The Old Boston: That Was the City That Was

Boston is moribund. Sad, but true, the better part of Boston lies in the past. The city is a mausoleum--mighty and serene. One could spend hours reciting the mortuary charms of its innumerable cemeteries, with their illustrious dead, which dot the city's main section as well as its periphery. The flight of industry to the South, the corruption of local politics, and the exodus of the Best People into the suburbs has decisively doomed Boston. But the ashes of a greatness that is gone remain to beguile and delight the summer visitor.

Boston's landscape, natural and man-made, its institutions and its amusements, its people and their past-times, its offerings and its possibilities--these are the subject of the following notes, and they are intended to help you get to know the city, and to encourage you to explore it for yourself. Cambridge has its charms, but tends to dullness during the summer months. The world that lies (in ruins) across the Charles River provides the perfect cure for the ennui of Harvard Square.

Death and Decay

When one thinks of Boston, it is hard not to think of death and decay, decline and fall. Before we drop our tokens into the subway turnstyles and begin our survey, let me tender a well-meant suggestion that this matter of cemeteries recalls to mind. If you chance to take ill during the Summer School, ask to be admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital, a fine place whose chief interest for us here is that the view of Boston from its roof is about the best in town. If you stay well, you can't possibly get up there, so don't bother the hospital administrators with a lot of stuff about the HARVARD SUMMER NEWS sending you. There are certain pleasures reserved for the unwell.

Save Your Car

How to get there? First off, if you are fortunate enough to have a car, be wise enough to leave it in the garage. Save it for your week-end trip to Tanglewood or Cape Cod. Boston is no place to drive in. Scooters are fine, and walking is even better; but for most, the public transit system will do best. It's called the MTA, and 20 cents will get you almost anywhere. Park Street Station in downtown Boston in the hub of this underground network. But, remember the subways and buses stop at 1 a.m.

If you want to see the city, walk. Boston is neither so compact (nor so hilly) as San Francisco, but it is sufficiently small that you will be able to cover a substantial chunk in an afternoon of legging it.

Glory That Was

Oliver Wendell Holmes once described the Boston State House as "the hub of the solar system." Serenely situated on Beacon Hill, this masterpiece of Charles Bulfinch's design is as good a place to start as any. From the Hill streets stretch down to all parts of the city.

The red-brick houses of Beacon Hill remain to remind us of the glory that once was Boston's. Louisberg Square, with its 22 houses set around a little garden in the center, best reflects the serenity, the calm, assured optimism, the decorous propriety of the Brahmins of yore. The pattern of these houses is English; No. 20 Louisburg Square was used for the filming of Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

Descending the Hill by way of Beacon Street, we pass the State House and the great houses fronting on the Common, their windows shining purple in the sun. Originally colorless, the constant glare of the sun permanently transformed their color over the course of years. In the Public Garden, which faces Beacon St. near the foot of the Hill, you can take a ride in a Swan Boat. Crossing the road, you enter historic Boston Common, where cows once grazed and where now Irishmen, Italians, Jehovah's Witnesses, and various others debate religion. On weekends the Common resembles nothing so much as London's Hyde Park, with its vehement soapbox oratory.

The Freedom Trail

The local Chamber of Commerce has charted the great monuments of the colonial and revolutionary periods into a continuous route called the Freedom Trail. The Trail starts at the Park St. Church, just across the street from the Common, and winds about, including some of the most vital sites in the history of the fight for American independence.

Adjoining the Park St. Church is the Old Granary Burial Ground, where lie many of the heroes of the struggle against George III, including Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and James Otis. The Old South Meeting House and the Old State House on Washington St. also figured significantly in the pre-revolutionary period and exhibit the evidences of colonial insurrection. Faneuil Hall, in Faneuil Sq., is worth visiting both for the starting variety of produce markets which surround it, and for its historical interest as the scene of innumerable rabble-rousing tirades against the British by such stalwarts as old Samuel Adams. If you can follow the Freedom Trail markers, you will be guided also to the site of the Boston Massacre, King's Chapel, the Home of Paul Revere, and Old North Church.

