Maybe an alert reader with some clippers can pop over before rush hour hits in earnest.

I set out last week from North Station, taking the commuter rail with legions of downtown office-workers headed home to the suburbs like Don Draper.  But wasn’t headed for scotch and family, I was taking my first car-free trip to the DeCordova museum for the opening of three new shows.

When I arrived at the museum an hour later, I found myself looking at where I started, fifty years ago.

That’s North Station in the ’40s, photographed by Jules Aarons, part of an exhibition at DeCordova called “In the Jewish Neighborhoods” consisting of pictures of Boston’s North and West ends as well as Paris and New York in the 1940s.  The green line trolley is just about the only thing recognizable in this picture now, even though the tracks have been sunk underground and North Station has been subsumed (literally) in the TD BankNorth Garden.

I walked into the sandwich shop in a bit of a morning fog, outside my usual breakfast zone, and surveyed the pastries.  No savory scones here, not even a forlorn croissant, just doughy-looking bagels (feh) and a rag-tag assortment of muffins.  I selected the lemon poppyseed muffin, which was a somewhat brighter shade of yellow than nature alone might have provided.

“You want that grilled, honey?” asked the counterwoman.

I blinked twice.  Grilled?  Didn’t I just order a sweet muffin, pretty much an unfrosted cupcake with a bit of attitude?  I glanced over at the grill, a standard short-order griddle affair where you usually see bacon and eggs frying.  All my sweet/savory circuits were sparking.  Cake?  Fried?  Fried cake??  Then, suddenly, the fog lifted.

“Yes.  Yes, I will have it grilled.” I stated, proudly.

She deftly butterflied it, leaving the bottom of the paper intact, and slapped it on the griddle.  After a minute or two, it was wrapped and bagged.  I didn’t get a good look at it until I got to the office and unbagged my breakfast.

The browned surface was hot and buttery and the rest of the muffin was warmed through, although the faint tang of cooking oil faded quickly.  I can’t quite describe the mingling of the sweet cakey lemon flavor of the muffin with the salty flavor of the griddle, except to compare it to hot cornbread and salty butter, not a bad thing on a crisp pre-autumn morning.

Where can you get your very own grilled muffin?  Probably all kinds of places I never noticed, but this one’s from Mulligan’s at 83 Canal Street near North Station.