For many years the city of Boston was called “the Hub” because it considered itself the hub of the universe, or so it is said. It remains the hub of the Greater Boston region, a huge wheel of three million people in the many towns and suburbs surrounding it. Boston itself, at the center of that wheel, houses only 575,000 people among narrow and winding streets. Boston is laid out along old cow paths that have become one-way streets. During weekdays, when half the people outside the hub come in to work there, the traffic can be daunting. It is wise to take the old but well-run subway and bus system, a taxi, or even a walk to where you're going.
Boston hopes to enter the post-modern age in transportation through what locals call the Big Dig. This is a huge underground highway that will replace an elevated highway that runs in from the northern suburbs and out to the southern suburbs. The Big Dig is said to be the biggest U.S. construction project to date. Putting the swell of traffic underground will relieve the congestion in the oldest parts of the city. When you arrive in June, the northbound lanes of this highway should be completed, including an astoundingly beautiful new bridge, the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, which rises up over the Charles River like a huge sailing ship. The bridge connects the downtown city with one of its neighborhoods, Charlestown, which includes the monument for the battle of Bunker Hill, one of the most famous battles in American history.
American—particularly colonial—history is what Boston is all about. It has the Old South Meeting House, where the Boston Tea Party began, and the Old North Church where Paul Revere began his midnight ride. You might want to take the “Freedom Trail,” a three-mile, red brick walk that connects to sixteen historical sites, including those churches and “Old Ironsides,” the U.S.S. Constitution, launched in 1797.
Another way to see the sights and get a feel for the city is to take one of the many motorized tours by trolley or by amphibious vehicles from World War II. The latter are run by Duck Tours and take you not only through the streets but also onto the Charles River where you can see the city from a different perspective. Other tours of interest are the Black Heritage Trail, which celebrates the history and contributions of Boston's African American community in the nineteenth century; the Boston Immigrant Walking Trail; and the Literary Trail of Greater Boston, which takes you by bus to places in Boston, Cambridge, Lexington, and Concord where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and some of our other great authors lived and wrote. By car or by train, you can also take tours further out of the city to Plymouth Plantation; Newport, R.I.; Cape Cod; or Lowell National Historical Park, with its canal boat tours around historic textile mills and other sights of the American Industrial Revolution.
You can see much of Boston by just walking around its neighborhoods. Two short blocks from the Park Plaza Hotel is the Public Garden, with its well-tended beds of flowers and swan boats to ride on. Across Charles Street from the garden is the Boston Common, where cows once grazed. At the top of the Common is the Massachusetts State House with its gold dome. To the west of the State House is the neighborhood of Beacon Hill, where Boston Brahmins (old New England families) lived. It is a lovely place to roam in, down to Charles Street lined, with little shops and eateries. Commonwealth Avenue, starting at the west side of the Public Garden at Arlington Street, is a street of elegant brick and stone homes with little gardens in front. Next to the Avenue is Newbury Street, famed for its upscale shops and galleries and some charming small restaurants. Walking along the Charles Riverfront, a few blocks further north on Arlington Street, you can see the boats sailing on the river and the domes and spires of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the opposite bank. In the evenings you may be able to catch one of the open-air concerts at the Hatch Shell on the Riverfront.
Ethnic neighborhoods abound in Boston. You may want to walk over to Chinatown, several blocks south of the Park Plaza Hotel, or wander the North End, the old Italian neighborhood in Boston, where old-timers sit out in the plaza playing chess and small restaurants send out inviting odors. Extending east from the North End, Boston's redeveloped waterfront looks out to the ocean. Along it are old warehouses turned into apartments, little green parks, the aquarium, and many fine hotels. Or you may want to go as far as the Fenway, where two of
Marylynn Boris, Ph.D., is a psychologist who has lived and practiced in greater Boston for thirty years, including twenty-one years in child psychiatry at New England Medical Center.
Boston's finest art museums are located: the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner You can catch a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park nearby, reachable by the “T” subway-trolley system.
A trip across the Charles River will take you to the city of Cambridge with its diverse population—students from more than 100 countries attend Harvard and MIT—and striking university campuses. Stroll around Harvard Square or sit in one of the sidewalk cafes to watch and hear the street performers, who perform day or night. Cambridge also houses the American Repertory Theater, which in June will be offering Shakespeare's Pericles, directed by Andrei Serban, and The Sound of a Voice, with music by Philip Glass and text by David Henry Hwang. Harvard offers three well-known art museums: the Fogg Museum, whose works illustrate the history of Western art; the Busch-Reisinger Museum, devoted to the art of the German-speaking countries; and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which houses superb collections of Asian, Islamic, and later Indian art. MIT offers the List Visual Arts Center, with galleries of photography, sculpture, video, and other arts.
Boston is a fine place for children. It has a Museum of Science that allows hands-on experiences, a Children's Museum, an Aquarium with an outdoor show, and those amazing amphibious Duck Tours. Older children would enjoy many of the guided or self-guided trail walks and the Boston Harbor cruises, whale watching cruises, or a sail on an eighteenth-century schooner. The youngest would especially like the statues of the mother duck and her ducklings marching through the Public Garden, just as they do in the beloved book Make Way for the Ducklings, and the swan boat ride where you can see the very island that mother duck chose to raise her children on.
A good city map and a map of the subway system can be a great help. These can be picked up at the Boston Common Visitor Information Center, located on the Tremont Street side of Boston Common. Material on Cambridge can be obtained at the Cambridge Office for Tourism at 4 Brattle Street, Harvard Square.