On the ninth floor of Boston City Hall, tucked away in a drab room with fluorescent light fixtures, is a miniature scale model of the city of Boston. I got to see it a few weeks ago while waiting for a public Design Commission meeting to start…
In April, many of downtown Boston’s sidewalks become lush with pink and white magnolia trees. A particularly striking display of blossoms can be found on Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay.
This tunnel of greenery is one of the sensory pleasures of a walk around my Boston South End neighborhood.
It’s 7:02 pm in Boston, and the sun is just coming out.
Today’s the Boston Marathon, and the city is bustling with out-of-towners. As of this mid-morning writing, it’s 42 degrees out, the sky is grey, and there is a 35% chance of precipitation (increasing over the day).
What comes to mind when you think of Boston? Walking the Freedom Trail? Eating cod with baked beans? As far as I can tell, these are things that Bostonians rarely (if ever) think about doing, unless they have tourists coming to visit. I could be wrong. This isn’t to say that there aren’t worthy tourist attractions in Boston. There are. But having lived here 22 years, I see much more interesting threads in the fabric of my adopted town. In my South End neighborhood alone: the local grocery store, the community garden, the artist studio buildings, the Spanish tapas bar, the post office, the sandwich shops, the homeless shelter, the hardware store, the dog park, the vintage cookbook store, the super-modern new house in the midst of a block of 18th century brownstones, the fire station, the bilingual pre-school, the doggie bakery, the bus stops. The fountains in the park, the park bench sleepers, the belligerent dog walker with her massive herd of canines. The red brick sidewalks, the parking spaces, the cherry blossom trees, the seagulls. The old man in the red, white and blue jacket who rides around …
