NEARBY SIGHT: OMNI PARKER HOUSE, 60 School Street, opposite Old City Hall.
If you're already sick of the Freedom Trail's yellowed colonial history, stop by the Omni Parker House, which is steeped in Boston's more recent - but no less revolutionary - history.
One of the city's oldest hotels, the Parker House was the supposed birthplace of the Boston Creme Pie, which is not actually pie, but a custard-filled cake with chocolate icing. The dessert is prepared using the original recipe in the expensive Parkers Restaurant downstairs (entrees $20 - $28).
The hotel also saw the creation of another Boston-born treat: it was from this hotel that John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for US President.
The Parker House has also housed some of the past century's most influential characters (for good or bad): before Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh's tenure as a busboy here and prior to civil rights leader Malcolm X's stint as a waiter, actor John Wilkes Booth spent a week here.
He did so directly before travelling to Washington, DC's Ford's Theatre to assassinate the 16th US President, Abraham Lincoln. Incidentally, Booth was in town to see his brother Edwin perform in a play.
Restaurant open: Sunday 7am - noon, Monday - Friday 6:30 - 2pm and 5:30 - 10pm,
Saturday 7am - noon and 5:30 - 10pm.
Tel: 617 - 725 - 1600 - Restaurant.
Tel: 617 - 227 - 8600 - Hotel.
OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE (BOSTON GLOBE STORE), 1 School Street.
After Puritan religious agitator Anne Hutchinson's house on this site was destroyed by fire in 1711. Thomas Crease built the current red-brick building as a residence and apothecary (pharmacy).
The building is referred to as a "bookstore" because, from 1845 - 1865, it was at the heart of Boston's once-thriving literary scene, when it housed the offices of the prestigious Ticknor and Fields publishing house.
The house published such great American writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau.
Today, it is home to the Boston Globe store and is filled floor to ceiling with Boston - and Boston Globe - themed tourist dreck.
Open: Sunday 11am - 4pm, Monday - Friday 9am - 5:30pm, Saturday 9:30am - 5pm.
Tel: 617 - 367 - 4000.
OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE, 310 Washington Street.
Best known as a colonial meeting hall, the building has also served as a church, a British stable, a post office, and (currently) a museum of free speech.
Early members of the church congregation included Samuel Adams, African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, and Benjamin Franklin (who was baptized here and went to school around the corner at the Boston Latin School).
On the day after the Boston Massacre (which took place on March 5, 1770 outside the nearby Old State House). Faneuil Hall could not accommodate all the people who came to the town meeting to protest the event, so the crowd moved to Old South, which was the largest building in Boston at the time.
there they drew up measures demanding the removal of British troops from the city, thus beginning the building's association with the public debate over various issues of religious, political, and social import. It was here that patriot rebels planned the Boston Tea Party.
In 1876, the Old South Preservation Committee, which included Little Women author Louisa May Alcott and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, was formed to preserve the building, then slated for demolition.
Today, its spare church-like interior has been converted into a rather unimaginative museum, with exhibits about the various debates held here. It's not really worth the price of admission and pales in comparison to the Immigration Museum across the street.
Just up the street from the Old South Meeting House is Downtown Crossing. Boston's major outdoor discount shopping area, Downtown Crossing is a great spot to rest your feet, take a break from the Freedom Trail's musty history, and partake in another all-American activity - shopping.
Open: daily April - October 9:30am - 5pm; November - March 10am - 4pm.
Tel: 617 - 482 - 6439.
NEARBY SIGHT: "DREAMS OF FREEDOM" IMMIGRATION MUSEUM, 1 Milk Street.
Although most travellers know that New York City's Ellis Island is America's major immigration port (with half of all immigrants to the United States arriving there) few realize that Boston is the country's second most frequent point of arrival, with one in six immigrants having entered America through the city.
To commemorate the struggles and triumphs of these immigrants, the interactive, kid-friendly Immigration Museum was built here, on the site of Benjamin Franklin's birth.
Subtitled "Dreams of Freedom", the museum is a flashy, 2 fl. multimedia extravaganza that uses chintzy special effects and interactive games - computerized quizzes, holograms, bright lights, and even an "immigration rap" - to chronicle the history of immigration in Boston and the role immigrants have played in the city.
Visitors are issued a "passport" upon entrance, which is stamped by virtual "immigration officers" throughout the museum. The journey begins with an enjoyable 20 minute interactive movie, narrated by an animatronic Franklin.
The final portion of the museum, which includes the Bernard Chiu Gallery, a contemporary art space with rotating exhibits, encourages visitors to record their own immigrant stories.
Open: mid-April - December daily 10am - 6pm; January - mid-April, Tuesday - Sunday 10am - 5pm.
