I spent a few days in Boston. What follows is a disjointed series of pictures observations from that trip.

Getting Around

Look at Boston on google maps and you’ll see freeways cutting through the middle of the city. Route 90 shoots west, straight through the historic Back Bay neighbourhood (or should I type “neighborhood” because it’s American??). Route 93 curves north right through downtown and past Boston Harbor where the famous tea-related act of rebellion took place in 1773.

Fortunately for everyone, including those who value architecture, history, and functional urban environments, the freeways were constructed almost entirely underground. It must have cost a fortune, but the benefit to the city is immeasurable.

There are also, like every big city, subways and above ground transit. I did not use either. Aside from a couple Uber rides (and a jaunt out of town), my wife and I walked everywhere.

Boston is a very walkable city, in that it is pretty compact and there are sidewalks on every street. The sidewalks are often misshapen and unlevel, have missing pieces or are narrow — especially on residential streets — but they are there.

Drivers also tend to be polite to pedestrians, yielding to jay-walking outlaws like myself on a regular basis.

Jay-walking, by the way, is a normal occurrence, as are other forms of law-breaking. This website makes Boston sound as chaotic as Rome:

Some drivers do stop, while others speed up.  Still others will be too busy texting or shaving to notice the traffic signal. In order to leave Boston alive, you must always drive defensively.  EXPECT THE WORST.

I mean .. there is some truth to that, but it’s really not that bad. Drivers for the most part recognize lane markings and traffic signals, and if one driver steps out of line others will let them know. And drivers recognize that pedestrians are at the top of the hierarchy.

Biking in Boston

Cyclists are not at the top of the hierarchy. The same website notes:

Boston streets can be hazardous for bicycle riders …  Where bike lanes do exist, some car drivers pull into them to make right hand turns, others double park in them, and still others use them as very narrow driving lanes. 

With a few notable exceptions, like Massachusetts Ave shown below, bike infrastructure is poor or non-existent. *Maybe* there will be a painted bike lanes on the odd street, but you don’t see a whole lot of bikes in Boston for good reason.

Rental bikes are available, and people use them, but if you’re going to venture away from formal bike paths be alert and prepared to mingle with traffic.

There is a lobby to improve bike infrastructure, unsurprisingly. Every city probably has one.

Contrary to what this sign implies, I couldn’t find any evidence of a proposal to rip up bike lanes — there are hardly any to rip up — but there are proposals for improving infrastructure which makes sense.

Harvard Art Museums

Harvard Art Museums is a single place with multiple floors and displays. I highly recommend visiting if you are in Boston. It is FREE and impressive. It is like a mini Louvre and Musée d’Orsay in one, containing everything from ancient Egyptian artifacts to modern art.

And the selection of art is impressive. Even people who are only passingly familiar with the art world will recognize many of the names on the walls and podiums of the gallery — Monet, Picasso, Rodin, Pollock, Renoir etc..

You can get through the whole place in a couple of hours. Fantastic bang for your vacation-time buck. And, once you’re done, you can grab a coffee at the café or visit the gift shop and buy Winnipeg-made dconstruct jewellery.

Architecture

I am sure there are 1000 websites that discuss architecture in Boston. I am not even going to attempt to do it justice because I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ll just say this: walking around Boston/Cambridge is interesting. There is some of everything: old ornate colonial-era temples like the state house, art deco and brutalist buildings, modern offices and everything in between.

This warehouse reno at MIT reminded me of Winnipeg’s RRC downtown campus — an old building being gutted and turned into a Franken-building, with a mesh of original and new architecture housing a new state-of-the-art learning institution:

Entertainment

Look, I only spent a few days there. I don’t know everything there is to do, but I do know that you can go to a ball game at Fenway or a rock concert at the House of Blues

History – good and bad

One of the parallels I noticed between Boston and home is the acknowledgement of some of the uncomfortable parts of our past. I am writing this sentence on Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada — a day that helps us acknowledge the harms delivered by residential schools on indigenous populations. In the U.S., the history of slavery looms most prominently over the country. It is not hard to find signs that this past is recognized.

But in a place like Boston and out in the New England countryside — places that helped to give birth to the United States as we know it — History is everywhere. Plaques on houses and buildings, statues and so on. If you’re interested in U.S. history it is a gold mine.

Composting!

I posted this picture on twitter and it generated a bit of reaction, in light of Winnipeg’s painfully slow process to get a composting program going.

The little mini composting bin is charming, but rolling that thing out to the curb will not be good for my back. Maybe some enterprising 6 year old rents out his compost bin rolling services in Cambridge MA. I’m also curious if there is a small version of the hydraulic arm that lifts that up or if a worker needs to do it manually. So many questions …

It is, in any event, a reminder that curb-side composting programs on a large scale are possible.

Smoots

I’m running out of things to talk about so I’ll leave you with this:

What is a smoot? It is a unit of measurement, created by MIT students in 1958 when student Oliver Smoot laid down on the Massachusetts Ave bridge 365 times so that fellow students could mark off his 5’7″ frame on the concrete. Successive cohorts of students have been repainting the markings ever since. You can even convert a measurement into Smoots using Google’s conversion calculator:

Thank you for reading my blog post about Boston!