Beacon Hill, Boston

“ In these stirring days facile American genius springs up, like brush fires, from coast to coast. Novels pour in from the West, the Middle West, the South. To superficial outsiders it may seem as if Boston might be hard-pressed to keep her laurels green, but Boston [Pg xix] herself has no fears. Her present may not shine with so unique a brilliance as her past, but her past gains in luster with each succeeding year. Nothing can ever take from Boston her high literary prestige.
While we are still on Beacon Hill we can look out, not only upon the past, but upon the future. ”

“ Like the survivors of Noah's deluge clinging to the top of a rock, they to whom the Boston of tradition was bequeathed are driven back on Beacon Hill as a final refuge from the billows rising round them. A high-bred, cultivated, sympathetic people, they have so given away their heritage as to be but a negligible factor in the State, in the country, of which their fathers and grandfathers may be said once to have kept the conscience.
But to Tom Whitelaw Louisburg Square meant only the dignified fronts and portals behind which lived the rich people who had no point of contact with himself. ”

“ How luscious will they be when they are mellow!"
He also saw great promise in bright little Jenny, who had heart full of sympathy and affection. Jenny, Ben, and Uncle Benjamin became one in heart and companionship.
Beacon Hill was a lovely spot in summer in old Boston days. Below it was the Common, with great trees and winding [71] ways. It commanded a view of the wide harbor and far blue sea. It looked over a curve of the river Charles, and the bright shallow inlet or pond, where the Boston and Maine depot now stands, that was filled up from the earth of the fine old hillside. ”

“ And do you recall that on this western slope of Beacon Hill from which I write to you lived the hermit Blackstone of Shawmut, before Winthrop or any Puritan had thought of settling Boston town?
I like old places. I like to be on the oldest spot 20in this old, historic town, as you may easily imagine, remembering all my antiquarian enthusiasm when we were at school. Well, I have not outgrown it in the least, in spite of all my modern radicalism about many things. ”

“ And now I must draw a sorrowful picture there. In a chamber in one of the most pretentious houses on Beacon Hill, in the city of Boston, a lady hardly past middle age, who must in health have been very beautiful, lay dying. ”

“ Buildings. Boston is replete with objects of architectural interest. The State House, on Beacon Hill, built in 1795 after designs by Charles Bulfinch, and subsequently enlarged at various times, is a prominent structure some 400 feet long, crowned by a guilded dome. The Shaw Monument, by Saint Gaudens, the reproduction of the Beacon Monument which was erected in 1790, and statues of Daniel Webster and Horace Mann, are of interest in this locality. ”

“ The New York Printing Company,
81, 83, and 85 Centre Street,
New York.
The Ghost. A CHRISTMAS STORY.
At the West End of Boston is a quarter of some fifty streets, more or less, commonly known as Beacon Hill.
It is a rich and respectable quarter, sacred to the abodes of Our First Citizens. The very houses have become sentient of its prevailing character of riches and respectability ”

“ We Boston cats must hang together,” and with these words she crept away.
Serena soon came out from under the bed, and got on top of it, and I lay down beside her. I slept until little Mary came to bed, and then it was so still that I could not sleep. Beacon Hill is a quiet place, one does not hear the cars up there, but still there is something doing and breathing at night. Here, in lovely Maine, there is absolutely nothing. The quiet seems to press upon you. ”

“ Few of the windows were lighted, but down by the docks she could hear the familiar cry of the watch, and over the bay the lights of Boston shone out bright and clear. It was hard for her to remember that Boston was no longer a friendly town.
When she reached the graveyard she felt her way along the low wall that protected it from the street. Shadow lay thick about the grassy mounds inside, and crooked elm boughs meeting overhead shut out the thin glow of the starlight. There was no moon. ”

“ I could understand why Boston people are proud of their work, and I could look up at Bunker Hill without any sense of shame, as I beheld such a wonderful display of energy and progress in the fair city, with its monuments, statues, parks, public buildings, churches, and on the sea furrowed by keels and studded with sunny canvas. ”

“ Boston is composed of two parts: the new city, pedantic and miserly, like a man who, displaying his riches and his virtue, yet guards them for himself,—where the streets, open on all sides to avenues, seem to become more silent and longer in the cold, and to listen with more spite to the step of the passer-by who follows them, grinding his teeth in the blast; and the hill where the old city, like a snail-shell, contains all the windings of traffic, debauchery, and hypocrisy. ”

“ Beacon Street, with its smooth macadamized roadway, whereon there is much pleasure driving, and in the winter a perfect sleighing carnival, is as pleasant a street as it is possible to live on, but a country road is always a better situation than a city street, and a forest path perhaps is best of all. When she is once settled in her Boston [Pg 191] home, the manifold interests of the complex city life claim every hour in the day. ”

“ If you should walk up and down the chessboard of Beacon Hill—taking the knight's move occasionally across the narrow cross-streets—you could not help treading the very squares which were familiar to the feet of that generation of authors which has permanently stamped American literature. At 55 Beacon Street, down near the foot of the hill and facing the Common, still stands the handsome, swell-front, buff-brick house where Prescott, the historian, lived. ”

“ To-morrow you may tell me all you please of the ghost and the mysteries of this house, and I dare say we shall find the bones of that British soldier somewhere beneath the foundations. As for that trifling bit of leather you hold in your hand, it's rather passé for Beacon Street. The next time you tell that story I suggest that you play your game of drop the slipper from a window in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. Still, as I always keep an umbrella in the check-room of the Parker House, I would not have you imagine that I look upon Boston as an unlikely scene for romance. ”

