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Much of the pleasure of visiting Boston
comes from being in a city that was built long before cars
were invented. Walking around it can be a joy; conversely,
driving is an absolute nightmare. The freeways won't take you
where you want to go, the one-way traffic systems can have you
circling for hours, and if you ever do arrive, parking lots
are thin on the ground and very expensive. There's no point
renting a car in Boston until the day you leave, especially
since the city's public transportation is so good and the
local drivers so bad.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation
Authority (MBTA, known as the " T ") is responsible for
Boston's subway system and trolleybuses . The
subway, which opened in 1897, is the oldest in the US; its
first station, Park Street , remains its center (any
train marked "inbound" is headed here), and is the place to
pick up all schedules and information. Four lines - Red,
Green, Blue and Orange - operate daily from 5am until 1am,
although certain routes begin to shut down earlier. Away from
downtown, the trains emerge from tunnels to run along the
city's major arteries. Though maps are posted at each station,
it's a good idea to pick up the widely available Rapid Transit
maps for reference. Trains are fast and safe; only some parts
of the Orange line might be said to be unsafe after dark.
Within the city, the standard fare is
$1, paid with tokens inserted into turnstiles, but on some
incoming aboveground routes you have to pay extra, up to $2.75
(conversely, some outbound aboveground routes are free). You
can buy eleven tokens for the price of ten, and a Boston
Visitor Pass covers all subway and local bus journeys at a
cost of $6 for a day, $11 for three days, or $22 for a week.
(For MBTA information call 617/222-3200 or
1-800/392-6100 or visit ).
The normal fare on MBTA's local
buses is 75˘, but longer distances, such as out to Salem
or Marblehead, cost up to $2.75. MBTA also runs commuter
rail lines , extending as far as Salem, Ipswich and
Concord; these are based at the unlovely North Station
(tel 617/222-3200) on Causeway Street, under the Fleet Center.
In and around Boston are some eighty
miles of bike trails , making it an excellent city to
explore on two wheels. Bicycles can be rented from the
Community Bike Shop at 490 Tremont St (tel 617/542-8623) and
Back Bay Bikes & Boards, 333 Newbury St (tel
617/247-2336), from mid-March through mid-October. Rentals are
around $10 for two hours; $20-25 per day.
From 1857
onwards, the spacious boulevards and grand houses of Back
Bay were built as each portion of the tidal flats of the
Charles River was filled in. Thus a walk through the area from
east to west provides an object lesson in Victorian
architecture. One of the most architecturally significant - if
not the prettiest - of its buildings is the Romanesque
Trinity Church ($3) on Clarendon Street, supported on
four thousand wooden pilings that have to be kept permanently
moist. Towering over the church is Boston's signature
skyscraper, the John Hancock Tower , an elegant wedge
designed by I.M. Pei, and whose rooftop observatory affords a
glorious panorama of Boston. (At the time of publication the
observatory was closed indefinitely due to security concerns;
call 617/572-6429 for the latest details.) Construction
defects caused the Hancock Tower to shed three thousand panes
of glass during its first year; the cost of insuring a
neighboring hotel against damage was so prohibitive that it
was cheaper for the developers to buy it outright. Copley
Square nearby is an upmarket shopping mall with several
good snack bars and restaurants.
The Christian Science Center
at Huntington and Massachusetts avenues is the "Mother Church"
of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, and the home of the
Christian Science Monitor newspaper; Nelson Mandela
made a point of paying a personal visit in 1990 to thank the
paper for its support of his release from prison. The complex
houses the Mapparium (Mon-Sat 10am-4pm; free), an
impressive glass globe of the world, through which you can
walk on a footbridge. Part of its interest is that it was
built in 1932, and thus shows national boundaries as they were
then.
