WEDNESDAY, August 9
Braintree & Boston, Massachusetts
We went downtown today right at rush hour. Across from us on the train were three suburban teenaged boys, two white and one black. The black boy was as clean-cut as you could possibly imagine. One of the white boys (the brown-haired one) had moussed hair and a few earrings. The other had artificially blond spikes, more tattoos than you could imagine, and piercings on virtually every visible part of his body (I won't vouch for what wasn't visible). He spent most of the time between Braintree and Quincy Adams trying to put on an eyebrow ring. He seemed to have about my level of coordination, and he couldn't get it through the tiny hole above his eye. Finally he gave up and put it in one of the few unfilled holes in his ear. This young gentleman had a case of CDs as large as many travelers' carry-on bags. He would listen to a CD for a few seconds, show it to his friends, put it away, and get out another one. Time after time he listened to maybe fifteen seconds of a song before trying something else. I guess I should be thankful when my students are able to hold their attention for five minutes.
We got off at Park Street Station, right downtown under the famous park called Boston Common. This is has the rather dubious title of "the oldest subway station in America". It was opened in 1897--almost a decade before the New York subway and not long after London opened its first tube. The station entrance (an old fashioned brass canopy) is now a national historic landmark, and for the subway's centennial they installed a commemorative mosaic in the lobby.
We exited the station, found our bearings, and walked across the street for breakfast. The place we chose was a fascinating local chain called "Finagle a Bagel". Beyond the cute name, they really serve excellent food. They pride themselves on serving their bagels fresh; the pans of newly baked bagels just barely keep up with demand. When you order a bagel, the clerk places it on a conveyor belt behind glass at the front of the counter. The bagel moves up to the middle of the counter, where a nasty-looking circular saw slices it in half and then flings it to the far end of the counter. Another clerk catches the flying bagel and puts it on a plate, and then a third clerk slathers the bagel with tablespoons of warm, gooey cream cheese. It was fascinating to watch the process. In addition to the bagels, we had delicious freshly squeezed orange juice. It was a little bit pricier than I'd normally pay for a fast food breakfast, but definitely fun and good.
Our morning was devoted to exploring Boston's Freedom Trail. A tour book (Access: Boston) describes the freedom trail as "a pilgrimage along some of America's most historic streets to sixteen sites dating from the city's colonial and early republic years". That word "pilgrimage" is not as far from the truth as you might think. I felt like a Moslem on the Haaj doing the circuit in Mecca as I carefully followed the red strip in the sidewalk past some of the oldest churches in America. I also felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, except that the brick road I was following was red instead of yellow.
The main part of the Freedom Trail is three miles long, and it includes pretty much everything historic you've ever heard of in Boston--and lots of stuff you probably haven't. It starts at Boston Common (1634), the oldest public park in America and still a pleasant and surprisingly large green space. As we walked through the park, a group of Asian schoolchildren was going for a stroll, arms chained together like giant snakes.
Right next to Boston Common is Park Street Church, a towering 1809 red brick Congregational Church nicknamed "Brimstone Corner". The anthem "America" (My country, 'tis of thee ...) was composed here, and the church remains an active U.C.C. church with Boston's largest Protestant congregation.
Beside the church is the Granary Park Burying Ground--obviously named before we found a need of euphemisms for our cities of the dead. This is the final resting place of Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams (another distant ancestor of ours), and Crispus Attucks.
The Massachusetts State House was built in 1798, and continues to function as the state capitol building more than 200 years later. They give free tours of the place, but we arrived between them, so we continued following the red line.
Next up is King's Chapel, the oldest Anglican (today Episcopalian) church in America (founded in 1668, with the present building dating to 1754). The church has the oldest pulpit still in use in America. It's a fascinating old church, with enormous white-painted boxes housing the pews. The boxes are built so tall, that you can't really see if anyone is in there or not. According to their free literature, one of the church's primary ministries today is to Boston's gay community. It's fascinating to ponder what George Washington (whose worshipped here when he was in Boston) or William Dawes (who is buried in the adjoining cemetery) would think about that. Would they cringe at changes the country they founded has made, or would they celebrate the fact that freedom and tolerance are still alive in America?
The Old South Meeting House (1729) was the site of the rally before the Boston Tea Party. They charge admission to see inside it, so we didn't. We also skipped paying to see the interior of the Old State House (1713).
