In Boston, you can cram more into a couple of days than in most American cities, eat clam chowder on the hoof or cherrystones, snap up a bargain or two – and learn why you shouldn’t hang out a sweaty T-shirt to dry in the woods.
The city center is so compact that you can do it all on foot – or at least by relatively cheap public transport. There’s no need to rent a car. Parking downtown is a nightmare.
The best possible introduction is the Freedom – which of course means freedom from British taxation without representation – a walking route marked with a thick red line. It starts on Boston Common, crosses the broad Charles River, climbs to the Bunker Hill monument, site of the revolution’s first great battle, and finishes at Charlestown Navy Yard where the USS Constitution is moored – a warship whose oak hull was so resistant to cannonballs that sailors nicknamed her “Old Ironsides”.
The walk should take about two hours but allow the best part of a day. You will want to linger in the old burial grounds and the churches with their spare, uncluttered interiors, where box pews serve as a reminder that temperatures here swing between extremes. Early worshippers would bring their own stoves or even dogs into them – to keep warm in the sometimes bitterly cold winters.
Make time for lunch en route. Graze, perhaps, among the stalls of Quincy Market. There, you could choose anything from steamed lobster or scallops to pizza. But best of all is a cup of creamy chowder, Boston’s staple, served in a paper cup, with crackers. If you’d rather eat sitting down, drop into the Union Oyster House, which claims to be America’s oldest restaurant. A half dozen cherrystones – sweet little clams on the half shell – are £2 or so cheaper.
For coffee, follow the trail to the North End, settled first by Irish immigrants, later by Jews from Eastern Europe, and now so overwhelmingly Italian you might fantasize that this middle-aged man chewing in the depths of its restaurants are accustomed to making offers that can’t be refused. Stop for one of the best cappuccinos you’ll ever taste. Maybe pick up a Sicilian cannolo for dessert. You’ll pass Mike’s Pastry, a Boston institution, which is famous for them. But chances are you’ll face a long queue.
Back in time, then, at Paul Revere’s wooden house, It was Revere who rode to warn the rebel militia that British troops were preparing to crack down on them, his famous midnight ride immortalized poetically, if not entirely factually, by Longfellow. In case he didn’t make it past the army patrols a light was shone from the steeple of the lovely Old North Church, where John Wesley once preached.
Having visited the grave of Samuel Adams, one of the nation’s Founding Fathers and a key organizer of the Boston Tea Party, formerly the Bull & Finch, on Beacon Street and down a beer named in his honor.