Further south, beyond the
boundaries of Back Bay and a long enough walk to warrant
taking the Green subway line instead (take the train marked
"E"), is the Museum of Fine Arts at 465 Huntington Ave
(Mon & Tues 10am-4.45pm, Wed-Fri 10am-9.45pm, Sat &
Sun 10am-5.45pm; $14, which includes a free repeat visit
within 30 days, under-17s free, ). From its magnificent
collections of Asian and ancient Egyptian art onwards, this
holds sufficient marvels to detain you all day. High points
include Edward Hopper's tranquil, hopeful Room in
Brooklyn (American Modern room); Andrew Wyeth's Corner
of the Woods (William Coolidge room); Degas' The Little
Dancer ; Gauguin's Where do we come from, What are we,
Where are we going ? (Impressionists room); and Millet's
The Sower (English and French room). Don't miss the
American Decorative Arts , either: a gloriously
nostalgic jamboree of coffee urns, speak-your-weight machines
and reconstructed living rooms. The I.M. Pei-designed West
Wing holds special exhibits and the contemporary art
collection.
A smaller-scale and rather more
idiosyncratic collection of fine arts can be found at the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , down the road at 280
The Fenway (Tues-Sun 11am-5pm; $10, weekends $11). Styled
after a fifteenth-century Venetian villa, the Gardner has a
stunning central courtyard, and is crammed with a hodgepodge
of works collected by the eccentric Boston socialite. Some of
the most interesting pieces are unlabeled, such as the
tapestry of a lion, a sea lion and an elephant above the door
of the Italian room, or the sculpted pigeon on the nearby
windowsill. Relaxing weekend music concerts are held Saturday
and Sunday at 1.30pm and cost an additional $5.
| Black Heritage Trail |
Massachusetts was the first
state to declare slavery illegal, in 1783 - partly as a
result of black participation in the Revolutionary War -
and a large community of free blacks and escaped slaves
swiftly grew in the North End and on Beacon Hill.
Ironically, very few blacks now live on Beacon Hill, but
the Black Heritage Trail through the area
celebrates important sites in local black history (the
various visitor centers provide maps).
Pick up the Trail either at 46 Joy St, where the
Abiel Smith School contains a Museum of
Afro-American History (summer daily 10am-4pm, rest
of year Mon-Sat 10am-4pm; free), illustrating the
national civil rights campaign as well as local history,
or at the African Meeting House at 8 Smith Court
(off Joy St), for displays and talks from well-informed
rangers. Built in 1806 as the first African-American
church in the United States, this became known as "Black
Faneuil Hall" during the abolitionist campaign;
Frederick Douglass issued his call here for all blacks
to take up arms in the Civil War. Among those who
responded were the volunteers of the Massachusetts
54th Regiment , commemorated by a monument at the
edge of Boston Common, opposite the State House, which
depicts their farewell march down Beacon Street. Robert
Lowell won a Pulitzer Prize for his poem, For the Union
Dead, about this monument, and the regiment's tragic end
at Fort Wagner was depicted in the movie Glory. The
Trail then winds around Beacon Hill, passing schools,
other institutions, and residences ranging from the
small, cream clapboard houses of Smith Court to the
imposing Lewis and Harriet Hayden House at 66
Phillips St, once a stop on the famous "Underground
Railroad," sheltering runaway slaves from pursuing
bounty-hunters.
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| Cambridge |
The excursion across the
Charles River to Cambridge merits at least half a
day, starting with a fifteen-minute ride on the Red "T"
line from Park Street to Harvard Square . This is
not so much a square as a number of interlocking
streets, filled with small shopping malls and
bookstores, at the point where Massachusetts Avenue runs
into JFK and Brattle streets. It's an exceptionally
lively area, filled with students from nearby Harvard
University and MIT; the café terrace at Au Bon
Pain makes for enjoyable people-watching, and in
summer street musicians are a common sight. The
Cambridge Visitor Information Booth here (Mon-Sat
9am-5pm; tel 617/497-1630) sporadically organizes
walking tours in summer, and sells local maps and
guides. More thorough information is available from the
Harvard Events & Information Center , Holyoke
Center, 1350 Massachusetts Ave (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm; tel
617/495-1573, ), which also arranges student-led tours.
