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Yes, Boston is a great walking city. Every corner brings some new historic site or some interesting building to look at. And from the throngs around Quincy Market to the fruit and vegetable sellers of Haymarket to the sunbathers along the Esplanade, Boston is a place to watch people. Together, the people and the building create an urban experience duplicated in only a few other places.
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Classic
You can find examples of virtually every style of architecture in Boston, from colonial to federalist to Georgian to post-modernist.
But there are certain buildings that just say "Boston." These are the buildings that are uniquely Bostonian, the ones that help define the way we identify our city and set the pace for new buildings to emulate (or at the very least, not overpower.
The unicorn and lion above the front doors of the Old State House show just how old the building really is - it was built in 1713 to house the British governor and the colonial legislature. It was outside the building in 1775 that British soldiers and colonialists first exchanged mortal fire (today, a rather non-descript circle of cobblestones marks the location of the Boston Massacre). It served as the seat of Massachusetts state government until 1798, when the "new" State House opened up on Beacon Hill. It is also proof that Boston did not always treasure its historic buildings - in the late 1800s, the city wanted to tear the thing down.
Today Quincy Market is the tourist trap extraordinaire - some boosters claim it has more visitors each year than Disneyworld. But it was built in 1826 for more prosaic reasons - to serve as a place for Boston wholesalers to prepare and ship meats and produce. The Greek Revival central market and the two side buildings were collectively named for Mayor Josiah Quincy.
Trinity Church is perhaps H. H. Richardson's grandest masterpiece, an 1877 adaption of French medieval church design that spawned its own style of architecture: Richardsonian Romanesque. The massive structure sits on wooden piles in what was once the swampy Back Bay. It is actually part of a circle of great buildings that includes Old South Church, the Boston Public Library and the Hancock Building.
Boston has always been a pioneer in zoning - government regulations aimed at imposing communal values on the look and feel of the city. At the turn of the century, city zoning codes prohibited skyscrapers. But the federal government was exempt from those codes and so it did something that no doubt sounded crazy to Bostonians of the time: it tore off the roof of the Greek Revival Custom House (built in 1847) and stuck a 17-story skyscraper in it. Today, the Custom House is a Boston icon (and is being turned into a hotel and luxury timeshare condos).
The Hancock Building is interesting in many ways. Close up, one could actually argue it's a failure: it sits in the middle of a dreary plaza and creates a mini-hurricane that is constantly threatening to tear the hats of unsuspecting pedestrians. Yet from just a couple of blocks away, it is a striking beam of blue that draws the eye downward to the glories of Copley Square, in particular, Trinity Church. Stand at just the right point on Boylston Street and look up, and you see what appears to be a 50-story, two-dimensional sheet of glass. It's also famous as the world's tallest plywood building - when first erected, windows began popping out and the builders eventually had to replace all of them with plywood before they figured out how to fix the problem.
The Union Oyster House and the Sears Crescent are both particularly notable because they are remnants of bygone eras. The oyster house, the oldest restaurant in the city, and the nearby buildings look straight out of the early 1800s - which they are. The Sears Crescent, next to the awful City Hall, is one of the few buildings that survived the bulldozers that tore down ol' Scollay Square as part of the Government Center urban-renewal project. By the curve of the building, you can even picture the road that no longer exists in front of it.
Haymarket
Like crows squawking at each other, the pair of neighboring Haymarket vendors endlessly repeat their duet as they try to draw in customers. Buck a box of what? Dollar a pound for what? Doesn't really matter. The key is to get the jostling pedestrians to stop and look. And then you might just sell them whatever it is you have.
Haymarket is Boston's great outdoor market, where you can buy everything from fruits and vegetable to sugar cane to fish just off the boat. It is everything your average supermarket isn't: cheap and loud and in your face. And don't even think of looking over any of those 12 limes you're about to spend a buck on.
"You wanna kick the tires?!?" one watermelon man hisses at a would-be customer trying to get a feel for his fruit. "You wanna take it out for a test spin?"
Squashed between a modern hotel and the green hulk that is the Central Artery, Haymarket seems precariously perched on the edge of extinction. Even in a small city like Boston, Haymarket is tiny. And, indeed, some worry what will happen when the Big Dig - that giant project to put the Central Artery underground - finally takes away the land on which the two-day (Friday and Saturday) market now sits.
Haymarket is also loud. The vendors shout their wares. They yell at each other - sometimes to get more produce to the stand, quick, sometimes just to recount the latest joke. Maybe they have to be loud, to make themselves heard over each other and the traffic that roars above and nearby.
You just don't see prices like this in the supermarket. And just as you're congratulating yourself on getting eight ears of corn for a dollar, you walk a few feet and see, if only you'd waited, you could have gotten ten. But no matter, it's still a bargain, even after you get home and you see that one of those 50-cent cantaloupes is all black from mold on one side, the side you didn't see as the guy put it in a bag. You're still up one, and even $1 is a good price for a large melon most places.
Details
Downtown Boston is filled with buildings erected in an age when no architect would dream of designing a building without decorative friezes, elaborate scrollwork or statues and gargoyles.
Today, they are all the more delightful because you don't expect them. You're walking down Washington Street near Filenes when, who knows, a glint of light catches your eye and you look up - to see a series of gargoyles looking down at you from their precarious perches.
One of the more amazing doorways in the city is to a building on Stuart Street at Berkeley Street. It was once the headquarters of Salada Tea (what is now the Grill 23 restaurant used to be a room where clerks made out orders for large volumes of tea). Today, Salada is long gone, but the bronze and stone friezes of elephants and ships, boxes of tea and tea farmers remain, a memorial to the day when Boston clippers were the fastest way to China.