And a Time to Eat

It's been a long day of walking for you, and you've earned a mighty supper. The top five restaurants are probably Locke-Ober's ($10 for lobster savannah; wait for your rich uncle to visit you), Joseph's, Red Coach Grille, Durgin Park (the roast beef, by all means), and Jimmy's Harborside (for seafood). Boston has a small Chinatown, about four blocks long, running off Washington St.; the House of Roy is one among several good restaurants in the area. For Italian food, it's Carmen's, an as yet little known walk-up on Charles St., small, intimate, and candle-lighted, or Simeone's in Central Square. Locally there is the University Restaurant--across Massachusetts Ave. from Widener--and also Cronin's, on Mt. Auburn St. behind the Brattle Theatre.

The Red Sox, currently in sixth place in the American League, will hold down Fenway Park at intervals during the summer. Prices range from $1 in the bleachers to $3 for the best box seat.

Other dining places, for visitors with an adventurous palate, are the Athens-Olympia (Greek), the Nile (Syrian), Chez Lucien (French), and the South Seas (Polynesian). But in the end, after heart-burn and indigestion, everyone usually returns to Elsie's for her immortal fifty cent roast-beef special.

Off to Glory

After dinner, it's off to glory: either the flicks or the bars. Presumably you're under 21--and that's the legal age, rigidly enforced in most, though not all, bars--so let's start with the movies. The good old dependables are the Kenmore, the Exeter, (usually British imports), the Esquire, the Brattle, and the Harvard Square. The last three are in Cambridge. For the sex-and-sadism spectaculars, amble down Washington St., the 42nd St. of Boston and more garish than anything along Broadway. There you can identify with the teen-age were-wolves on the Cinemascope screens.

Now you have time for about a drink and a half before the bartender informs you gravely that he must clear all the glasses off the bar. Closing time is 1 a.m. every night except Saturday, when midnight rings down the curtain. Local libertarians are currently engaged in a full-scale attack on the Blue Laws, but in the meantime, just drink fast. The plush scenes are the Merry-Go-Round Room in the Sheraton Plaza Hotel, the Ritz Bar in the Ritz Carlton, the Keyboard Lounge in the Somerset Hotel and the Eliot Lounge in the Eliot Hotel.

The most popular nightclubs are Storyville; where it's jazz; Blinstrub's, featuring big-name popular entertainers; Club Zara, for belly dancers; and the Polynesian Village, where the prices are high and the drinks exotic.

Try Washington St.

Less expensive are The Seven (a haven for crew cuts and madras skirts at the base of Beacon Hill); the Rathskeller (beer, tumult, and camaraderie on Commonwealth Avenue); the go-it-alone joints along Washington St., notably the Palace (where you can bring a date during the week and emerge unscathed), the Novelty Bar, and the Golden Nugget.

If you prefer cappuccina to scotch, you're in luck; a number of coffee houses have opened up in the last several years. Charles St., with three houses within as many blocks, bids fair to compete with Greenwich Village's Macdougal St. There is folk singing at Golden Vanity, in Kenmore Square, and at The Loft, on Charles St. Probably some of the others will have entertainers during the summer, but you should check before you go. Some of the others are the Turk's Head, Cafe Yana, The Place, and the Gallery. Charles St. is no North Beach but the prices are reasonable.

Boston's Culture

No doubt, Boston's greatest appeal is its cultural opportunities and great institutions. Boston's art treasures rank among the world's greatest. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, located on the Fenway, stands as a monument to the success of the acquistive instinct in art collecting. According to the rather peculiar terms of Mrs. Gardner's will, the collection can not be added to or rearranged, nor can any work be removed, nor is anything permitted to be lent to other museums.

The Museum of Fine Arts, on Huntington Avenue, includes a great collection of American art, especially of the Colonial and early Republican period. Portraits by Gilbert Stuart, Copley, and Sargent and landscapes of the Hudson River School are in this great collection. And just off Storrow Drive is the Museum of Science, which combines natural history, science, history, and public health; it also has a planetarium