By the sheer glory of its Boylston Street parcel, the Verb came into this world in 2014 having inherited vaunted status. The former storied site of a unique atomic age HoJo’s motor lodge that Ben Affleck’s heist gang in “The Town” used to case the ballpark across Van Ness Street, it was also home to, almost as notably, the dimly lit Hong Kong Cafe and its long running open mic night where I bombed several times in the aughts.
But while the Verb could have coasted on its location alone, from the beginning its attentive management committed to paying proper homage, and it has done that with the guidance, curation, and unrivaled stockpile of collector extraordinaire David Bieber and his namesake archive based in Norwood. On Monday, to mark 10 years of chronicling and sometimes excavating popular culture for guests and visitors to ogle, the team behind the hotel’s rotating exhibits held a “salon gathering” and “group discussion about WBCN, WFNX, and the Boston Phoenix, as well as music and media in Boston from the 1970s, 1980s, and all the decades forward into today’s cultural climate.”