Like many universities, or indeed many large institutions, Northeastern’s history is seeped in the stories of numerous property acquisitions.

Some of those, of course, have been quite scandalous. Northeastern’s Speare Hall, for example, lies on Huntington Avenue between the Boston Symphony and the Museum of Fine Arts – on land which was once housed a magnificent “temple of music”; Boston’s original Opera House.

Opened in 1909, the glory of this opera house was unfortunately short-lived. Its original opera company went bankrupt by 1915. Various theater companies used the space, but the building fell into disrepair.

In 1957, the property was purchased by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, who sold it to Northeastern a week later. It’s unclear to me exactly how transparent this deal was. In a 2009 story, the Boston Globe indicated that the building really was far past repair, and mentions off-handedly that a Northeastern building now sits there.

But in a 2011 piece from Northeastern’s student newspaper, Emeritus Professor Wilfred Holton indicates a different story:

“It was kind of sneaky how they did it,” said Holton. ”Northeastern said they had no interest in the building. Then the developers bought it and it looked like Northeastern had a deal with them because within a week, the university bought it from them. But the university got away with it, obviously.”

Despite the sale, Boston’s cultural community tried to save the building, but “the condition of the building required it to be demolished and rebuilt.”

While I imagine some are skeptical of the necessity of this demolition, Northeastern’s 1976 Master Plan is clear that the Boston Opera House “had been condemned as
unsafe prior to acquisition by Northeastern.”

Apparently a brick from the original building is preserved in the university archives.

What started me on this story, though, was the history of Northeastern’s Holmes’ Hall. Purchased in 1961 and dedicated in 1979, four Northeastern buildings – Lake Hall, Meserve Hall, Nightingale Hall, and Holmes Hall – once belonged to United Drug Company.

United Drug Company (UCD) was the corporate force behind the retail chain of Rexall Drug Stores. Founded in 1903 by Louis Kroh Liggett, the Boston-based company once boasted “as many as 12,000 drug stores across the United States.”

Incidentally, Liggett apparently got his start selling “Vinol” made from wine and cod livers. It’s unclear to me exactly what ailment this tonic was intended to address.

Northeastern’s archives – which house an odd assortment of Rexall remedies – indicates that “in the 1930s, UDC built six buildings on its Boston campus that housed its corporate offices and manufacturing and research facilities.” While many of these buildings were eventually demolished, Northeastern renovated one UDC building – splitting it into the four Northeastern buildings which exist today.

Now, somebody had told me that one of these buildings, Holmes Hall, used to be a rubber factory – a fact I was beginning to doubt as I read about the history of United Drug Company.

But then I ran across this tidbit. After the initial construction of “a small factory” in Boston, “A candy making department was the next installation, followed by one for perfumery in 1905. Stationery and fountain supplies were added in 1910, rubber goods in 1912, brushes in 1913 and hospital items in 1919.”

So I guess United Drug Company had a rather diverse manufacturing portfolio.

John N. Ingham’s Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders, Volume 2 – the book you never knew you needed – confirms this history, noting that “United’s first product was a dyspepsia tablet, but it soon was bringing out a wide variety of patent medicines, along with spices, toilet soap, candy, and rubber goods.”

Furthermore, optically scanned versions of various trademark and patent applications can be found online.

But what I really want to know is how the still-standing building maps onto UDC’s original operation.

Some indications of this can be found in a 1998 Northeastern publication:

Evidence of the United Drug Company survives today. Fired terra-cotta shields at the tops of the beveled corners at Greenleaf Street carry the lettering “UD Co.” On the fifth floor of Lake Hall, the Math Department enjoys the dark wood paneling and marble fireplace of United Drug’s president’s office. Every floor in the building carries a large, walk-in safe, perhaps for protecting secret product formulas. And over the door on the Leon Street end of today’s Ryder Building is a carved sign: United Drug Company Department of Research and Technology.

And one more fun fact revealed by that document:

In 1961, Northeastern purchased a seven-acre parcel of land from the United Realty Company. The entire, red-brick industrial complex occupying the site, once owned by the United Drug Company, was to be razed to make way for a sports facility. After reducing three blocks of buildings facing Forsyth Street to rubble, however, the demolition crew was ordered to stop. The University had grown so rapidly that the old buildings now had to be salvaged for offices and laboratories.”

So, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this morning trying to figure out answers to what I thought were somewhat straightforward questions. First, when did people in various western European countries stop celebrating their Saints’ day – or name day, if you will – and second, how did the various reorganizations of the liturgical calendar affect name day celebrations?

I rather thought there would be plenty of information and resources to explore these questions, but I’m afraid I’ve merely found fragments.

The Catholic Church has celebrated feast days for important saints nearly since its inception. St. Martin of Tours, born in 316 in Sabaria (now Szombathely, Hungary) is thought to be the first saint – or at least the first to not die as a marytr.

Saint days quickly became a staple of the early Catholic church. As Christian Rohr has argued, these were not just days of religious observance, but were deeply seeped in the symbols and politics of their times:

I had planned today to write something commemorating the centenary of Ireland’s Easter Rising; the quickly-crushed insurrection which paved the way for the Irish Free State.

But such reflections seem somewhat callous against the grim backdrop of current world events.

Just this weekend, a suicide bomber killed at least 70 – mostly children – in an attack on a park in Lahore, Pakistan.

I debated this morning whether to write about that instead. Whether to grieve the mounting death toll from attacks around the world, or whether to question, again, our seemingly preferential concern for places like Brussels and Paris. Or perhaps to highlight the inequities evident in such headlines as CNN’s In Pakistan, Taliban’s Easter bombing targets, kills scores of Christians.

The majority of those killed were Muslim.

Perhaps these details hardly matter; it is all of it a horror.

But if I were to write about every global tragedy, these pages would find room for little else. There is no end to suffering, no limit of atrocity.

Perhaps I should write instead about Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, who – twenty years after orchestrating the ethnic cleansing of Srebrenica – was just convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by a United Nations tribunal.

Of course, such news also serves as a reminder that Omar al-Bashir, the current, sitting president of Sudan, is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is also widely considered to be a perpetrator of genocide, though the ICC demurred from making that charge. The ICC issued its arrest warrant in 2009, citing numerous crimes committed since 2003. Bashir won reelection in 2010 and again in 2015.

It is all too much.

Perhaps I should write about the Easter Rising – a notable event for my own family – after all.

In the midsts of World War I, on Easter Monday 1916, 1,600 Irish rebels seized strategic government buildings across Dublin. From the city’s General Post Office, Patrick Pearse and other leading of the rising, issued a Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic:

We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people.

The overwhelming superiority of British artillery soon put an end to the provisional government.  Over 500 people were killed; more than half were civilians. In The Rising historian Fearghal McGarry argues that Irish rebels attempted to avoid needless bloodshed, while, according to  one British soldier, the British troops, “regarded, not unreasonably, everyone they saw as an enemy, and fired at anything that moved.”

During the fighting, the British artillery attacks were so intense that the General Post Office (GPO) was left as little but a burnt-out shell. As an aside, the GPO housed generations of census records and other government documents – making my mother’s efforts to recreate my family tree permanently impossible.

After the the rebellion had been crushed, fifteen people identified as leaders were executed by firing squad the following week.

This week is rightly a time of commemoration and celebration in Ireland. The brutality of the British response galvanized the Irish people – among whom the uprising had initially been unpopular. The tragedy of the Easter Rising thus led to Irish freedom and, after many more decades, ultimately to peace.

It’s a long and brutal road, but amid all the world’s horrors, confronted by man’s undeniable inhumanity to man, perhaps it is well to remember: we do have the capacity for change.