Tag Archives: Cityscape

Three days in Boston

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Tuesday 13 to Thursday 15 June 2023 – Both Jane and I have visited Boston before, but some three decades ago, and then, in my case, for a very short visit. Although short, it established Boston as one of my favourite American cities.  It’s compact enough to explore on foot, has considerable charm and, of course, a huge place in the history of the United States of America. (As an Englishman, I’m not bitter. Not at all. No, really.)

So we were both interested to visit and revisit the city, and it turns out that three days is a good length of time to spend exploring all the parts that are within walking distance of the centre.  One could actually spend more time there and still find new and interesting things to see and to do, but three days is all we had. So, we went for a walk. Obviously. Well, several walks, covering about 30 miles in total.

One of the great charms of the place is its architecture. It’s full of handsome and historic buildings, such as the state capitol, Massachusetts State House, one of the oldest state capitols in use,

and the Old State House.

The balcony is  where the Declaration of Independence was first read, on July 18, 1776, by Colonel Thomas Crafts. The declaration is read out every year on July 4th from the same spot.

Elsewhere, there are other fine buildings

Old South Church (see later)

with fine exteriors and, indeed, interiors.  Possibly the finest of these was something we saw courtesy of a photo tour, an offering from https://photowalks.com/  – the courtyard and interior of the Boston Public Library.

The Reading Room
Book Collection Room ceiling

The library is on Copley Square, which offers various points of interest, at least to me.  The Old South Church pictured above is a wonderful building – Victorian Gothic with some inspiration from Venice. Its interior is a good match, too.

Looking up into the square cupolla

It features a wonderful display of stained glass.

The other significant church on Copley Square is Trinity Church.

Above is a photo of it reflected in the glassware that sheaths the Hancock Tower – still Boston’s tallest building, even after nearly 50 years – more of which later.  The church itself gives an opportunity for some nerdish photographical musing.  I took a photo with my Nikon Z6 and also with my Samsung Galaxy phone. The picture is towards the light, which makes it tricky to capture, as it’s very high-contrast.

Nikon
Samsung

The Nikon version is processed from a RAW image, which theoretically gives the best chance to get a top quality final version. Corrected verticals aside, the Samsung image is direct from the phone.  It’s a great demonstration of how advanced computational photography is becoming, as it’s coped very gracefully with a high-contrast situation and presented a very attractive image.

Anyway, we went inside.  This church also has a striking interior.

and another very fine display of stained glass.

The Hancock Tower gave me an opportunity to try to recreate a photo that I had taken on my previous visit in 1990.  Back then, the Hancock Tower was relatively new, having been completed in 1976.  That is, eventually completed in 1976, after teething problems which delayed it by five years.  One of the tower’s USPs is that it’s sheathed entirely in blue glass.  Therein lies a tale, because during construction several of the huge (500-lb, 4ft x 11ft) panes of glass actually fell from the building, and all 10,344 panes had to be replaced.  I bet the insurers were livid. More details can be found in the tower’s Wiki entry.

It’s always been A Thing to take a photo of the tower using reflection to create the illusion of the edge of the tower disappearing.  So Jane and I spent a non-trivial amount of time loitering on the pavement whilst we waited for the sun to shine and the bloody buses and other traffic to get out of the way to enable a second shot to compare with the one from 1990.  Here are the two versions, side by side.

1990, shot on a Minolta Dynax 7000i with 24-70 lens

I was a little luckier with the weather three decades ago, but it was a fun experiment to try again – and the new photo shows some of the development that has gone on in central Boston over the years.

Copley Square is at the periphery of an area of Boston called Back Bay, which is actually land reclaimed from the Charles River. It borders another area called Beacon Hill.  Both areas have a great deal of charm, and we spent much time, both on the photo tour and on other occasions, walking around these pleasant bits of Boston.

Acorn Street, possibly the most photographed street in Boston
Acorn Street again
Chestnut Street
Fire escapes around the back of Back Bay apartments
First Church in Boston
Commonwealth Avenue
Louisburg Square – the poshest address in Boston
First Baptist Church of Boston

The whole area, basically south of the Charles River, is a pleasure to walk around, with riverside scenes,

and miscellaneous other vignettes.

