Boston

Public Transport

The MassachusettsBayTransportAuthority(MBTA), 10 Park Plaza (tel: (617) 222 5000 or 1 800 392 6100; website: www.mbta.com), operates four subway lines (blue, green, red, orange), which spread out from a central point at Park Street Station, at the northeast corner of Boston Common. The ‘T’, as the system is known, began in 1897 and is the oldest in the USA. The lines run seven days a week.

MBTA also runs 13 commuter rail lines, three boat services and numerous bus routes. The public buses are cheaper and have many more stops than the subway but bus routes can be more difficult to navigate.

Passes (Boston Visitor’s Passport) for one, three and seven days are valid on both. Route maps are available at all stations.

Taxis

Taxis are plentiful and can be hailed on the street or reserved by telephone, but they are not cheap.

There are plenty of companies including BayStateTaxiService (tel: (617) 566 5000), CityCab (tel: (617) 536 5100), GreenCabs (tel: (617) 625 2000) and MetroCab (tel: (617) 782 5500). Over the river in Cambridge, providers include AmbassadorBrattleCab (tel: (617) 492 1100) and StarTaxi (tel: (617) 876 8888).

Water Taxis

An interesting way to get to know the inner city area is to use the water taxis, which run throughout the year both as commuter taxis and as ordinary water buses. CityWaterTaxi (tel: (617) 422 0392; website: www.citywatertaxi.com) operates 10 waterfront stops, seven days a week. Shuttles run to Logan International Airport with HarborExpress (tel: (617) 222 6999; website: www.harborexpress.com) from Downtown, Hull and Quincy Shipyard.

Driving in the City

Boston is not on a simple grid plan, curving as it does to accommodate both the Charles River, running more or less west-east, and the coastline, running more or less north-south. Though the ‘Big Dig,’ the most expensive tunnel-rebuilding project in America’s history, has been completed, traffic in the city is still very congested. Parking can be confusing with many areas having local residents’ rules and public parking lots being expensive.

A car is only necessary for locations outside the city. Much of the central part of Boston was built before cars and so lends itself to exploration on foot, and public transport in and around Boston is good and inexpensive.

Car Hire

Hire cars are available from Alamo (tel: 1 800 327 9633; website: www.alamo.com), Avis (tel: 1 800 331 1212; website: www.avis.com), Budget (tel: 1 800 527 0700; website: www.budget.com), Dollar (tel: 1 800 800 4000; website: www.dollar.com), Enterprise (tel: 1 800 325 8007; website: www.enterprise.com), Hertz (tel: 1 800 654 3131; website: www.hertz.com), National (tel: 1 800 227 7368; website: www.nationalcar.com) and Thrifty (tel: 1 800 367 2277; website: www.thrifty.com).

Most car hire companies require drivers to be over 25 years of age or impose hefty surcharges.

Bicycle Hire

Cycling on the city streets of Boston is not for the faint-hearted. Only brave locals do so. There are scenic cycle paths, however, along the Charles River. Bike hire is available at BackBayBicycles, 366 Commonwealth Avenue (tel: (617) 247 2336; website: www.backbaybicycles.com). Helmet and lock are included in the day rate.

Introduction

Boston prides itself on being an extremely cultured city. Listings for the exhaustive number of cultural events that prove this can be found in the Thursday editions of the BostonGlobe (website: www.boston.com/globe) and the BostonPhoenix (website: www.bostonphoenix.com) and the Friday edition of the BostonHerald (website: www.bostonherald.com). The Boston magazine (website: www.bostonmagazine.com) has a monthly overview of the city’s events as does Where (website: www.bostonwhere.com) which is usually found in hotel guest rooms.

Ticketmaster (tel: (617) 931 2000; website: www.ticketmaster.com) sells tickets for all cultural events. BosTix (tel: (617) 723 5181 (recorded information); website: www.artsboston.org), whose kiosks are located at Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Chatham Street and Copley Square, sells ’same day’ half-price tickets for cash, as well as the usual ticket sales. BosTix kiosks are open Monday to Saturday 1000-1800 and Sunday 1100-1600.

Music: The Boston Symphony Orchestra plays at Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue (tel: (617) 266 1492 or 1 888 266 1492; website: www.bso.org). Perhaps their most widely known event is the 4th July Concert or ’Boston Pops’. The venue for the occasion is the Hatch Memorial Shell, at Esplanade off Storrow Drive, which often stages free concerts throughout the summer. The Symphony Hall is also the base for the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.

The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra (tel: (617) 236 0999; website: www.bostonphil.org) performs classical music at three different locations: Sanders Theatre, Cambridge and Quincy Streets, Cambridge (tel: (617) 496 2222); Symphony Hall, (see above); and its home, the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street (tel: (617) 585 1260), built in 1903 and renowned for its acoustics.

The Boston Chamber Music Society (tel: (617) 349 0086; website: www.bostonchambermusic.org) performs at Jordan and Sanders Theatre on Sunday as well as at Pickman Hall, 27 Garden Street, Cambridge (tel: (617) 876 0956) and at another acoustic gem, the First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge (tel: (617) 547 2724).

