Jay Becker lived in Whittier Place, a high-rise overlooking the Charles River or the Fleet Center depending on the placement of your condo.

Whittier Place is part of the Charles River Apartments, a horrific complex of modern luxury housing built in the seventies along with City Hall, the Hurley and Lindemann Center buildings, and the JFK Building to replace the old West End neighborhood, which several genius city planners decided had to be razed so Boston in the 1970s would look like London in A Clockwork Orange.

The West End had looked a lot like the North End, if a bit dustier and dingier in places due to its proximity to the red-light districts of Scollay Square and North Station. The red-light districts are gone now, as is the West End, as are most pedestrians after five o’clock. In the place of a neighborhood, city planners erected a cement complex of squat sprawling erector-set municipal buildings, no function and all form, and the form hideous too, and tall cinder-block apartment complexes that look like nothing so much as an arid, characterless hell.

“If You Lived Here,” the clever signs told us as we looped around Storrow Drive toward the entrance to Whittier Place, “You’d Be Home Now.”

“If I lived in this car,” Angie said, “wouldn’t I be home, too?”

“Or under that bridge.”

“Or in the Charles.”

“Or in that Dumpster.”

We ran with that until we found a parking space, another place we’d call home had we lived there.

“You really hate modern, don’t you?” she said as we walked toward Whittier Place and I looked up at it with a scowl on my face.

I shrugged. “I like modern music. Some TV shows are better than they’ve ever been. That’s about it, though.”

“There’s not a single modern piece of architecture you like?”

“I don’t instantaneously want to nuke Hancock Towers or the Heritage when I see them. But Frank Lloyd Wrong and I. M. Pei have never designed a house or building which could compete with even the most basic Victorian.”

“You’re definitely a Boston boy, Patrick. Through and through.”

I nodded as we walked up toward the doors of Whittier Place. “I just want them to leave my Boston alone, Ange. Go to Hartford if they want to build shit like this. Or L.A. Wherever. Just away.”

She squeezed my hand, and I looked in her face, saw a smile there.