|
About Boston
Boston calls itself "America's Walking City," and with good reason: driving can be a challenge. What better excuse to park your car and explore on foot? There's history around every corner.
No trip to Boston would be complete without a walk along the Freedom Trail, a red brick line winding through the Financial District, Beacon Hill and the North End, past dozens of famous landmarks--Faneuil Hall, the Old North Church, Paul Revere's house. Beyond these streets where patriots walked are scores of distinctive neighborhoods to explore: Cambridge, Back Bay, Charlestown, Brookline, Fenway and the South End. You'll rub elbows with Yankee pragmatists, Irish fatalists, Kennedy liberals, Brahmin blue-bloods, die-hard Red Sox fans and sleep-deprived students of every stripe--Boston has one of the highest concentrations of colleges and universities in the world. If you can say, "Park the car at Harvard Yard," without using an "r," you'll fit right in.
Boston, more than any other American city, is where our nation's history began. New England's metropolis is some 150 years older than the country itself. Its landmark buildings--from Faneuil Hall to Paul Revere's house--tell the story of an upstart young colony. The resonant "shot heard 'round the world" and the outraged cries of "no taxation without representation" are both part of its legacy. But instead of the fractious sounds of yesteryear, what rings out today is likely to be quite different--the echo of wingtips stepping smartly on cobbled alleys, the polite parlance of blue bloods, the hint of brogue heard in the banter on a South Boston street.
There are two Bostons, in a sense. For vacationers, the focus is the downtown area, anchored by the expansive green space of Boston Common and the Public Garden and bursting with tourist attractions. Here are the Freedom Trail, Beacon Hill, Faneuil Hall Marketplace and the waterfront that accounts for the city's maritime origins. This is the Boston of American history textbooks, the site of pivotal events that culminated in the birth of the new republic. The central city is reminiscent of San Francisco in its sardine-can vitality--nearly 600,000 residents packed into an area of 46 square miles.
Greater Boston, on the other hand, encompasses a weblike sprawl of communities. There are numerous city neighborhoods such as the Back Bay, Charlestown and Roxbury; separate municipalities like Brookline, Cambridge and Quincy; and a score of outer suburbs, from Braintree to Newton to Woburn. The even larger Boston-Worcester-Lawrence Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA) has a combined population of about 5,500,000.
|
|