How to See Boston: A City of Lines

Boston is small enough to walk in a long day. The downtown core is about a square mile. Beacon Hill is two streets deep at the ridge. The North End is six blocks across. Cambridge is the next town over, the other side of the Charles, twenty minutes on foot from Boston Common to Harvard Yard. The whole of what tourists call historic Boston could be photographed from the top of one tall building.

That smallness is what makes the city deceptive. Every story you can tell about Boston happens within a few miles of every other story. The Revolution and the Civil War abolitionists and the Famine Irish and the Olmsted parks and the MIT biotech cluster all sit on top of each other on a peninsula and the marshes that were filled in to make it bigger. You can stand on Boston Common and be three minutes from a 1773 burying ground, eight minutes from the first Black church building in the United States, twenty minutes from a 1916 reinforced-concrete dome built by an institution that arrived in town already fifty-five years old. The compression is the city. The compression also makes the city read, on first encounter, like a museum where everything is in the same wing.

It is not a museum. It is a city of lines.

The official line, painted in 1958

The first line you meet is the Freedom Trail. Two and a half miles of red paint and red brick, sixteen sites, from Boston Common to Bunker Hill in Charlestown. The painted trail is the most successful single piece of civic marketing in twentieth-century American tourism. It was invented in March of 1951 by a Boston Herald-Traveler columnist named William Schofield, who suggested in a single column that the city paint a line on the sidewalk connecting its colonial sites. Mayor John B. Hynes dedicated the route in June of that year. The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce put up the signs. For seven years the trail was an idea on paper. The red paint went down on the sidewalks in 1958.

The trail is now treated, by most visitors and a fair number of guidebooks, as if it had always been there. It had not. It is a postwar tourism invention that braided sixteen mostly-unrelated colonial and Revolutionary sites into a single Revolutionary narrative, and it succeeded so completely that it became the standard way Americans walk through the early national story. Other cities copied it. Philadelphia, Concord, New Bedford, Lowell. The painted-line, choose-the-sites, walk-them-in-sequence template is Boston's. You can argue that the most important civic invention in postwar Boston was not a building. It was a line.

The trail is honest about what it shows. It is not honest about what it walks past. It marks the Old State House and the cobblestone ring of the Boston Massacre. It does not mark the West End demolition that happened four blocks northwest in the same year the red paint went down, displacing seven thousand residents of a mixed working-class neighborhood. It marks the Old North Church and the lantern signal of April 1775. It does not mark the upper gallery of the same church that was the colonial-era segregated seating for enslaved and free Black congregants. It marks Faneuil Hall as the Cradle of Liberty. It does not mark Peter Faneuil's slave-trading fortune that built the hall.

These omissions are not malicious. They are editorial. A 1951 newspaper columnist and a 1958 Chamber of Commerce committee chose what to include based on the public-history priorities of postwar Boston, which were Revolutionary, white, and Protestant. The trail froze those priorities. To walk it now is to walk what the city decided, three quarters of a century ago, was worth painting onto the sidewalk.

The line beside it

The second line is the Black Heritage Trail. The National Park Service has run it since 1980 from the Museum of African American History at 46 Joy Street on Beacon Hill. The trail covers the north slope of the hill, the eight buildings most consequential to free Black Boston between 1800 and 1865. The African Meeting House, built in 1806, the oldest standing Black church edifice in the United States. The Abiel Smith School, opened in 1835, the first public school in the United States built specifically for Black children. The Lewis and Harriet Hayden House, the most active Underground Railroad station in 1850s Boston. The William C. Nell House. The Charles Street Meeting House. The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Memorial across from the State House. The George Middleton House.

The Black Heritage Trail is not a competitor to the Freedom Trail. It is a corrective. The two trails cross each other in two places: the Shaw Memorial, which is the first stop of the Black Heritage Trail and which the Freedom Trail walks past without stopping; and Copp's Hill Burying Ground, where the Freedom Trail names the Mathers buried on the rise and the Black Heritage Trail names the free and enslaved African Americans buried in unmarked graves on the western slope. The geography is the same. The argument is different.

There are now also the Boston Women's Memorial on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, unveiled in 2003. The Irish Heritage Trail. The Asian American Heritage Trail. The LGBTQ History Trail. Each new trail names what the previous trail walked past. The city has, in effect, been adding trails for forty years to compensate for the editorial choices of 1951. To see Boston honestly is to hold all of them at the same time, and to remember that the original line was a choice and so are all the lines drawn since.

The line under it

The third line is harder to see because it does not have paint. It is the engineered ground.

Roughly a third of modern Boston is filled-in land. The Back Bay, the South End, the Seaport, the western edge of Boston Common, the airport, the financial district waterfront. The peninsula the Puritans founded in 1630 was less than half its current size. The neighborhoods that look most settled to the modern eye are mostly the ones that did not exist when the founding stories were happening. Back Bay was tidal mudflats until the 1857 to 1882 landfill operation drained and graded it. The North End was an island connected by a causeway. Cambridge held salt marshes where MIT now stands.

