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.
Central Boston is now slightly set
back from the water, separated by
the hideous John Fitzgerald
Expressway that carries I-93 across
downtown. The city has been working
on routing the traffic underground
and disposing of this eyesore (a
project a decade in the making known
as "the Big Dig"), though
the monumental task won't likely be
completed before 2004, much to the
frustration of locals.
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.
The slump of the Depression
seemed to linger in Boston for years
- even in the 1950s, the population
was actually dwindling - but these
days the place definitely has a
rejuvenated feel to it. 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.