One of the famous Swan Boats in the Public Gardens, powered by some poor sucker at the back who has to pedal

The other main thing we had to in this area was to visit View Boston, a chance to ascend the 52 stories of the Prudential Building and see the city from the top floor. As you can imagine, there are some great views.

Hancock Tower and Public gardens
Boston Red Sox baseball ground
Back Bay with MIT in the Background
MIT
Longfellow Bridge
The Bunker Hill Memorial, with the Liberty Hotel in the foreground

The day we visited was billed as the opening day of View Boston and we were very excited to be able to pay for the privilege of going to the top of the Prudential Center.  However, it was sparsely attended, which we hadn’t expected, and when I proudly shared some photos on social media, various friends mentioned that they, too, had seen the exact same views, so the occasion wasn’t as exclusive as I had thought.  However, View Boston did have a couple of treats for us.  One was a cocktail in the 50th floor cocktail bar, enhanced somewhat by the availability of Gunpowder Gin; and the other was a very impressive 3D model, which is brought to life with projected illuminations of various sorts, illustrating the days, or the seasons, or other features of the city, such as the Boston Marathon or the success of the Red Sox.

If you refer back to the map at the top of this post (you don’t have to – I’ll explain here), you’ll see that although we spent a fair proportion of our mileage around Back Bay and Beacon Hill, we did venture further afield.

One of the Things One Simply Must Do Whilst In Boston is, of course, to walk the Freedom Trail. a 2.5-mile path past a collection of museums, churches, meeting houses, burying grounds, parks, a ship, and historic markers that tell the story of the American Revolution. It’s marked out in the pavements, typically as a narrow line of bricks. It starts at the Massachusetts State House (which gives the opportunity for a schoolboy snigger),

runs through Boston Common

passes the Old State House (see above) and the Old City Hall

and ends at the Bunker Hill memorial obelisk.  On the way, one can learn about Paul Revere and his famous (indeed, revered) ride (and see his house), see Benjamin Franklin’s final resting place, and hear other famous names associated with the War of Independence, such as Samuel Adams.  No, not that Samuel Adams, he of the excellent local beer, but his son, who was an excellent political activist – a founding father of the United States, no less – but a rotten businessman, as the brewery went bust under his stewardship.

Walking the path, past streets of interesting-looking houses,

on the way to Bunker Hill, we passed USS Constitution,

which is nicknamed “Old Ironsides” despite the hull being constructed of wood, because an incoming cannonball bounced off. Entry is free and one can go below decks which is interesting and slightly challenging for anyone over about 5′ 9″.

We also diverted a little to take a look inside the Liberty Hotel.

The interesting part of the hotel is housed in the slight forbidding-looking grey building, which used to be the city prison, hence the ironic naming of it as the Liberty Hotel, and enabling the management to have bars inside it called “Clink” and “Alibi”.  The atrium is very ritzy.

Tempting as it was to stop for a drink, we pressed on and actually had a coffee in the very pleasant Beacon Hill Books and Café, which, like the Liberty Hotel atrium, was a recommendation from Saba, who runs the Photo Tour we did.

The other area of Boston we explored was around the seaport and harbour, which is a worthwhile expedition, leading as it does past some interesting sights.

Old Northern Avenue Bridge
Summer Street bridge, which looks like it once could have shifted diagonally to open

We walked past what was clearly an artwork, but which wasn’t immediately engaging.

It’s by David von Schlegell and is called “Untitled Landscape”, which doesn’t give much of a clue, and consists of four large pieces of stainless steel facing each other at obtuse angles. Schlegell (I quote someone else’s blurb here) “intended to create objects of such a scale that could relate buildings, bridges, and other large objects”. Go figure.

However, I accidentally took a mobile phone photo of it directly from the side and all of a sudden

it was rather more interesting.

In our peregrinations around the city we saw a lot more, as it’s a very rewarding place to walk around.  But I didn’t want to inflict nearly 600 photos on you, so I hope this distillation gives you a good feeling for the parts of the city we covered, even if it’s not comprehensive.

I’m writing this from the depths of the New Hampshire countryside (seriously – if out walking we have been advised to stick to the roads, because Bears) and when we move on from here we’ll head to Cape Cod, a place I’ve heard much about but never visited.  If you keep your eye on these pages, you can follow us and I hope to see you again in due course.