“ Once the lay-out of New York has been mastered—its avenues and numbered cross streets—it is the most difficult city in the world in which to lose one's way. But Boston is different. I found Boston hard to learn, although it was a pleasant task to acquire knowledge, for I was led into some of the quietest little Georgian streets I have ever been in, steep though some of them were, and along one of the fairest of green walks—that between the back of Beacon Street and the placid Charles. ”

“ Now, as we go down the steps, a sudden consciousness strikes us of what very pleasant places Boston literary lines seem to fall into! Is it that literary people are more fortunate in Boston, or that in Boston only the fortunate people are literary? For as we think of brilliant names associated with Beacon Street, Boylston Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury and Marlborough Streets, it certainly seems as if the Bohemia of plain living and high thinking—so prominent a feature of New York literary and artistic life—had hardly a foothold in aristocratic, literary Boston. ”

“ The modern city has about 590 miles of streets, of which all but 95 miles are paved—the greater part with macadam, granite, Belgian blocks, and gravel. In the new sections they are handsomelv laid out. Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, the latter 240 feet wide and one of the finest boulevards in America, with other streets of the Back Bay region, are representative of the beauty of Boston's residential avenues. Washington and Tremont streets are the headquarters of the retail trade, and State Street is the important financial centre—the Wall Street of Boston. ”

“ A change has come over Boston in four months, since John Harrington and Josephine Thorn parted. The breath of the spring has been busy everywhere, and the haze of the hot summer is ripening the buds that the spring has brought out. The trees on the Common are thick and heavy with foliage, the Public Garden is a carpet of bright flowers, and on the walls of Beacon Street the great creepers have burst into blossom and are stretching long shoots over the brown stone and the iron balconies. ”

“ To the stranger in Boston, delighting in that magnificent walk along the Charles River Embankment, with the arching spans of the Cambridge and Harvard bridges on one side, and the homes of wealth and mellow refinement on the other—a walk which for invigorating beauty compares with any in the cities of men—it seems incredible that when this promenade was laid out a few years ago, the householders along the water's edge absolutely refused to turn their front windows away from Beacon Street. ”

“ There is an Athenæum, and a State Hall, and a fashionable street,—Beacon Street, very like Piccadilly as it runs along the Green Park,—and there is the Green Park opposite to this Piccadilly, called Boston Common. Beacon Street and Boston Common are very pleasant. Excellent houses there are, and large churches, and enormous hotels; but of such things as these a man can write nothing that is worth the reading. ”

“ The numbers on the plans follow the original pagination of the Book of Possessions.
On the plan of 1630 the lot marked S should have been assigned to Thomas Sharp.
These plans show the old peninsula of Boston; consequently the allotments at the “field end next Roxbury” do not appear.
The New Field was located at the west part of the town in the angle bounded by the present Cambridge street, and extending through Lynde and Leverett streets to Haugh’s Point. The principal town landing was at the head of the cove or dock, around which Valentine Hill’s highway was laid out in 1641. ”

“ A stranger coming to our city might think it made little difference whether his travelling Boston acquaintance lived in Alpha Avenue or in Omega Square, but he would have to learn that it is farther from one of these places to the other, a great deal farther, than it is from Beacon Street, Boston, to Fifth Avenue, New York.
An American finds it a little galling to be told that he must not drive in his numbered hansom or four-wheeler except in certain portions of Hyde Park. ”

“ The matters they had in hand wandered indeed as stray vague airs across to us—this I think I have noted; but Boston itself could easily rule, in default even of New York, when to "go," in particular, was an act of such easy virtue. To go from Ashburton Place was to go verily round the corner not less than further afield; to go to the Athenæum, to the Museum, to a certain door of importances, in fact of immensities, defiant of vulgar notation, in Charles Street, at the opposite end from Beacon. ”

“ In urban domestic architecture, both on large mansions and on the more usual terrace houses, mansards became characteristic but not ubiquitous in the late fifties and remained so down to the mid seventies and even later in the West. Boston’s Back Bay district, laid out by Gilman in 1859, has a few mansions along Commonwealth Avenue that resemble somewhat the hôtels particuliers of Paris, and also several mansarded terraces by Bryant & Gilman and other architects in that avenue and in Arlington and Beacon Streets. ”

“ The appearance of the old town is still retained in the narrow and irregular streets of the North End, now one of the most squalid parts of the city. As historical relics remain three old burying-grounds—Copp's Hill Burial Ground, containing the graves of the Mathers; Central Burying-Ground, dating from 1756; and Old Granary Burial Ground, in which are buried several persons noted in history. A few old buildings are still standing—Christ Church (Old North Church) (1723) , from the spire of which were hung the lanterns for Paul Revere ”

“ At the feet of the spectator Boston and its environments are spread out in the glad sunshine. Every day Boston spreads out her environments just that way.
Bunker Hill monument is 221 feet in height, and has been entirely paid for. The spectator may look at the monument with perfect impunity, without being solicited to buy some of its mortgage bonds. ”

“ President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain for ever. ”

“ There is undoubtedly a new emphasis upon country life generally. The people of the cities have been going to the country more than ever [Pg 193] before. A walk, the length of Beacon Street in Boston, at any time from the middle of June to late autumn, convinces one that the majority of the people are somewhere in the country. ”

“ Today
Two hundred thousand persons visit Bunker Hill every year. Of these visitors 20,000 pay their $0.10, and presumably climb the 294 granite steps to the top.12 Very few Bostonians are among these visitors.13 They are of various types: honeymooners and casual tourists, whose list of the sights to be seen in historic Boston includes the monument, and historically minded youngsters, one of whom was recently caught in a heated argument with his father as to where the order was to “wait ’til you can see the whites of their eyes.” ”