Today was an all-around gorgeous and fabulous day for exploring Boston. We woke up around 8 local time, which felt like sleeping in to us, and made our way out the door by 8:30, with the thought of grabbing breakfast at a Starbucks. That was fine, except we had to stand because that particular location had apparently gotten rid of all its chairs and tables except a long bar to stand on. So not very comfy for breakfast! Then we set out to walk, under beautiful blue skies, across the Boston Common and the Beacon Hill neighborhood to the Museum of African American History. We couldn’t get enough of this neighborhood with its early-19th century brick townhomes, the narrow streets and alleys on the Northern slope of Beacon Hill, and the overall “old city” (and even Rome or Paris “old-world”) feel. Now thoroughly gentrified and super expensive (we did look at the going prices posted in the windows of various real-estate businesses), this neighborhood was primarily Black until the 1850s, when the population gradually drifted to Roxbury and South Boston, while new immigrants took over this area. (Gentrification didn’t happen until the 1970s.) And the Museum of African-American History, though it has a small exhibit, was huge for me because I was able to see my first-ever marble by Edmonia Lewis, one of the two Black women sculptors I have been researching, in person. Her bust of Robert Gould Shaw is exhibited here, alongside some Shaw memorabilia and a set of cartes de visite (another thing I’ve researched extensively) of soldiers from the 54th regiment, including Frederick Douglass’s son.
The museum had a very nice site manager who gave us a tour of the African Meeting House next door, built in 1806 as a church and school, where a major abolitionist group was founded and where Frederick Douglass and other important Black activists spoke in the 1840s. Boston as the cradle of abolitionism was such an important starting point for Black and white activists alike, but I didn’t have enough of a sense of how much of a role this neighborhood played. We took the (short, less than 2 miles) Black Heritage Trail through Beacon Hill back to the Boston Common that drove this home–with several houses on the route where Black Bostonians sheltered and defended enslaved people who had run away, even after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, and participated in the key political movement that led to emancipation. Many of them were Black Masons (Prince Hall Masons), something I know very little about.
Once we were back at Boston Common, we stopped back at our digs and then grabbed some quesadillas for lunch before we went to Harriet Tubman Square. This is where a bronze by OTHER Black sculptor I love and research, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, called “Emancipation,” was put in the 1990s, and again–this was the first time I got to see any of her works in person. This was cast from a plaster version she made in 1913, for an exhibition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and I like to think that she would have been very happy to know that it was eventually cast and displayed publicly. Mark was wonderful and took a whole bunch of photos from all angles for me. Here is just one!
We then made our way to Copley Plaza, where we stood for a while before a gigantic public building trying to figure out what it was until it became clear that it was the public library. I had only briefly read about it (“free things to do in Boston”) and we were pretty bowled over by this enormous neoclassical building, a kind of secular Church of Learning. There was also a surprise for the art historian who didn’t do her homework: an entire ENORMOUS gallery with murals by John Singer Sargent. It all clearly signaled that the City of Boston in the 1890s could absolutely be a Renaissance prince, with its own Michelangelo/Sistine Chapel arrangement. (The courtyard with its fountain said it all over again; it looked like something exported straight from Italy.)
Copley Square also had another one of these incongruous new/old contrasts, with Trinity Church (from the 1870s) right next to a big glass box with 60 stories (formerly known as the John Hancock Tower).
From Copley Square, we went to the Charles River (through another really beautiful residential neighborhood with lovely brick row houses and parks and even community gardens) and walked along the esplanade (designed by none other than Frederick Law Olmsted) all the way until the last of the pedestrian bridges across a busy multi-lane highway took us back into the downtown area where most of the hospitals are. The view across the river was lovely and many people were out and about along the esplanade, which made for good people watching.
We’d already walked about eight miles by this time, but we had one more destination: the Institute for Contemporary Art. I had gotten us tickets because there was an exhibit of a contemporary Black sculptor, Simone Leigh, in whose work I got very interested after I heard about her show at the Venice Biennale last year. The ICA is directly on the waterfront, but across the Ford Point channel that separates the downtown Boston harbor area from South Boston. But the friends that have told us how walkable Boston is were right–even this was less than 2 miles away from where we were. The view of the harbor from the ICA was just fabulous, as was the view from the bridge across the Point, which included the abandoned Northern Avenue Bridge.
(NB this is a straight window; the curves are because of the panorama technology!)
The Simone Leigh exhibit was also amazing. I especially liked her “Last Garment,” and the way it involved a reflecting pool, but I have to research the exploitative series of photographs from the late 19th century that it was partly based on!
After we left the ICA, we went to a nearby Greek place called Greco (a chain, maybe?) and had some lovely chicken and lamb with pita bread and other sides. The walk back (the last bit of the 12 miles we walked today!) went straight through downtown and was less than half an hour long. We found a place that sells cookies and ice cream (“Insomnia Cookies”–apparently they DELIVER until all hours? Now that’s decadent) and enjoyed our dessert in the Boston Common, watching happy people enjoying a lovely Friday evening in May as the sun still shone on our backs before it threatened to disappear behind Beacon Hill and we went to back to our room and rest until tomorrow!