I described Faneuil Hall (the downtown mall) in Monday's write-up. The building dates from 1761 and was modeled on the London Exchange, complete with a brass grasshopper on the roof. From now on when I read references to the Exchange in Dickens, I will picture Faneuil Hall.
We also saw Quincy Market (1826) yesterday; that's where we ran into Tony, the Garrigan student. About a block from there is the Ebenezer Hancock House, a 1767 rowhouse that was owned by John Hancock's uncle (they sort of stretch the history on that one, if you ask me). It is now the offices of a law firm.
We again walked past Paul Revere's House (1680) and Sacred Heart/Bethel (1833), which we saw the other day. Next door to Paul Revere is the Pierce-Hitchborn House (1710), an enormous brick mansion that contrasts greatly with Revere's modest home. It was apparently subdivided into twenty tenement apartments before being declared a historic site and being restored.
Just up the street is St. Stephen's Church (1804). The church was originally Congregational, but it was sold to the Catholics in 1864 to serve Irish immigrants. This was Rose Kennedy's home church.
Beside the church is a tiny park that the Italian locals call "the Prado" and the city calls "Paul Revere Mall". It was built as a WPA project in the '30s. One of my travel books described it as "a scruffy little park with a statue of Paul Revere", while another calls it "a pleasant tree-lined passage plucked straight from Italy". Go about halfway between those two descriptions and you'll get a pretty good idea of what the place is.
On the other side of the Prado is what is probably Boston's most famous building, the Old North Church. Officially called Christ Church (a terribly British name that could only be Episcopalian), the place was built in 1723 from designs stolen from a Christopher Wren church in London. It was, of course, here that the lanterns hung to signal that the British were coming for the battle made famous in Longfellow's poem (which I hadn't realized had been first published in the Atlantic Monthly). Well, actually, that may not quite be so. Many scholars apparently feel that the real Old North Church was a church called Second Church of Boston, which was burned down by the British. Its location is now a parking ramp and is not marked on the Freedom Trail. Even if Christ Church was the Old North Church, the steeple that is here today would not be the one of Paul Revere fame. The original blew down in a storm in 1804, was replaced, and blew down again in 1954. So today's steeple is not even 50 years old, rather than 225.
In spite of all that, Christ Church is a lovely old place of worship. It is also by far the most touristy Protestant church I have ever seen. That's both good and bad. They handle the crowds well, and provide a lot of interesting information about the places national and religious history. They also have an amazingly tacky gift shop where I'm ashamed to say I did drop a couple of bucks.
Copp's Hill Burying Ground, the cemetery for Old North Church, is the official end of the main part of the Freedom Trail. We continued along a branch of the trail--nearly as long as the main part, and not nearly so interesting--that goes across the Charles River into the old neighborhood known as Charlestown.
There are two main sites in Charlestown. The first is the Charlestown Navy Yard, home of the U.S.S. Constitution. This is the ship that is better known as "Old Ironsides", the oldest ship still commissioned in the U.S. Navy fleet. "Commissioned" is a relative term; it's pretty much docked in the harbor full-time. We joined countless other tourists and climbed aboard. What can I say--it's basically a big old ship; its history is really more important than the ship itself.
The other site of interest in Charlestown is Breed's Hill, where the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought. I've felt disappointed at pretty much every battlefield I've ever visited, and this was certainly no exception. The problem is that history fixes in your mind what the battlefield looked like in its day. The point of the battle, of course, was to preserve land that people wanted--and since they wanted the land, they used it. That means that today the battlefield looks absolutely nothing like what you'd expect it should look like. Here in Charlestown, Bunker Hill is a neighborhood of ultra-expensive gentrified rowhouses. It's really a lovely neighborhood, but hardly what the place looked like in Revolutionary times.
There's a small park at the top of the hill with a big obelisk at the top that looks like the Washington Monument. The guide books say that there's a lovely view of the city from the top. I, of course, had to find out, so I huffed and puffed my way up 294 claustrophobic steps without a single landing. About every 50 steps they have tiny windows carved in the side of the structure. All these windows look out in the same direction, providing a charming view of a public housing project. Once you get to the top you have an even better view of public housing, but I'd hardly call the overall cityscape spectacular. The problem is that Boston is frankly an ugly city. It's quite low rise (Des Moines has higher skyscrapers), and all its modern buildings are of the generic glass box variety that leads to a very boring skyline. The waterfront is almost entirely industrial, and there are lots of ratty buildings that aren't old enough to be historic nor well enough located to invite gentrification. Oh well, at least they didn't charge me to walk up here.
