Resources // Boston

“The Cradle of Liberty”

Boston is the largest city in New England, the capital of the state of Massachusetts, and one of the most historic, wealthy and influential cities in the United States of America. Its plethora of museums, historical sights, and wealth of live performances, all explain why the city gets 16.3 million tourists a year, making it one of the ten most popular tourist locations in the country.

Navigating Boston’s streets is very hard if you are not familiar with the area. While other American cities have their streets laid out in a grid (New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix), or along a river, lake, or other geographical feature (New Orleans, Cleveland), the modern streets of Boston are a twisty and seemingly incomprehensible maze. Boston in the 1600s was a narrow peninsula surrounded by farmland and distant settlements. Landfill, urban expansion, waves of radical economic change, and new technologies have seen sensible street patterns added on to and collide in less sensible ways. Due to dense development, the older street patterns have largely remained in place without being adapted to their modern surroundings. In this way, Boston is more similar to old European cities than large American cities that were well planned, expanded into unsettled land, or were mainly settled in the modern world.

Although not in Boston, Cambridge (just across the Charles River, home to Harvard and MIT) is part of the larger urban area and an essential addition to any visit to Boston.

History

Massachusetts’ first governor, John Winthrop, famously called Boston a “shining city on the hill,” a reference to Jerusalem and a declaration of the original settlers’ intent to build a utopian Christian colony. From the very beginning, the people who lived there declared their home to be one of the most important cities in the world. Considering that the American Revolution and modern democracy got it’s start thanks to Bostonians, and that Winthrop’s quote is still used in modern political speech, one could argue that they were right!
The father of American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes) once called the Boston statehouse “the hub of the solar system,” but common usage has expanded to the now-current Hub of the Universe. This half-serious term is all you need to know to understand Boston’s complicated self-image. Vastly important in American history, and for centuries the seat of the USA’s social elite, Boston lost prominence in the early twentieth century, largely to the cities of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Over the past two decades, Boston has regained political, cultural, and economic importance.

The city was founded in 1630 by members of the Massachusetts Bay colony, Puritan religious dissidents who had fled England to find freedom in the New World. Because of its easily-defended harbor and the fact that it is the closest port to Europe it rapidly assumed a leading role in the fledging New England region, with a booming economy based on trade with the Caribbean and Europe. The devastating Fire of 1760 destroyed much of the town, but within a few years the city had bounced back.

Bostonians were the instigators of the independance movement in the 18th century and the city was the center of America’s revolutionary activity during the Colonial period. Several of the first Revolutionary War skirmishes were fought there, including the Boston Massacre, The Boston Tea Party, and the battles of Lexington and Concord -which were fought nearby. Boston’s direct involvement in the Revolution ended after the Battle of Bunker Hill and, soon afterwards, the ending of the Siege of Boston by George Washington. For some time afterwards the city’s political leaders continued to have a leading role in developing of the new country’s system of government. The residents’ ardent support of independence earned the city the nickname The Cradle of Liberty.

Throughout the 19th century, Boston continued to grow rapidly, assimilating outlying towns into the metropolitan core. Its importance in American culture was inestimable, and its economic and literary elite, the so-called Boston Brahmins assumed the mantle of aristocracy in the United States. Their patronage of the arts and progressive social ideals was unprecidented in the New World, and often conflicted with the city’s Puritan foundations. They helped drive unprecedented scientific, educational and social change that would soon sweep the country. The Abolitionist movement, anesthesia and the telephone are a few examples of this.

Education was another area that was vitally important to the elites and citizenery in general. The first public school in America, Boston Latin, was founded in 1635. The oldest elementary school in America, the Mather School, opened in 1635. (Its current structure, built in 1905, is the oldest continuously-operated school building in America.) Harvard College in nearby Cambridge became, and in many ways remains, America’s premier center of learning. Boston was also the first city in America to adopt a public library.

At the same time, the city’s working class swelled with immigrants from Europe. The huge Irish influx made Boston one of the most important Irish cities in the world, in or out of Ireland. Gradually the Irish laborer population climbed into city’s upper class, evidenced no better than by the continued importance of the Kennedy family in national politics.

From the early twentieth century until the 1970s, Boston’s importance on the national stage waned. Cities in what was once the frontier, like Chicago, San Francisco, and later Los Angeles, shifted the nation’s center of gravity away from liberty’s cradle. In the past two decades, Boston’s importance and influence has increased, due to growth in higher education, health care, high technology, and financial services. It remains America’s higher educational center; during the school year, one in five Bostonians is a university student. There are more college students per square foot in Boston than any other city in the Western Hemisphere.

Boston’s nicknames include “Beantown”, “The Hub” (shortened from Oliver Wendell Holmes’ phrase ‘The Hub of the Universe’), “The City of Higher Learning” (due to the plethora of universities and colleges in the Boston area) and - particularly in the 19th century - “The Athens of America,” on account of its great cultural and intellectual influence. If you don’t want to stand out as a tourist, don’t refer to Boston by any of these nicknames. Locals generally don’t use any of them.