Feel free to wander into Harvard Yard and
around the core of the university, founded in 1636; its
enormous Widener Library (named for a victim of the
Titanic ) boasts a Gutenberg Bible and a first
folio of Shakespeare. Five minutes' walk west along
Brattle Street is the imposing yellow-fronted mansion at
no. 105, known as Longfellow House , after the
author of Hiawatha , who lived here until 1882. A
century earlier it was briefly the headquarters of
General George Washington. The site has been undergoing
extensive renovation. Call 617/876-4491 or visit to
check hours and admission fee. Dexter Pratt,
immortalized in Longfellow's Under the spreading
chestnut tree, the village smithy stands , lived at
56 Brattle St, now a popular bakery and café.
Cambridge has several first-class art museums on
offer, along with more specialized science museums with
a few engaging exhibits of note. The Harvard
University Art Museums (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm;
$5, free on Wed; tel 617/495-9400) encompasses over
150,000 works of art across three museums. Highlights of
Harvard's substantial collection of Western art are
showcased in the Fogg Art Museum , at 32 Quincy
St, while the Busch-Reisinger Museum on the
second floor has a small but excellent selection
focusing on German Expressionists and the work of the
Bauhaus. Just steps away at 485 Broadway, the Arthur
M. Sackler Museum is devoted to classical, Asian and
Islamic art. The Harvard Museum of Natural
History , at 26 Oxford St (daily 9am-5pm; $6.50),
operates three museums devoted to botany, zoology, and
minerals and geology respectively.
A couple of miles southeast of Harvard Square is the
Massuchusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
whose List Visual Arts Center , 20 Ames St
(Tues-Thurs, Sat & Sun noon-6pm, Fri noon-8pm; tel
617/253-4680), exhibits contemporary art in all media,
including photography and video, and often has
accompanying lectures.
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| Lexington and
Concord |
| On the night of
April 18, 1775, Paul Revere rode down what is now
Massachusetts Avenue from Boston, racing through
Cambridge and Arlington on his way to warn the American
patriots gathered at Lexington of an impending
British attack. Close behind him was a force of more
than four hundred British soldiers, intent on seizing
the supplies that they knew the "rebels" had hoarded at
Concord further north.
Although much of Revere's route has been turned into
major freeways, the various settings of the first
military confrontation of the Revolutionary War - "the
shot heard round the world" - remain much as they were
then. The triangular Town Common at Lexington was
where the British encountered the opposition. Captain
John Parker ordered his 77 American " Minutemen "
to "stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but
if they mean to have a war let it begin here." No one
knows who fired the first shot, but the Minuteman Statue
commemorates the eight Americans who died. Guides in
period costume lead tours of the Buckman Tavern ,
where the Minutemen waited for the British to arrive;
the Hancock-Clarke House a quarter of a mile
north, where Samuel Adams and John Hancock were awakened
by Paul Revere, is now a museum . All three sites
are open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm, on Sunday
from noon to 5pm, and admission to each is $5 or $12 to
visit all three.
By the time the soldiers marched on Concord the next
morning the surrounding countryside was up in arms. In
running battles in the town itself, and along the
still-evocative Battle Road leading back toward
Boston, 73 British soldiers and 49 colonials were killed
over the next two days. The relevant sites now form the
Minuteman National Historic Park , with visitor
centers at the scenic North Bridge (174 Liberty St) in
Concord and at Battle Road in Lexington. Paul Revere's
ride and the Battle of Lexington are re-enacted annually
on Patriot's Day, a city holiday on the third Monday in
April that is also the day of the Boston Marathon.
South of Concord, Walden Pond was where Henry
David Thoreau conducted the experiment in solitude and
self-sufficiency described in his 1854 book
Walden . "I did not feel crowded or confined in
the least," he wrote of life in his simple log cabin.
