30 Aug
Today I took Boston By Foot’s August Tour of the Month focusing on the Historic Preservation movement entitled Preserving Boston’s History. The tour featured many familiar Boston landmarks and the guide informed us how historic preservationists saved many of them from the dustheap.
I’ve put a gallery of photos from the tour on my website.
Highlights include:
the [...]
22 Jul
I promote a lot of tours on this blog, but if there’s one tour you must take this summer it’s the Exploring the Charles River Basin tour offered by Boston By Foot guides (including myself). The tour steps off at 2 pm on Sunday, July 26th from Nashua Street Park just opposite the exit from [...]
25 Jun
If a Jamaica Pond tour isn’t enough for one weekend, head to Charles/MGH station on Sunday June 28th as Boston By Foot presents the Tour of the Month, The Flat of Beacon Hill. This special tour will focus on the lesser known and once unfashionable area built on made land along the Charles River. Stepping [...]
25 Jun
The Jamaica Plain Historical Society debuts its newest neighborhood tour of Jamaica Pond this Saturday, June 27th at 11 am. The 90-minute walking tour will discuss the residential, industrial, and recreational history of this scenic gem. The tour departs from the bandstand near the intersection of Pond Street and Jamaicaway, and yours truly will be [...]
20 Jun
Last year I posted a list of walking tours in the Boston area in hopes of encouraging people to get out and explore the history, architecture, culture, topography, and nature of the area. I’ve updated the list and links for 2009, once again giving primacy of place to the two organizations in which I volunteer [...]
21 Mar
With the first day of spring upon us and Boston officially thawing out, it’s time to get out and do something! There are many things to do and sites to see right near home that I always find a way to procrastinate, some for several years running now. Here are ten things to do [...]
15 Mar
An entire week has passed, and I’ve yet to write about Boston By Foot’s special tour of 20th Century writers who lived and worked on Beacon Hill held on March 8th entitled Literary Landmarks, Continued. This is a sequel of sorts to the regular Literary Landmarks tour which focuses on the 19th Century writers in [...]
19 Feb
On a sunny but breezy Sunday afternoon, a couple of dozen brave souls ventured out to explore the connections across the Charles between North Station and the Charlestown Navy Yard. The occassion was a Boston By Foot tour for the Boston By Foot Meetup Group called Bells, Bridges, & Locks. If you feel bad about [...]
26 Jan
Jane Jacobs is cited in an inordinate number of books I’ve read in the past few years (including Emergence by Steven Johnson) and I’m very interested in the way cities work, so it was natural for me to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). In some ways, it is the book [...]
30 Dec
Great Fortune : The Epic of Rockefeller Center (2003) by Daniel Okrent is a lively and engaging popular history of the origins of the most famous urban development in the world. It’s chock-full of facts that I never knew.
For example, the land Rockefeller Center is built upon was originally the “Upper Estate” of Columbia [...]
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