One of the best places to enjoy these details is Downtown Crossing and the neighboring financial district. Go down on a Sunday, when, at least in the Financial District, you've pretty much got the place to yourself
The North End
If Boston is the most European of American cities, then the North End is Boston's most European of neighborhoods.
Walk along its narrow, curving streets and catch quick glances of hidden courtyards and flower-bedecked fire escapes. Listen to the animated Italian conversations of the retired gentlemen sitting outside the Caffe dello Sport. And breathe in the scent of the nearby sea - when you're not taking in the scent of garlic or olive oil from the seemingly inexhaustible supply of restaurants.
The North End has always been a European community. For decades, immigrants from Europe have found a home here - just beyond the docks and just down the winding streets that followed the curve of the ever expanding shoreline. First the Irish, then the Jews, today the Italians.
And like previous groups, the Italians have retained many of the customs of their homeland. One of those is the hosting of festivals to honor the patron saints of the towns from which they or their ancestors came. On more than a dozen weekends, various societies honor the saints with Masses, processions, food and music.
The festival for St. Agrippina di Mineo is an example. For several hours, men with some muscles carry a one-ton statue of the saint (martyred after resisting the advances of the Emperor Valerion), bedecked with dollar bills, around the neighborhood. They stop frequently at other saint's societies, churches and the like. Meanwhile, a street fair takes over a good part of Hanover Street.
Statues
Boston loves its statues. We've put 'em up by the dozens, to commemorate everything from the usual (George Washington) to the unusual (the invention of ether - http://neurosurgery.mgh.harvard.edu/History/ether1.htm -).
Indeed, Commonwealth Avenue mall (which runs from the Public Garden to Charlesgate East) is basically a long statue garden, starting with George Washington astride his horse in the garden gazing west and ending with Leif Ericsson at Charlesgate scowling at that interloper Columbus as he looks east.
The Garden and the Boston Common are filled with statues to almost everyone and everything imaginable - see if you can spot the Ether memorial.
Up until the 1980s, Boston statues tended to be your basic 19th-century realistic-yet-heroic oversized models.
But then Boston underwent something of a statuesque schizophrenia. We couldn't decide between brutalism and terminal cuteness.
On one end of the Common, the city allowed construction of a series of starving freedom fighters astride equally gaunt horses.
Meanwhile, the Arthur Fiedler - http://www.classicalmus.com/artists/fiedler.html - Giant Head dropped on the Esplanade (near his beloved Hatch Shell and the Arther Fiedler Memorial Footbridge). It looks like one of those Easter Island heads after it had been stepped on by the foot from the beginning of Monty Python.
Yet at the same time, Nancy Schon - http://www.schon.com> was installing her now beloved statues of Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings in the Public Garden. At Quincy Market, Celtics fans got the chance to sit down on a bench with a cigar-smoking Red Auerbach and reminisce about the days when the Celts were good - just a couple of blocks away from a similarly casual James Michael Curley (who is joined by a second, standing Curley).
One of the city's most recent statues harks back to the days of yore - it's a bronze JFK striding purposefully in front of the State House. But the city's newest monument is neither statue nor heroic - yet in its own way, quite powerful. The Holocaust memorial, a block away from the Curley statues, consists of six smokestack-like glass towers, inscribed with the numbers of concentration-camp victims. One of the most moving parts, however, is not anything the designers did - it's the stones left as symbols of respect by visitors.
Mistakes
Why do some developers want to turn Boston into Houston-by-the Sea?
During the "Massachusetts Miracle" of the early and mid 1980s, downtown Boston experienced a building boom perhaps not seen since the creation of the Back Bay in the 19th century. Although some of the new buildings were designed to fit into their Boston surroundings (notably Rowe's Wharf), others were designed by people who seemed to regard Boston as a blank slate on which to build grandiose glass and steel towers. This can work in a place like Houston, where all the other buildings are like that. But Boston is a 300-year-old city of brick and block and detail. Look at the picture at the right. Especially in the large version (click on it for that), it doesn't even look real - it looks like somebody took a picture of the Old State House and then did a particularly bad job with cut-and-paste in Photoshop.
This is not to say glass buildings can't work in Boston. Take, for example, the Hancock Building. But that building works because architect I.M. Pei designed it not as a squat, angry invader gobbling up the surrounding cityscape but as a thin mirror that draws your attention downward to the delights of the Back Bay (in particular, Trinity Church).
At the same time, brick facing is no guarantee of success. Lafayette Place in Downtown Crossing is a brick-encased fortress, a suburban shopping mall that says to the rest of the neighborhood: "Go away." Fortunately, Bostonians listened and today Lafayette Place is a shuttered failure that shows the dangers of trying to turn Boston into another Atlanta (unfortunately, the thing still stands, as big a blight on Downtown Crossing as any of the former smut parlors of the Combat Zone).
Copley Place is another suburban shopping mall dropped in the middle of the walking city, with blank walls and dark underground-parking entrances that serve as moats against the teeming masses of the Back Bay and the South End.
Unfortunately, it seems to be successful, largely due to the old adage of "location, location, location." It sits atop a Massachusetts Turnpike exit that lets the suburbanites drive in and "experience" the city without ever actually stepping foot in it (they can even walk to the nearby Prudential Center by way of a human hampster tube over Huntington Avenue that is depressingly reminiscent of similar structures found throughout downtown Atlanta).
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