This information is based on the efforts of multiple WikiTravel contributors. The original article can be accessed at: http://wikitravel.org/en/boston . It is reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareALike 1.0. USA Tours Pros accepts no responsibility for any inaccuracies in the information presented and merely offers the article as a resource for the Tour Professional.

Neighborhoods

Boston neighborhoods (nicknames in parentheses):

-Allston and Brighton (Allston-Brighton, All-Bright) are to the west of Boston proper. Brighton, in particular, has a large number of apartments housing students.
-Back Bay - the upscale area of Boston with fine shops, fine dining along with the Prudential Center, Copley Square, and Hynes Convention Center.
-Bay village
-Beacon Hill was once the neighborhood of Boston’s “Brahmin” upper crust.
-Charlestown is across the Charles River to the north. It is where you will find the Bunker Hill Monument.
-Chinatown - Great Asian food, great herbalists and next to downtown and the theatre district.
-Dorchester (Dot) - Pretty much a troubled area which tourists should avoid.
-Downtown - The hub of tourist activity with Faneuil Hall, the Freedom Trail, Boston Public Garden, Boston Common. Also the center of government and business.
-East Boston (Eastie) is on a peninsula across Boston Harbor from the main bulk of the city. Logan Airport is in East Boston. Several underwater tunnels connect East Boston to the rest of the city.
-Fenway-Kenmore (The Fens, Kenmore Square)
-Hyde Park (HP)
-Jamaica Plain (JP)
-Mattapan
-Mission Hill
-North End is the city’s Italian neighborhood with excellent restaurants. It is also the location of the Old North Church.
-Roslindale (Rozzie)
-Roxbury (The Bury)
-South Boston (Southie) A proud residential neighborhood with a waterfront district and the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center on its north side.
-South End, just south of Back Bay, has Victorian brownstones and a bohemian atmosphere.
-West End, once a slum, was submitted to “urban renewal” during the late 1950s and is no longer a coherent neighborhood.
-West Roxbury (Westie, West Rox, WR)

Boston is a city of diverse neighborhoods, many of which were originally towns in their own right before being assimilated into the city itself. These neighborhoods still go by their original names and people will often tell you they are from “JP” (Jamaica Plain), “Southie” (South Boston), “Dot” (Dorchester) or “Eastie” (East Boston) rather than from “Boston”. Alternatively, people from the suburbs will tell you they are from Boston when in fact they live in one of the nearby (or even outlying) suburbs. If in doubt, you can look for “Resident Parking Only” signs which will tell you what neighborhood you are in.

Another consequence of this expansion is that the neighborhoods, in addition to their cultural identities, also retained most of their street names, regardless of whether or not Boston -or another absorbed town- already had a street with the same name. According to a survey by The Boston Globe, there are at least 200 street names that are duplicated in one or more neighborhoods in Boston. For instance, Washington Street in Downtown Boston, is different from Washington Street in Dorchester and another Washington Street in Jamaica Plain. This can play havoc with web-based mapping and direction services.

Be aware that geographic references in district names tend to mean little. For example, South Boston is different from the South End, which is actually west of South Boston and north of Dorchester and Roxbury districts. Some other confusing notables: East Boston and Charlestown are further north than the North End. The West End is in the northern part of town (bordering the North End and Charles River).

Among Boston’s many neighborhoods, the historic areas of Back Bay, Bay Village, Beacon Hill, Chinatown, Downtown, the Fenway, the Financial District, Government Center, the North End, and the South End comprise the area considered “Boston Proper.” It is here where most of the buildings that make up the city’s skyline are located.
Allston and Brighton are abutting neighborhoods. Brighton is rather suburban, and home to the largest population of Asian-Americans in the City of Boston—even more than Chinatown in absolute numbers. Allston is more urban than Brighton and smaller. It is closer to the City and quite close to Harvard Square in Cambridge. In fact, Harvard University has recently published plans to expand “Harvard Sq.” into North Allston. You will often hear them called Allston-Brighton, although they are quite distinct. They are connected to the rest of the city by a narrow neck of land between the Charles River and the town of Brookline.

The Back Bay is one of the few neighborhoods with streets organized in a grid. It is so named because it used to be mud flats on the river, until the city filled in the bay in a land-making project ending in 1862. It is now one of the higher-rent neighborhoods in the city. The north-south streets crossing the axis of Back Bay are organized alphabetically. Starting from the east, at the Public Garden, and heading west, they are: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester (pronounced ‘gloster’), and Hereford. After Hereford is Massachusetts Avenue, more commonly known as Mass. Av., and then Charlesgate, which marks the western boundary of Back Bay. The alphabetical street names continue a little way into the Fenway neighborhood on the other side of Charlesgate, with Ipswich, Jersey, and Kilmarnock, but the streets are no longer arranged in a grid.

There are also several “districts” you might hear mentioned. “Districts” are generally areas of common interest located within a larger neighborhood:

-Financial District (downtown)
-Leather District (downtown)
-SoWa District (South of Washington, South End)
-Theatre District (between Chinatown and Bay Village)
-Waterfront District (South Boston)
-Ladder District (newer phrase for Downtown Crossing)

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