Opera is provided by Boston Lyric Opera, 45 Franklin Street (tel: (617) 542 6772; website: www.blo.org), with performances at the Shubert Theatre in the Citi Performing Arts Center, 270 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 482 9393; website: www.citicenter.org). The country’s oldest musical organisation, with performances on record from 1815, is the Handel & Haydn Society, 300 Massachusetts Avenue (tel: (617) 266 3605; website: www.handelandhaydn.org).

Theatre: The Theater District is on the south side of Boston Common, along Tremont, Boylston, Stuart and Washington Streets. The Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 426 5000; website: www.bcaonline.org), is a complex with three small theatres. Other options include: the Charles Playhouse, 74 Warrenton Street (tel: (617) 426 6912) which is the home to the long running Blue Man Group; the Colonial Theater, 106 Boylston Street (tel: (617) 426 9366); the Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College, 219 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 824 8000 or 1 800 233 3123; website: www.maj.org); the Shubert Theatre in the Citi Performing Arts Center (see Music above); and the smallest of the District’s traditional theatres, the Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 423 4008).

Over in Cambridge, the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Harvard Square (tel: (617) 547 8300; website: www.amrep.org/loeb.html), has two theatres and is the home of the American Repertory Theater.

Dance: The city’s top classical dance company is the Boston Ballet, 19 Clarendon Street (tel: (617) 695 6950; website: www.bostonballet.org), which performs at the Citi Performing Arts Center (see Music above). The season runs from September to May. Every Christmas there is a special performance of The Nutcracker at the Opera House, 539 Washington Street.

The Jose Mateo’s Ballet Theatre (tel: (617) 354 7467; website: www.ballettheatre.org), a nonprofit professional performance company and school, performs mostly classical and contemporary dance at the Cutler Majestic Theatre at Emerson College, 219 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 824 8000). The Art of Black Dance and Music (tel: (617) 666 1859; website: www.abdm.net) performs African and Latin American-style dance at various venues.

Film: All the latest Hollywood releases show throughout the city, but Boston also has a strong alternative and art-house scene. Try the AMC Loews Boston Common 19, 175 Tremont Street (tel: (617) 423 3499), The Brattle Theater, 40 Brattle Street, Harvard Square, Cambridge (tel: (617) 876 6837; website: www.brattlefilm.org), the Harvard Film Archive at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge (tel: (617) 495 4700; website: http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa) and the free showings at the Hatch Memorial Shell, at Esplanade off Storrow Drive.

Boston is a very popular location for film sets. Movies shot or set in or around the capital of Massachusetts over the years include TheThomasCrownAffair (1967), StilloftheNight (1981), TheVerdict (1982) with Paul Newman, TheBostonians (1983), FromtheHip (1986), FieldofDreams (1988), Glory (1989), Malice and TheFirm (both 1993), GoodWillHunting and Amistad (both 1997), LegallyBlonde (2000) and MysticRiver (2003). Also released in 2003 were TheHumanStain, StuckonYou and MonaLisaSmile. FeverPitch, about the famed Boston Red Sox, was shot in Boston in 2005. Parts of The Departed (2006), with Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio were filmed at South Boston Waterfront. TV shows Cheers (1982) and AllyMcBeal (1997) also used Boston and its vicinity as their backdrops.

Literary Notes: Writing and Boston are inseparable from around 1840, before which Philadelphia was pre-eminent. From this time on, Boston was talked of as the ’Athens of America’, drawing writers and artists from everywhere. The writer Bret Harte (1836-1902) commented that if an arrow were shot across the Charles River into the Cambridge area it would inevitably bring down a writer.

In its heydays of the 1850s, several of America’s major works appeared from writers based in and near the city: TheScarletLetter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), who lived on Charles Street; MobyDick (1851) by Herman Melville (1819-1891), who lived for a time at New Bedford; UncleTom’sCabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), who had lived just outside west Boston at South Natick; Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who built himself a cabin on Walden Pond to ’front only the essential facts of life’.

The small town of Concord (see Excursions) was home at various times to Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and the Alcott family, including Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), author of LittleWomen (1868). Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was born in Boston. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a Harvard professor of modern languages, lived at Craigie House (now known as the Longfellow National Historic Site) and published his famous poem ’Hiawatha’ in 1855.

In the 1850s, The Saturday Club, based at the Parker House Hotel, became a meeting point for the lions of literary society, including Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes and members of a group calling themselves the transcendentalists, a term applied to Waldo Emerson’s ’back to nature’ writing such as Nature (1836). Henry James (1843-1916) published TheBostonians in 1886.

Boston remained almost unchallenged as the cultural and literary centre of the country until the new century. Cambridge has been home to two world-renowned poets. T S Eliot (1888-1965) studied at Harvard and e e cummings (1894-1962) was born in Cambridge and also studied at Harvard. Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) studied playwriting at Harvard in 1914. Both e e cummings and O’Neill are buried at Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Avenue.

The city’s beloved baseball features in Dan Shaughnessy’s TheCurseoftheBambimo (1991), which recounts the shudders that went through Boston society when the owner of the Red Sox sold the legendary ’Babe’ Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918.

© Columbus Travel Media Ltd.