It was well past noon when we left Bunker Hill (or whatever it's called), and both Margaret and I were getting rather both hungry and thirsty. Most of Charlestown is exclusively residential, and what restaurants were there were well beyond our price range. So we crossed the bridge back into central Boston, where things looked a bit more promising. We settled on a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant that looked like absolutely nothing from the street, but was really quite pleasant inside. A stereotypical Italian mother was our waitress, and we enjoyed minestrone and heaping plates of pasta. I also downed glass after glass of iced tea. It was close to 90o, and after the long walk I was close to being dehydrated.
The restaurant was about a block from one of Boston's more modern points of interest, an enormous construction project that locals simply call "the Big Dig". Today there is one major expressway through downtown Boston--the Central Artery, which carries three different highway numbers on a crowded and decaying six-lane elevated structure. While traffic never seemed all that awful while we were there, apparently gridlock is commonplace. The airport would be just over a mile from downtown as the crow flies (probably 3 or 4 miles by road), but I've read that it can sometimes take 90 minutes to get there at rush hour. The Big Dig is an attempt to solve the traffic problems and beautify the city at the same time. For over a decade they've been working on the biggest tunnel project on earth. They've already built a freight by-pass to relieve much of the downtown truck traffic. When they're finally done (in about ten more years) they'll have eight-lane highways running north/south and east/west beneath the city, interchanging with each other underground. They're sandwiching the new expressway system amid all the existing utilities, not to mention the subway and Amtrak tunnels--without disturbing service on anything and without dislocating a single house or business. While there's really nothing special to see (it's just a big construction project, after all--and most of it is underground), the whole concept of the thing is fascinating. I mentioned that we did not see horrible traffic in Boston. That said, I must go on to say that Boston is a place I would never even remotely consider driving. The quaint, rambling streets meet at odd angles, often at blind corners. They change their names from block to block, and as often as not there is no street sign to tell you what the street name is anyhow. Major streets tend to intersect at traffic circles (called "rotaries" in New England) that have rules all their own. The only on-street parking is parallel. It's almost always full, and more often than not it's reserved for neighborhood residents. There are surprisingly few parking ramps, and those that do exist are usually approached from narrow side streets.
There is also a collection of Massachusetts laws that favor pedestrians over wheeled traffic. That was pleasant for us, but must be incredibly annoying for drivers. Most notably, there is a $500 fine if a driver does not stop for a pedestrian in a marked crosswalk. They obviously enforce this closely, because drivers are ridiculously careful at crosswalks. If you're on the corner and they have an inkling you might be about to cross the street, they stop. Several times I was waiting for traffic (as I always do in the Midwest) when someone stopped (often squealing their brakes) and waved me across the street. The pedestrians often seem quite arrogant about their rights. I saw many people crossing without looking--even where there wasn't a painted crosswalk. It's also quite common to wander among stopped traffic, assuming they'll wait until you've passed before they go. I walk a lot--often in big cities--and while I rarely strictly observe "Walk/Don't Walk" lights (trusting instead in red and green and which way the cars are going), I'm definitely not so trusting as the Bostonians. If a New Englander tried to cross the street in Chicago, we'd be hearing about his gruesome demise on WGN.
We got on the subway again at Haymarket station and rode to Copley Square (surprisingly, pronounced just as it looks: COP-lee). There are two big churches here. First there's Trinity Church, an 1877 Episcopal monstrosity that we just saw the outside of. More interesting is the "New Old South Church", whose name alone creates interest. The congregation of this U.C.C. church moved here from the Old South Meeting House in 1874. The whole reason Margaret and I came here was that the entrance supposedly contains a fragment of our ancestor John Alden's tombstone. Sadly, we got distracted and forgot to look for it. I guess that gives me a reason to have to return to Boston.
We next took the subway to Kenmore Square, the stop for baseball's famous Fenway Park. Having seen a number of ballparks--old and new--I must say Fenway did little to impress me. Baseball nostalgists rave about how the park blends in with its neighborhood. It does. What they don't tell you is that the neighborhood is a bunch of run-down warehouses, most of them covered with graffiti and several with their windows smashed out. The park itself is a crumbling brick box with lights mounted on it. The playing field is tiny, really not much larger than a high school park. The famous "green monster" is there all right, and so is the big Citgo sign beyond the outfield. I guess it's time to haul out the sarcasm: Wow, Fenway Park--been there, done that! ... I'll definitely complain if they carry through with plans to tear down Yankee Stadium, but having seen Fenway, I'll shed no tears when it goes.