The engineered ground is the second invisible spine of Boston. Frederick Law Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, a connected sequence of parks running from the Public Garden through the Back Bay Fens to Franklin Park, was designed in part to solve a sanitary crisis at the western edge of the new Back Bay neighborhood. The Fens was a foul tidal flat that the new mansions on Commonwealth Avenue could not be built next to. Olmsted's 1878 solution was a tidal saltwater marsh that would flush twice daily and absorb the sewage of the new district. The marsh was beautiful. It was also drainage infrastructure. The hydraulic function and the landscape function were the same design.

The same logic runs across the city. Trinity Church on Copley Square stands on roughly forty-five hundred wooden piles driven through thirty feet of fill into the water table. The piles must stay constantly wet or they rot. Every major Back Bay building does some version of this. The architecture you read at street level rests on a buried forest. The neighborhood is the result of an engineering decision made by mid-nineteenth-century city government to extend the peninsula westward by dumping gravel into a tidal bay for twenty-five continuous years. A thirty-five-car gravel train ran every forty-five minutes around the clock, hauling fill from a pit in Needham nine miles southwest. Irish-immigrant crews did the work. Most of them, because of the deed restrictions that controlled who could buy the new lots, would never live in the houses they made possible.

To see Boston is to see this. The city is engineered ground holding architectural memory. The streets you walk on are paved over earlier streets, which are paved over earlier shorelines, which are paved over a tidal landscape that the Puritans inherited from the Massachusett and the Pawtucket peoples who had been managing it for thousands of years before. Each layer is a decision someone made. The decisions add up to the city.

How to walk the lines

Five tours, in any sequence, hold the argument together.

Walk the Freedom Trail first if you have one day. Walk it knowing what it is. A 1951 newspaper column made physical. Look at what it includes and notice, at each stop, what it does not. The Old State House intersection holds the cobblestone Massacre ring and is four blocks from the demolished West End. The Park Street Church spire is the site of William Lloyd Garrison's first major anti-slavery address in 1829, which the trail does not name. Faneuil Hall was paid for in part by the slave trade. The Old North Church held the lantern signal and the segregated upper gallery in the same building at the same time.

Walk the North End next. It looks Italian, and has been since about 1920, but the six blocks between Hanover Street and Copp's Hill held an English colonial congregation in 1804, an early documented free Black community at the base of the hill through the 1700s, an Irish Famine wave starting in the 1840s, an Eastern European Jewish wave from the 1880s through 1910, and the Italian wave that is still here. Each community largely replaced the last on the same housing stock. The buildings stayed. The languages, the religions, the kitchen smells, the children running between the front stoops all changed entirely four times.

Walk Beacon Hill third. The single drumlin with two communities that climbed it from opposite slopes for two centuries. Brahmin Boston on the south slope, the Federal-period real-estate venture of the Mount Vernon Proprietors that included Charles Bulfinch, Harrison Gray Otis, and the editorial circle that produced the Atlantic Monthly and the American literary canon. Free Black Boston on the north slope, the African Meeting House, the Abiel Smith School, the Hayden House, the New England Anti-Slavery Society founded inside the Meeting House in January 1832. Four blocks between them. They argued out the question of who was American across those four blocks for sixty years.

Walk Back Bay and the Emerald Necklace fourth. The neighborhood that did not exist before 1857. The park system Olmsted designed while Central Park was still under construction. The connected-park-system concept that became the template for every American city park system that followed. The wooden piles under Trinity Church. The deed-restriction regime that made the brownstones residential, Anglo-Protestant, and architecturally uniform. The labor that filled the bay and never lived in the houses.

Walk Cambridge fifth. The city that is older than its university and that has, three times in the last hundred years, rewritten its relationship to the institutions sitting inside it. The 1916 MIT arrival on filled tidal flats. The 1977 City Council vote that made Cambridge the first municipality in the world with a biosafety ordinance. The post-2000 biotech cluster that is downstream of that vote. Cambridge is the city the universities are inside of, not the other way around. The cluster outside Kendall Square exists because the city kept choosing to allow what other cities had not yet thought through how to allow.

What it adds up to

The five tours do not converge on a single Boston. They converge on the recognition that there is no single Boston, and that the city's intelligence is in how transparently it shows you the seams between its versions. The painted red line is in the same sidewalk as the bronze 54th Regiment plaque. The North End's Italian-Catholic parish was built into a Federal-period Protestant meeting house designed by the same architect who designed the State House. The Back Bay brownstones rest on the gravel that drowned the bay.

Boston rewards a reader who can hold contradictions. The Freedom Trail is both the most consequential piece of American public-history infrastructure of the twentieth century and a partial story that walked past most of what was happening four blocks away. The Brahmin literary canon and the abolitionist movement were neighbors on Beacon Hill, separated by four blocks and a class line. Frederick Law Olmsted designed a sewage-drainage system that doubled as a public park, and it is now treated as if the drainage had never been the point. The city's biotech cluster came out of a civic decision other cities were still deciding whether to make.

To walk Boston honestly is to walk all these stories knowing each was a choice, and that the city you see is the city those choices made. The lines are still being drawn. The next chapter is being negotiated in zoning hearings about the Seaport, in conversations about which monuments to add, in the slow argument about what Boston's bicentennial in 2030 will mark.

Almost four centuries after the Puritans landed, the city is still figuring out how to tell its story.