The site where it stood is now marked with stones, and
at dawn you can still watch the pond "throwing off its
nightly clothing of mist." Thoreau is interred, along
with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa
May Alcott, atop a hill in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
, just east of the center of Concord.
As well as guided bus tours from Boston,
buses run to Lexington from Alewife Station, at
the northern end of the Red "T" line, and trains
to Concord from North Station ($4
one-way |
| Waterfront |
It comes as a disappointment to
realize that you can't walk along Boston's
waterfront for any distance, broken up as it is
by over a dozen heavily developed wharfs jutting into
the harbor. However, if you head straight for the sea
from Quincy Market, Columbus Park , next to the
ugly Marriott Long Wharf Hotel , makes a nice
place to sit. Faneuil Hall originally stood at the head
of Long Wharf , which stuck out nearly two
thousand feet into the harbor, and was the site of the
final British evacuation on March 17, 1776. Later, a
thousand-foot expanse of the waterfront was filled in,
and the Custom House Tower erected to mark the
end of the wharf, though it too now finds itself inland,
as a further thousand feet of new land has been added.
Out on the water, Boston Harbor Cruises (tel
617/227-4321 or 1-877/733-9425, ; inner and outer harbor
$17, inner harbor $8) from Long Wharf are not all that
exciting. The port is nowhere near as busy as when
fishing boats lined the quays three or four deep on all
sides. Instead you pass vast rows of freshly imported
Japanese cars on the quayside, and get a close-up view
of the airport. You can get off one cruise in
Charlestown, to see the USS Constitution , and
catch the next one back for no extra charge.
Close by on Central Wharf, the New England
Aquarium (July & Aug Mon, Tues & Fri
9am-6pm, Wed & Thurs 9am-8pm, Sat & Sun 9am-7pm;
Aug-June Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat & Sun 9am-6pm; $13)
has an outdoor pool of basking sea otters. Inside, the
colossal Giant Ocean Tank, a four-story glass cylinder,
holds sharks, giant turtles and tropical marine life
(with an unsettling emphasis on how "delicious" certain
species are). Scuba divers hand-feed the fish five times
a day, and sea lion shows are held in a floating
amphitheater alongside.
If you follow the shoreline past Rowe's Wharf
(the base for the water shuttles to the airport), a
short distance before South Station the Congress
Street Bridge leads off to the left across the Fort
Point Channel. Moored to the bridge is the Boston Tea
Party Ship and Museum , damaged by fire in 2001 and
closed through the summer of 2002; for hours and
admission fee call 617/338-1773 or visit . This is not
the origi nal Beaver , one of the three ships
stormed by patriots in 1773, but a replica, Beaver
II , sailed here from Denmark in 1973. Neither is it
the original mooring, which was on the now-demolished
Griffin's Wharf; instead it's the site of the house
where the conspirators prepared their assault.
On the far side of the bridge, a forty-foot milk
bottle , which serves as an ice-cream parlor and
sandwich bar, marks the Children's Museum , 300
Congress St (Mon-Thurs, Sat & Sun 10am-5pm, Fri
10am-9pm; $7, children $6, Fri 5-9pm $1 for all). The
five floors of educational exhibits are designed to
entice kids into learning by doing, with plenty of
buttons to push, strings to pull and tunnels to crawl
through, as well as costumes, water toys and climbing
structures.
The Museum of Science , in the Science Park on
the Charles River Dam at the northern end of the
waterfront, not far from North Station (summer daily
9am-7pm; rest of year Mon-Thurs, Sat & Sun 9am-5pm,
Fri 9am-9pm; $11, children $8), has several floors of
hands-on exhibits illustrating basic principles of
natural and physical science. An impressive OMNIMAX
cinema takes up the full height of one end of the
building, and the Hayden Planetarium pays its way with
Pink Floyd laser shows and the like ($7.50, children
$5.50; call 617/723-2500 for show times).
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