We had one more church to see in Boston, and we took the subway to Bowdoin (the first syllable is pronounced like a tree "bough" and the second like a loud "din") to see it. We'd seen Old North Church and Old South Church (old and new), and there isn't any Old East Church (if there were it would be in the middle of the harbor). That left "west" as the only remaining direction, and just outside Bowdoin station is Old West Church. The original Old West Church was a wooden structure that was burnt by the British when they discovered it was being used to send signals across the river. The "modern" brick structure dates to 1806. It was originally Unitarian, but is now Methodist--yet another in the amazing mix of switched-around religions among Boston's churches.
Also at Bowdoin is the New England Bell Telephone building. While he was born in Scotland and mostly lived in Canada, Alexander Graham Bell made his famous discovery in Boston. Today the phone company (which is now called Verizon) has a museum replicating his original laboratory. We would have liked to see it. Unfortunately the employees of Verizon were on strike all over the East (probably trying to avoid massive lay-offs like those at their sister company Qwest), and neither Margaret nor I was keen to cross a picket line. I guess that's another reason I'll have to go back to Boston.
We went back to Braintree, and Margaret rested a while at the motel. I went to Shaws, a local supermarket, and also to K-Mart. I didn't buy much of anything other than coffee, but it made for a pleasant afternoon walk.
For dinner tonight we went back downtown. We ate at a Mexican place called Zuma that was located in the basement of Quincy Market. Zuma exhibited a trend I've noticed at a lot of restaurants lately, which I do not like at all. They served way too much food. I ordered what they called the "vegetarian feast" (cheese and salad on and in enchiladas, tacos, and burritos). It came on an enormous platter that was piled high with food. I forced myself to eat more than half of it, but eventually I got to the point where I honestly couldn't have eaten another bite without becoming very ill. I'm sure they felt they were providing good value, but honestly I'd rather have paid two-thirds the price for half the food. (Margaret's enchilada plate was somewhat smaller, but it was also oversized.)
It was going on 10:00 when we left Zuma, but downtown was still lively and full of people. Boston is a college town and a tourist town, and both of those groups keep it hopping well after dark. For us it was quite late, though. We headed back to the hotel and packed our bags for our departure tomorrow.
THURSDAY, August 10
Braintree, Massachusetts to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
It had dripped and drizzled all day yesterday, and today's prediction was for serious rain. Fortunately, when we got up it was overcast, but not raining. We had breakfast (ham and eggs) at Bickford's, and checked out of the Motel 6.
Our next job was getting our luggage to the Braintree station. This was easier said than done. While the station was literally next door, there was no sidewalk on our side of a very busy street--just a gravel path next to the traffic. While both Margaret and I had wheeled luggage, it's hard to drag it across gravel. So we carried it to the corner, where we encountered our next obstacle. I had commented before about how Massachusetts drivers are overly deferential to pedestrians--especially at marked crosswalks. Unfortunately, there was no marked crosswalk between us and the station. The crosswalks were painted to easily connect commuters with the industrial park, but not the motel. We could have gone about a block out of our way and crossed at official crossings, but here there was nothing. Compounding things, it was also a relatively blind corner, with a big tree blocking our view of upcoming traffic (and its view of us). It was rush hour, so there was a lot of traffic to contend with, but we found a break and quickly wheeled our bags across the street.
We caught the first train downtown, right at rush hour. Fortunately, having gotten on at the end of the line, we were able to find seats and balance our luggage on the floor in front of us. Unfortunately, after just a few stops (at JFK/Umass), they announced that the train was going out of service and everyone would have to exit. So we joined the mob on the platform and then crowded on board the next train--which was already full when it got there. We and our luggage effectively blocked one of the exit doors, but there really wasn't anything we could do about that. Fortunately, it wasn't all that far before we arrived at South Station and left the train.
We took a series of escalators and elevators up to the Amtrak station, double-checked the status of our train, and killed some time having coffee in the waiting area. Unlike Chicago, Boston's South Station was bright and friendly; the staff was helpful, and every single train on the schedule was listed as "on time".
