The Rough Guide to Boston

INTRODUCTION

Boston is as close to the Old World as the New World gets, an American city that proudly trades on its colonial past, having served a crucial role in the country’s development from a few wayward pilgrims right through to the Revolutionary War. It occasionally takes its past a bit too seriously – what might pass for a faded relic anywhere else becomes a plaque-covered tourist sight here – but none of that detracts from the city’s overriding historic charm, nor its present-day energy.

Indeed, there are plenty of tall skyscrapers, thriving business concerns and cultural outposts in Boston that are part-and-parcel of modern urban America, not to mention excellent mergers of past and present, such as the bustling Quincy Market, a paradigm for successful urban renewal. And despite the occasional wearisome touch, no other city in America gives a better feel for the events and personas behind the nation’s birth, all played out in Boston’s wealth of emblematic and evocative colonial-era sights, conveniently linked by the self-guided walking tour (one of a handful in the city) known as the Freedom Trail. As well, the city’s cafés and shops, its attractive public spaces and the diversity of its neighborhoods – student hives, ethnic enclaves and stately districts of preserved townhouses – are similarly alluring, going some way to answering the twin accusations of elitism and provincialism to which Boston is perennially subjected.

Boston is also at the center of the American university system – more than sixty colleges call the area home, including illustrious Harvard and MIT, in the neighbouring city of Cambridge, just across the Charles River. This academic connection has played a key part in the city’s long left-leaning political tradition, which has spawned a line of ethnic mayors, and, most famously, the Kennedy family. Steeped in Puritan roots, local residents often display a slightly anachronistic Yankee pride, but it’s one which has served to protect the city’s identity. Indeed, the districts around Boston Common exude an almost small-town atmosphere, and, until the past decade or so, were relatively unmarred by chain stores and fast-food joints. Meanwhile, groups of Irish and Italian descent have carved out authentic and often equally unchanged communities in areas like the North End, Charlestown and South Boston.

Today, Boston’s relatively small size – both physically and in terms of population (at under 600,000, it ranks well below most other similarly important US cities) – and its provincial feel actually serve to the city’s advantage. Though it has expanded significantly through landfills and annexation since it was first settled in 1630, it has never lost its core, which remains a tangle of streets over old cowpaths clustered around Boston Common (which was itself originally used as cattle pasture). Delightfully, this center can really only be explored properly on foot; for even as Boston has evolved from busy port to blighted city to the rejuvenated and prosperous place it is today, it has remained, fundamentally, a city on a human scale.

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