Home builder Lennar Corp. is suing two Chinese manufacturers of drywall, claiming the wallboard is defective and is causing electrical problems and emitting rotten odors in dozens of homes across Florida.

Lennar, of course, is famous around these parts for trying, and failing, to buy Fan Pier.

Just when you thought low tide couldn’t smell any worse…

I will counter with this dude, whom I shared a Green Line car with this morning. And this is how it went…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sRo80A-ZpU

After the jump, a couple hastily-snapped cell phone pictures of the Giant’s posse touching up their work. Good looking stuff.

But who needs rent money when you’ve got totally subversive and unprofessional government memos? That’s what we’ve got here. By all means, please do read on.

Here’s a quick addendum to a post from last month on urban renewal run amok in the Back Bay, and to this item in the April issue of Boston (On newsstands now! Buy buy buy!).

While I was researching the history of the Back Bay Architectural District’s borders and the debate over whether the district could be saved from itself with the addition of a couple modernist residential towers, I came across this July, 1967 memo from a BRA planning official named William Weismantel.

Weismantel sketched out three possible outcomes to a proposal to build towers in the Back Bay. High-rises might mix attract new residents and spur rehabilitation of the neighborhood’s increasingly shabby row houses; they might not mix with the neighborhood, and instead become oases of wealth in the midst of a death-spiraling slum; or, the city could block the towers altogether, and instead focus on preserving and rehabbing the Back Bay’s existing buildings.

It’s the second possible outcome that terrifies Weismantel, and he sketches it out in language that, it’s safe to say, rarely finds its way into BRA memos anymore:

New high rise fails to stimulate rehabilitation of row houses. High rise face out towards Public Garden or Charles River, on Arlington Street and the water side of Beacon Street, trying to ignore the “environmental sink” overcoming the middle of the district. In the middle, old row houses get older without the benefit of rehabilitation, except the worst kind: conversion to tiny apartments, dormitories, rooming houses, fraternities. William Lloyd Garrison’s statue on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall is pulled down and Dr. Timothy Leary’s lifted onto the empty pedestal during one of the spontaneous love-ins.

BRA planners don’t exactly write like that anymore. Sad.

The answer goes back to urban renewal, when Mayor Collins and the BRA were tearing down and encasing in concrete as much of the city as they could. Collins even proposed saving Old Boston from itself by placing up to eight high-rise condo towers along the A, B, C and D blocks of the Comm. Ave. Mall.

The Back Bay historic district was formed, in part, as a way to keep Collins from doing to the neighborhood what he was doing to Scollay Square.

The historical preservation push didn’t come without a good deal of controversy, though. I came across this utterly hilarious – not to mention wicked prescient – 1964 letter from noted local architect Isidor Richmond to the City Council, begging them to slap a few towers in Frederick Law Olmsted’s park before it was too late.

The consequences of not doing so were dire indeed. Without condo towers, Richmond warned, Comm. Ave. would become “A region of rooming houses and eventually a slum, with all the attendant evils of a bad slum. It is now necessary to tear down and reconstruct the South End by Urban Renewal… The days of Commonwealth Avenue are numbered unless something extraordinary is done.”