I am sure I am offending someone out there, but really, how can I be alone on this?

I can’t stand all those 1970s hotels built to look like castles. Frankly, I can’t stand the Tudor style, period, end of sentence. Anytime I see it on a house I picture myself as the owner trying to calculate the cost of ripping off the painfully phony exterior.

So I am not shedding any tears with the news this morning that hotel developer Dick Friedman, who masterminded Cambridge’s Charles Hotel and the redevelopment of the old Charles Street lockup in Boston into the upscale Liberty Hotel, is about to put the old Sheraton Tara in Braintree, with its mock medieval turrets, out of its misery.

Freidman’s Carpenter & Co. and Baynorth Capital are breaking ground today on a sweeping redevelopment of the old Sheraton into a modern, 204 room Hyatt Place Hotel.

The redevelopment will also include a new 32,000 square foot retail building as well.

It’s great to have championship sports teams.

But at the end of the day, it’s even better to have championship hospitals and research centers.

Boston healthcare and research institutions pulled in more than $2.1 billion in federal research funding in 2010.

It marked the 16^th straight year that Boston’s booming healthcare sector had led the nation in pulling down grant money from the National Institutes of Health, according to a new report by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Boston’s lead in NIH funding in 2010 was nearly $400 million over second place New York.

And despite the federal budget crisis, Boston research hospitals, institutions, universities and private firms as well are set to ring the bell for another $2 billion in NIH funding this year as well, the report finds.

The office market, whether you are talking about Boston or Boise, is all about jobs.

If companies are hiring and unemployment is going down, empty office space starts to disappear and rents rise. When bad times hit, the opposite happens.

Now it looks like the office market is starting to feel the impact of the slowdown in the economic recovery.

The good news is that the amount of empty office space across the country dropped by 3.7 million square feet in the last quarter. The bad news is this represents a decline from the stronger showing by the national office market during the first three months of the year, when companies took down 5.5 million square feet, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing Reis Inc.

I thought I needed to get my eyes checked when I read the latest bioSTATus report by Richards Barry Joyce & Partners and saw a 0 percent vacancy number along Route 128.

Looks like my eyes are OK.

Waltham and Lexington make up the core of the fast growing lab market on 128.

And yes, there is no available lab space in the 1.3 million square foot submarket, Brian Joyce, a spokesman for the firm, confirmed.

So have the Sox struck out in their long-standing efforts to reshape the once gritty neighborhood around Fenway Park to the fabled franchise’s liking? Or has the  team’s vision suddenly changed?

That’s the question lurking behind the development gold rush taking place around Fenway Park, one that is seeing every available lot scooped up by developers with plans for new apartments, offices and shops.

The Abbey Group wants to replace a now empty lot near Fenway Park – once home to the now demolished Boylston Street McDonald’s - with a pair of office and apartment mid-rises.

It follows a steady stream of new apartment towers being rolled out in the same area by developer Steve Samuels.

During the reign of Janet Marie Smith, the ballpark preservationist who brought ailing Fenway back to life, the Sox aggressively pushed back against Samuels and other would-be tower developers looking to build near the ballpark.

The team even succeeded in moving one proposal from Lansdowne Street to another site farther away from Fenway Park.

Why? Well the team was concerned this flood of development might bring in a flood of upscale neighbors intent on putting all sorts of restrictions on the operations of the noisy ballpark next door.

Clearly Sox owner John Henry wasn’t interested in pumping hundreds of millions into the renovation of 1912 ballpark only to find the team on the wrong end of a wave of gentrification.

But in the nearly two years since Smith was squeezed out, the Sox either have quietly reversed that policy or have been incredibly inept enforcing it. I think the former is more likely.

Whatever the case, the neighborhood around Fenway Park is fast becoming one of the hottest residential zip codes around.

So do upscale apartment towers and baseball stadiums make good neighbors?

Only time will tell, but so far so good.