Good Will Hunting slept here.

Maybe if I watched it now, it would seem dated. And/or silly.

But 25+ years ago, when it was first released, Good Will Hunting was fresh and interesting. Poor boy from the underclass of the Boston underclass turns out to be a math genius, sticks it to the Harvard bros, and gets the girl. Plus a local setting. (Plus, of course, it was our introduction to a couple of local fellows - Matt Damon and Ben Affleck - who ended up making pretty good.)

The plot has Will commuting on the Red Line to his work as a janitor at MIT, where he spends his workday swabbing floors and sneaking into classrooms to solve insolvable equations left on the board in Building 5. (Not surprisingly, buildings at MIT have numbers, as do the majors/courses. I was in course 15 - the Sloan School of Management - and our HQ was Building 52. I also had classes in Building 6 and Building 54, among others.) Will's day of swabbing and solving over, Will returned - after a bit of time knocking back a few boilermakers in some South Boston dive bar - to his apartment in a dump of Southie triple decker.

When my brother Rick was a very young man, he lived for a while in a dump of a double-triple-decker in Southie. How big of a dump was it? For a housewarming gift, my sister Kath and I bought him a toilet seat. 

That would have been in the late 1970's. Good Will Hunting takes place in 1997, and Southie's fern bars and Catholic churches converted to condos gentrification was still more than a decade away.

In 1997, Southie had some nice residential sections, mostly those down by the water, but it was largely a working class enclave, full of three deckers, modest single family homes, ramshackle apartment buildings, and projects. And largely Irish Catholic.

But location, location, location. And like Boston's Italian North End, the "natives" were pushed out by gentrifiers: young singles working in finance and tech who wanted to be close to the action, and empty nesters leaving the 'burbs so they could be in on the action, too. 

Old buildings were torn down or converted to condos, bars, coffee shops, and restaurants. One of my friends graduated from Cardinal Cushing High School in South Boston. Her school building has long gone the way of an upscale condo building. It's just across the street from what used to be Saints Peter and Paul Church. They kept the building, but it's now condos, too. (Because who wouldn't want to live in a converted Catholic church?)

Another friend was an empty nester who sold up and out of the suburbs and bought a condo in South Boston in a converted two family. After a few years in their very charming condo, she and her husband decamped to DC to be closer to their grandkids. And they sold their very charming condo for more than twice what they paid for it, and without ever having to put it on the market. (The realtor they contacted had a buyer ready, willing, and able to get into Southie. The buyer was willing to avoid a bidding war, so opened LARGE. My friends were delighted to get well above what they anticipated asking.)

Since my friend moved to DC, I haven't been over to South Boston - need to go basis, only, and I have little by way of need to go. (Although I used to attend pretty regularly, I no longer go to the St. Patrick's Day Parade, which marches through Southie.) But I do walk over there every once in a while and I'm always astounded by the new construction, new shops, new restaurants, new etc. 

It is inevitable that Will Hunting's home would be gentrified. 

A two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in Will's building is now renting for $4,500 a month. 

The home’s dilapidated vibe in the film (recall the stacked tires and broken furniture strewn across the yard) is no longer. Now it’s considerably more upscale — and so unrecognizable that it took an eagle-eyed podcast host to point it out on Twitter.

“It’s just amazing. I didn’t realize it. I don’t think the owner realized it,” said Frank Celeste of Gibson Sotheby’s, who shares the listing with Ash Williams. “It’s gone crazy with everybody’s interest.” (Source: Boston Globe)

The apartment has only 1,000 square feet of very nice reno that includes the coveted in-flat laundry. And it even comes with a parking place, which means that you don't have to leave a kitchen chair, orange traffic cone, or statue of the Sacred Heart as a space-claimer when you shoveled your street parking out after a storm. (The city finally cracked down on this practice of long-standing. Now, I think you get 48 hours to claim your space, after which DPW comes around and trashes your space-saver.)

It's pretty amazing to me that rents have gotten so high in South Boston, but such is the gentrifying march of time.

The Globe article beat me to the obvious punchline:

How do you like them apples?