Mr. Gorbachev Tore Down This Wall (Not Really)

From Dave Brigham:

Yes, that's a piece of the Berlin Wall. This blew my mind when I saw it. Standing in the shadow of the Hult International Business School, located at the southeast edge of Cambridge, Mass., overlooking North Point Park, I was waiting for my son, Owen. He and I had split up on one of our regular subway rides in Boston. As I waited, a Boston Duck Boat drove by, heading toward its Charles River splash-in point under a highway overpass. I heard the tour guide say something about the Berlin Wall. I walked across the quiet side street and there it was.

So what's a piece of the Berlin Wall -- which from 1961 to 1989 kept residents of Communist East Berlin from escaping to free West Berlin -- doing a nine-hour plane ride away from Germany? Well, as it turns out, pieces of the Wall have been scattered to the four winds and are placed in more than three dozen countries.

There are many chunks of the Wall in the United States, including one just a few miles away from this piece, at Boston's John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum & Library. That segment was donated by the German government. As for the piece outside the business school, I believe that Bertil Hult, the billionaire founder of the business school that bears his name, as well as the international education company Education First, whose North American headquarters is located next door to the Hult school, purchased the wall segment and had it placed outside his building. In this 2013 Boston Globe profile of the businessman, Hult, a native of Sweden, said his hero is Ronald Reagan, who beseeched former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down that wall" in Berlin. Hult said in the article that his company exists to dissolve walls. The tall, heavy concrete chunk with the odd graffiti “symbolizes what we do here,” Hult said. “Free trade and education, you have to have that for a prosperous society.”

Jawohl, Mr. Holt!