Coastal Adventure # 8: I'll Pahk My Cah in Hahvahd Yahd

If you can translate the title, then you know that the next visit was to Baahston (Boston).  And yes, I know I'm exaggerating the accent!

My love affair with the history of Boston began decades before I ever visited the city.  As a teenager, I loved reading the Reader’s Digest condensation of Irving Stone’s novel Those Who Love, a biographic novel of Abigail Adams, the wife of second U.S. President John Adams and mother of the sixth President, John Quincy Adams (I still have the Condensed Books volume in question, by the way).  Since the Adams family lived in the greater Boston area, a good deal of its geography and history made its way into Stone’s novel, along with a strongly human sense of the tension that necessarily accompanied the birth of a nation by means both revolutionary and evolutionary.

Although I visited Boston several times in and around the years 1999 and 2000, I never really had a chance to do a thorough workman-like job of touring the city’s historic sites and monuments.  Well, a one-day cruise ship stop is hardly the ideal method, but I managed to accomplish at least a bit of my desire to become more familiar with a city whose history is so closely interwoven with that of the nation.

To get from the cruise ship terminal into the centre of the city, we had to drive across a block-wide strip of parkland and assorted public spaces, the Rose Kennedy Green Belt.  I already knew what it was, because the last time I was in Boston, I nearly went crazy trying to navigate in and out and round about what was, at the time, a gigantic construction site.  The Green Belt covers the multi-lane buried expressway which used to be elevated, and was moved underground through the 15-year project known as the “Big Dig”.  Bostonians are always very, very careful of how they pronounce that name!

But what a difference it’s made to the character of the city!  The waterfront, formerly cut off, is now a vibrant, integrated part of the life of the downtown area, and the whole city on both sides of the Big Dig looks cleaner, neater, livelier than it did before.  Toronto civic leaders, take note!

As soon as we drove into town, I was reminded of the narrow streets, and the lack of system in the layout.  No grids here!  Central Boston shares with London the characteristic (noted by Helene Hanff) that you can walk a block, turn left, walk a block, turn left, walk a block, turn left, and walk one more block – and be nowhere near where you started.  Only in the area west of the Boston Common, known as the Back Bay neighbourhood, does a dependable grid pattern appear. 

We actually had the first stop of our tour in Copley Square, the heart of Back Bay.  Here, we saw the monumental Trinity Episcopal Church mirrored in the John Hancock Insurance skyscraper.

Across the Square from Trinity Church is the classic elegance of the Boston Public Library.

We then drove past the Public Garden on our way to Beacon Hill.

Up on Beacon Hill, we passed the gilded dome of the State House, the Massachusetts capitol building.

Back in the downtown area, we passed the Old State House building.  From this historic balcony, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud to the crowd of Bostonians in the street in July of 1776.

We stopped in the North End, to walk up past the famous statue of Paul Revere…

…and then to view the Old North Church, in whose tower the lanterns were hung by Revere’s order to warn of British troop movements, “one if by land and two if by sea.”

When we rejoined the bus, we drove across the Charles River into Cambridge, to visit the campus of Harvard University.  Since it was a Sunday, the tree-shaded courts of Harvard Yard were especially peaceful and beautiful. 

At the end of the day, as we sailed for our next port, we had to pass very close alongside an Italian ship, Aida Mar, to get out of the berth.  Hundreds of passengers and even a few crew members lined the sides to wave and shout greetings, and the captains joined in (of course) by saluting each other with their horns as the bridges of the two ships passed very close by each other.  An entertaining and exhilarating end to a fine day in Boston!