💧 The Legend of Larry Owl

[This post sits at the intersection of technology and 20th century history.]
At 42 Lomasney Way in downtown Boston, there’s a brownstone known as the Last Tenement. Built in the 1870s, it was once part of blocks and blocks of similar buildings. Now, it stands as the last of its kind, penned in by modern glass-walled skyscrapers.

The Last Tenement
[Photo courtesy of P. Kafasis]

In the 1950s, Boston was the victim of a horrifying urban renewal, and the West End neighborhood was almost entirely demolished:

Your browser doesn’t support the video tag. Click to download and watch in another app. Mid-20th century urban planning had problems.

Legends of how this particular building escaped the wrecking ball abound. Whatever the truth, it’s the only nearby structure that wasn’t razed. Still standing in 2025, the Last Tenement is now home to four apartments and two billboards. For at least the past decade, the building’s south-facing billboard has played host to a continuous succession of Apple advertisements:

This 2015 photo of a photo shot with an iPhone 6 was itself shot with an iPhone 6.
[Photo courtesy of P. Kafasis]

Recently, Apple shipped their AI-powered Genmoji feature, which enables you to create your own custom emoji. I’ve used it to make useful gems like a dumpster fire, as well as a sack to stuff your sorries into:

It’s an expression!1

Apple has advertised Genmoji with snails driving cars, pigeons donning clothes, and even this enormous2 pizza rat:

The Last Tenement’s billboard was part of this Genmoji campaign as well. It featured the following ad:

I run through this area frequently, so I noted this ad after it went up. Because I was often focused on just how miserable running in a frigid Boston winter can be, however, I didn’t think too much about it. “OK, sure, an owl basketball player” was about as far as my cold-addled brain got.

Eventually, though, the penny dropped. After my umpteenth time passing the billboard, while trying to distract myself from the single-digit temperatures and the brutal wind chill, I realized what I’d been missing. That’s not just a basketball-playing foul fowl.

You see, the Last Tenement is located just a few hundred feet from TD Garden, home arena for the reigning NBA champion Boston Celtics. The Celtics have had many great players over the years, but only one had the last name “Bird”. Yes, this billboard is surely an allusion to the Hick from French Lick, Larry Bird.

It was obvious once I finally saw it, and I was so amused that I went by with my phone to snap the above pic. At that point, I noticed that the cartoon’s basketball jersey even seems to feature Larry Legend’s #33. It’s cut off, perhaps in the hopes of avoiding a lawsuit, but those numbers really can’t be anything else.

Having now studied the ad quite closely, I suspect that this Genmoji was not created with a simple text prompt like “A bird playing basketball”. Instead, I’m betting it’s based on an actual picture of Larry Bird, specifically Kurt Shimala’s picture featured on Bird’s Wikipedia page. Just look at this comparison:

Larry Bird bird vs. Larry Bird

For reference, the real Larry Bird is the one not wearing sunglasses.

I would love to know if this particular ad was created exclusively for the location. If you spotted it elsewhere in the world, get in touch. Until I hear otherwise, though, I will assume this was a hyper-specific one-off. Either way, props to the Apple marketer who thought to put a Genmoji Larry Bird bird right next to the Celtics’ home.

Footnotes:

The relevant Seinfeld clip is archived here. ↩︎

It’s on a big billboard, so it is literally an enormous rodent. But setting that aside, do you think it’s a huge rat or a very tiny slice of pizza? ↩︎