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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 John Fitzgerald Expressway
that carries I-93 across downtown. The city has been working on
routing the traffic underground (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.
