Ubiquitous blandness?: Let it be known: Hub Blog hopes I'm wrong. It's still early. But I strolled down to the North End today and got an early-bird view of the post-Big Dig landscaping. I think it's going to be a bummer for all of us who had high hopes for something much, much better, i.e., Did they learn ANYTHING from the City Hall Plaza all-brick/concrete debacle? It looks like an urban landscape that might appear in Phoenix or somewhere else -- a minimalist urban park system that you'd expect from someone trying to skimp on landscaping costs. The entire sidewalk around the North End's Salem Street entrance is all ... brick. Not Boston bricks. Something that looks like cheap imitation Terracotta-brick siding on a high school gym or bus station. ... I walked along the "new" Salem Street, beheld a new computerized landscape rendering attached to a Jersey Barrier and used my Sidewalk Superintendent Logic to come to the conclusion that: Anything that looks mediocre in a computerized landscape rendering attached to a Jersey Barrier is usually going to look inferior in reality. ... The design looks cheap and lazy.  ¶ 7:18 PM