Tel: 617 - 338 - 6022.
OLD STATE HOUSE, 206 Washington Street.
Preserved and run by the Bostonian Society as a museum of the history of Boston, the Old State House is perhaps the most interesting and well-organized of the stops along the Freedom Trail.
Built in 1713 as the headquarters of the British government, the building has - like the Old South Meeting House up the street - served many functions over the years, including a merchants' exchange, general meeting place, legislative building, and most famously, as the site of the Boston Massacre.
The museum's fascinating and unusually wide range of exhibits on colonial life include such diverse topics as colonial female diarists, British pirates, the changing architectural face of the city, and the 350-year history of firefighting in Boston and bring new life to the one-time headquarters of the colonial government (the building is the oldest existing courtroom in the Western Hemisphere).
Every year on America's Independence Day (July 4), an actor in period clothing reads the "Declaration of Independence" from the balcony, where it was first read to Bostonians on July 18, 1776.
Stand under the Old State House balcony and look right for a ring of cobblestones in a traffic island; this marks the site of the Boston Massacre, an event that many claim sparked the American Revolution.
On March 5, 1770, British redcoats and American patriots clashed in this small skirmish that left five civilians dead, including Crispus Attucks, the first black man to die in the Revolution. The night of the Boston Massacre is eerily recreated in a room inside the Old State House.
It's a bit of a walk from here to the next sop on the Trail, Faneuil Hall; the Trail passes by Boston's sleek Financial District en route, crossing behind Government Center, which is home to the current Boston City Hall.
Open: daily July - August 9am - 6pm; September - June 9am - 5pm.
Tel: 617 - 720 - 1713.
FANEUIL HALL, 15 State Street.
Built in 1742 by merchant Peter Faneuil and given as a gift to the town, Faneuil Hall has served as a public meeting hall for over 250 years and was critical to sparking the Revolutionary War. It was here that angered patriots, known as Sons of Liberty, approved revolutionary measures, such as boycotts of English cloth and tea.
The Daughters of Liberty helped enable these boycotts by weaving their own cloth and growing and brewing their own herbal teas.
in the mid-19th-century, Faneuil Hall was the chief rallying place of America's anti-slavery movement and played host to famous abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, as well as slavery advocate and President of the Confederate side during the Civil War Jefferson Davis.
The only rallying cry heard in Faneuil Hall today is capitalism. Sure, you can take a peek inside the spacious restored meeting hall and adjacent exhibits on colonial history, but know that the real reason people come to this giant outdoor shopping plaza is to spend their money on the chain-mall goods and overpriced tourist crap for sale on the 1st fl. shops and in the stores of adjacent Quincy Market.
The only place to escape the overly commercial ground floor is to head upstairs, where National Park Rangers give talks in a spacious meeting room, which has managed to retain the feel it must have had centuries ago when the nation's great orators spoke there.
Open: daily 9am - 5pm (except when being used for public functions).
US park rangers give talks about the history of the building and the city on the second floor every 30 minutes; 9:30am - 4:30pm.
Tel: 617 - 242 - 5675.
QUINCY MARKET, Opposite Faneuil Hall.
Once Boston's major meat and fish market, Quincy Market (named for its commissioner, former Boston mayor and Harvard president Josiah Quincy) is now a giant three-building shopping mall and food court with such historically significant spots as the Gap and Victoria's Secret.
Swarming with tourists and street performers throughout the year and almost unbearably packed in summer, it is perhaps the world's only shopping mall that also happens to be a National Park. Despite its chain-mall repulsiveness, this is the best place to grab an affordable lunch mid-Freedom Trail.
Quincy Market is full of small scale versions of Boston's big name restaurants, like Legal Sea Foods. For what many claim as the best clam chowder in the city, stop by Houston's.
Retail stores open: Sunday noon - 6pm, Monday - Saturday 10am - 9pm.
Restaurants open: daily on Sunday - Thursday until midnight or 1am, Friday - Saturday until 2am.
NEARBY SIGHT: HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL, Carmen Park, Congress Street.
Completely out of place amidst the rowdy bars and tourist hordes of Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market, the sobering New England Holocaust Memorial was placed adjacent to the Freedom Trail to allow visitors to reflect on the meaning of freedom and oppression and to remember the freedoms many were forced to give up during the Holocaust (Shoah).
Said to represent everything from gas chamber smokestacks to candles in a menorah, each of the six luminous glass towers represents one of the six major Nazi concentration camps.
Hauntingly lit at night, each tower is etched with quotations from Holocaust survivors and a pattern of 6 million numbers. The numbers are meant to recall the numerical tattoos given to concentration camp internees and to represent the estimated 6 million Jews who died in the camps. |
