A Short Walk Through Longwood...and Mission Hill

From Dave Brigham:

I'm going to dispense with my usual introductory information and just get right to some random photos of Boston's Mission Hill and Longwood neighborhoods, along with some descriptions.

(These two beauties are part of the Mission Hill Triangle, an architectural conservation district bound by Huntington Avenue and Tremont, Worthington and Smith streets. Seventy-one of the 74 buildings in the district were built in the late 19th century.)

(Located at the corner of Wigglesworth and Tremont streets, Flann O'Brien's pub is named after the Irish novelist, playwright and satirist whose real name was Brian O'Nolan. The sculpture over the door is pretty damn impressive.)

(Around the corner heading west on Huntington Avenue is Carman's Beauty Salon. According to Yelp reviews, this is a "Dominican spot" that offers great haircuts and styles at reasonable prices.)

(Reversing direction on Huntington, on the same side of the street, we see this faded beauty, with just a hint of a ghost sign. Opened in 1885 as The Helvetia, this was an apartment hotel, per Wikipedia.)

(Hopping across Huntington Ave. takes you to the Longwood area of Boston, which is thick with hospitals, medical schools and other such facilities. Above is a statue of Sidney Farber, found of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Einar Gustafson, the young patient who in 1948 helped launch the Jimmy Fund [Jimmy was the name used to protect the boy's privacy], in front of a research facility named for the late Red Sox owner Thomas Yawkey. Erected in 2013, the statue recognizes the strong bond between cancer research and Boston's baseball teams, the Red Sox and the one-time Braves.)

(A short distance away from the Jimmy Fund statue is the former Boston Lying-In Hospital. Established in 1832 as one of the nation's first maternity hospitals, the Lying-In merged with the Free Hospital for Women in 1966 and eventually became part of Brigham & Women's Hospital.)

(This is as close as I'm ever going to get to Harvard Medical School. Through that wonderful arch you see in the background is a regulation tennis court, just one of the many amenities for all the smarty pants folks who live here. Other fitness options include an indoor basketball court, two singles squash courts, two weight rooms, a cardiovascular room, a climbing wall, a spinning studio, and a group fitness room, per the school's web site for Vanderbilt Hall, which dates to 1927 and is the nation's oldest medical school residence.)

(Last, but certainly not least even in and among the hallowed medical halls it is surrounded by, we have Sami's Vanderbilt Food Trolly, known as Sami's. Offering falafel, hummus, shawarma and kebobs since 1979 - minus the two years between 2012 and 2014 -- the sort-of food truck unfortunately recently announced that it's closing. "Sami's fed all of us after leaving the clubs [in the late '80s,]" says one sad commenter on Universal Hub. "Doctors, nurses, punk rockers from Kenmore, all in line together to enjoy the comfort food of Sami's!!")

R.I.P., Sami's