Much-maligned Boston City Hall Plaza has been getting some good press lately, especially in the Boston Globe, for efforts to spruce/lively it up.

And now Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s relentless red-brick-revival is garnering national recognition, via the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Kamp.

Boston’s Maligned City Hall Plaza Gets a Makeover

BOSTON—On a recent sweltering weekday, three young women did something unusual outside the imposing, concrete City Hall building here: They took a seat.

Allison Baldwin and two co-workers from a nearby advertising firm were relaxing in plastic Adirondack chairs next to a lush, fake lawn, all installed as part of Boston’s latest effort to rejuvenate one of the nation’s most maligned public spaces. Built during the midcentury heyday of bulldozer-oriented urban renewal, the City Hall Plaza is a largely empty, more than 200,000-square-foot expanse of red bricks wrapping partially around the city’s headquarters.

The nonprofit Project for Public Spaces includes the plaza in its “hall of shame,” calling it “one of the most disappointing places in America.”

Now maybe not so much.

Interestingly, the Journal piece fails to mention the paper’s own Ada Louise Huxtable, one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of Boston’s Brutalist Boondoggle.

Regardless, good news for a town that could really use it, yeah?