Although the metropolitan area of BOSTON has long since expanded to fill the
shoreline of Massachusetts Bay , and stretches for miles inland as well, the
seventeenth-century port at its heart is still discernible. Forget the neat grids
of modern urban America; the twisting streets clustered around Boston Common
are a reminder of how the nation started out, and the city is enjoyably human in scale.
Boston was, until 1755, the biggest city in America; as the one most directly affected
by the latest whims of the British Crown, it was the natural birthplace for the
opposition that culminated in the Revolutionary War . Numerous evocative sites
from that era are preserved along the Freedom Trail through downtown. Since then,
however, Boston has in effect turned its back on the sea. As the third busiest port
in the British Empire (after London and Bristol), it stood on a narrow peninsula.
What is now Washington Street provided the only access by land, and when the
British set off to Lexington in 1775 they embarked in ships from the Common itself.
During the nineteenth century, the Charles River marshlands were filled in to create
the posh Back Bay residential area.
There is a certain truth in the charge leveled by other Americans that Boston likes
to live in the past; echoes of the "Brahmins" of a century ago can be heard in the
upper-class drawl of the posher districts. But this is by no means just a city of WASPs:
the Irish who began to arrive in large numbers after the Great Famine had produced
their first mayor as early as 1885, and the president of the whole country within a
hundred years. The liberal tradition that spawned the Kennedys remains alive, fed
in part by the presence in the city of more than one hundred universities and colleges,
the most famous of which - Harvard University - actually stands in the city of
Cambridge, just across the Charles River, and is fully integrated into the tourist
experience thanks to the area's excellent subway system.
Quincy Market has served as a blueprint for urban development
worldwide, and with its busy street life, imaginative museums and galleries, fine
architecture and palpable history, Boston is the one destination in New England
there's no excuse for missing.
Boston has grown up around Boston Common , which was set aside as public land
in 1634. The obvious first stop on any tour of the city, it is also one of the gems in
the string of nine parks (six of which were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted,
America's foremost landscape architect) known as Boston's Emerald Necklace .
Another gem is the lovely Public Garden , across Charles Street, where the two-ton
swan boats ($1.50), which paddle across the main pond, are a less-than-natural,
though whimsical, focal point.
The visitor center - the start of the Freedom Trail - is near the tapering north end
of the Common. As you stand here, facing up Tremont Street with the State House
away to your left, the main shopping district, Quincy Market , and the waterfront
are slightly ahead and down to the right. The modern concrete wasteland of
Government Center is straight up Tremont Street, with the North End beyond -
first Irish, then Jewish, and now very definitely Italian. A short way behind you
on the left rises Beacon Hill , every bit as elegant as when Henry James called
Mount Vernon Street "the most prestigious address in America" (and far removed
from its eighteenth-century nickname of "Mount Whoredom"). Heading away from
the center down Tremont Street brings you to Chinatown and the Theater District ,
while grand boulevards such as Commonwealth Avenue lead west from the
Public Garden into the Back Bay , where Harvard Bridge runs across the Charles River
into Cambridge .
OTHER POPULAR DESTINATIONS IN MASSACHUSETTS
Andover
Boston
Burlington
Cambridge
Cape Cod Greater Area
Danvers
Hyannisport
Lenox
Marlborough
Martha's Vineyard
Milford
Northampton
Pittsfield
Plymouth
Provincetown
Springfield
Sturbridge
Waltham
West Springfield
Westborough
Woburn
Worcester