We had originally planned to take a train that left around 11:30, but our tickets were interchangeable on any of the East Coast trains (except those at rush hour or the high-speed Metroliner service). We decided to leave a bit earlier and opted for a train scheduled to leave at 10:20. They announced the train about 10:15, and we left just four minutes after the scheduled time.
Coach seating on Amtrak's "Northeast Direct" service is completely unreserved. When the called the train we elbowed our way to the gate and ended up near the front of the line. This was definitely fortunate. The train was nearly full by the time we left South Station, and by the time we had picked up passengers at Boston's other two stations (Back Bay and Route 128), it was standing room only. One woman who got on at Back Bay complained and complained because she did not have a seat. She felt that because she had bought her ticket three weeks ago, she should have the right to a seat. I assume her ticket was similar to ours--which we had purchased several months earlier. It was marked "unreserved", had no particular train number or time indicated, and clearly indicated that seating was not guaranteed. Fortunately, by the time we got to Providence, she managed to take a seat from someone who got off there. The train staff tried to do their best to make sure long-haul passengers had seats, while those just going a short ways either stood or spent their time in the lounge car.
If the California Zephyr is the high end of Amtrak's service, the Northeast Direct (a.k.a. "Clockers" for their roughly hourly service) is definitely the low end--even though it's this route were Amtrak makes the bulk of their money. The entire way, the follows commuter rail routes; in fact you could go all the way from Virginia to Boston by transferring endlessly from one commuter train to another. Basically the Northeast Direct is like an express commuter service--not unlike the Metra express trains that run straight from Aurora or Joliet to Chicago, skipping the suburbs between. The single-level coaches were the same size as those we had on the Lake Shore Limited, but the seats were much closer together--similar to the configuration on a long-distance bus. The car attendants here really do nothing more than deal with tickets, and that pretty much occupies all the time they have. Ours was a mousy woman who reminded me of our mother's old friend Joyce Jones--that is, until she opened her mouth and revealed her thick New England accent.
Speaking of the car attendants reminds me that I should talk about how Amtrak deals with tickets. The tickets themselves are printed on tagboard and stapled together in a little booklet, like airplane tickets. At most stations someone at the gate checks the validity of your ticket before you are allowed to go out on to the platform. Once the train starts moving, the car attendant comes around and takes your ticket. Typically he or she punches both the ticket and the stub. Then they place a handwritten seat tag on the luggage rack above your seat with the three-letter code for your destination written on it (ours this time was "PHL""--and most are the same as the airport code for the same city). The seat tag is your receipt and proof of payment once the car attendant takes your ticket. It is also the attendant's clue as to who has to get off at what destination. In addition to the three-letter codes, there also appears to be some color coding system (which may deal with where you got on, rather than where you are getting off), but we never did figure that out. What really seemed odd to me was that the seat tags were all handwritten. You'd think in the computer age they could work out a better system than that.
We got to Providence on time at 11:11am. This was the first time I had ever been in Rhode Island, and there was a certain thrill to being there, even if I never did actually set foot on the ground. Rhode Island was, of course, founded as a place of tolerance. My Congregational ancestors, who had come to America in search of religious freedom, found that practicing tolerance themselves was a difficult virtue. Roger Williams found Massachusetts oppressive, so he fled southward and founded the American Baptist Church here at Providence. At least from the surface, it would appear that Rhode Island is continuing to surpass Massachusetts in the area of tolerance; the population of Providence is far more diverse ethnically than that of Boston. Providence apparently has a very large Hispanic population, as is evidenced by billboards in Spanish along I-95. We also saw a lot of Blacks and Asians getting on the train in Rhode Island.
We really didn't see much of Providence. The station itself is underground, and the tracks mostly go past ancient factories and modern strip malls. We did catch a glimpse of the Rhode Island State Capitol, though, as well as a few boxy houses that were similar to the ones we had seen years ago in Newfoundland. Then, just past Providence, we got our first glimpse of the ocean. Technically this was Rhode Island Sound, an inlet of the Atlantic. It amazed me that forest changed near the ocean, in precisely the same way it did in Mississippi and Louisiana. Where there had been thick, tall trees between Boston and Providence, once we were in Rhode Island, the soil was sandy and the trees were short and scruffy. We paralleled U.S. 6 across the state for about an hour, stopping briefly at the beach resort of Kingston and arriving at Westerly (on the Connecticut border) 15 minutes late. It's amazing to think of crossing a state in less than an hour, and being late when you finish.
CONTINUED IN PART 5
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