Taking a view

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Monday 3 and Tuesday 4 October 2022 – Jane and I had quite different journeys from Halifax to St. John’s, Newfoundland.  (For the uninitiated and those who didn’t watch that particular episode of QI, Newfoundland is pronounced “NewfndLAND” – emphasis on the last syllable. Just so you know.)  My journey was entirely unremarkable.  Jane, sitting three rows behind me on a full flight, got the writhing, screaming toddler.  However, she also got some useful intelligence from its mother about things to look out for in St. John’s.

The next oddity about the journey is that one travels half a time zone.  Where Halifax is 4 hours behind the UK, St. John’s is 3½.  The final oddity was our transport from airport to hotel.

Yes – another stretch limo. Once again, somewhat overkill for two people with standard amounts of luggage – but pleasant enough.  Our driver was a chap with the unlikely name of Basil and what seemed at first an unlikely amount of Irish in his accent; it turns out that the ancestry of many people in Newfoundland is Irish from the original immigration, and significant bits of the accent have stuck.

Basil was very helpful, possibly because of his good nature and possibly because he didn’t have anywhere else to be.  He gave us the run around, but in a good way, taking us to the top of Signal Hill so we could get a view over the town

(note the cruise liner in the harbour; it’ll become relevant later) and then driving us around some of the main downtown streets pointing out interesting bits.  Sadly, his limo was too big for the hotel forecourt, so he had to drop us off round the corner and we had to lug our bags up a small hill to the hotel reception, but that didn’t matter – he was charming, helpful and somewhat Irish and the limo journey was a pleasure.

We got a hotel room on the 10th floor, giving us a very pleasant outlook over bits of St. John’s.

This picture should give those of you who don’t know the place some idea of what was to come as we explored. Because, it being time for a late lunch/early dinner, we went for a walk. Obviously.  Jane had had a recommendation for a restaurant called the Fish Exchange, and so we headed there and had a very nice meal indeed.  After it, well fed up and agreeably drunk, we wandered the streets of St. John’s.

It is spellbindingly photogenic.

We wandered round, gawping in astonishment at pretty street after pretty street.

I’ll share more building photos later, as time was getting on as we wandered around and the light was fading.  But as well as the houses, there was artwork,

(Jane asserted that this last is artwork; it looks more like a failed paint job to me.)

strange business names,

and cultural appropriation gone wrong.

There were interesting and imposing buildings

the last three above being the Anglican cathedral, the Law Courts and their antidote, the Appeal Courts.

It was a fascinating first sight of the place and we knew we had to come back in better light to explore further. Which we did, the following afternoon.  However, before that, in the morning, we set out on another walk. Obviously.  Jane had seen a couple of views of St. John’s online and was interested to try to capture our own version of them.  One was a view over the town and the other was a particular view of an area called The Battery.  Many of the houses in The Battery are obscured from view from the town itself by a rocky outcrop and we decided that we had to get across the harbour to the other side to get the right viewpoint.

To do this is not as straightforward as it might have been.  You can’t, unfortunately, simply walk around the water to get to the other side; there’s rather a lot of shipyard, railway and river obstacles in the way.  So the route you have to take looks like this.

The route we walked, we discovered, included a few steps of the 28,000 km Trans-Canada Trail, which I wrote briefly about in a previous post – the zero mile/kilometer point is just outside the Railway Coastal Museum

with its attendant train display.

From there we followed one Trans Canadian Trail option for a short distance along a riverside track  – it’s thus called “T’Railway”, which is insufferably cute.

Leaving the trail to follow the road along the far side of the harbour, we passed some interesting sights as we went.

We passed a historic house being restored,

and a different view of one of those ships we saw earlier.

It’s called the Earl Grey, by the way.  As we walked along, it became clear that the view was not, erm, clear.  The south side of the harbour is basically occupied with shipping-related stuff – shipyards, customs areas, coastguard, fishing boat ports.  Many of them are surrounded by chain fencing too high to get a decent view over.  There are occasional gaps where one can see the town

and we gradually saw that we were on the right track for the view over The Battery, at least.

We pressed on, always trying to get to the waterside to catch a photo.  On one occasion it meant going behind a film crew as they were trying to do a film shoot

and you can just see the director as he is about to point out to us that we’re about to be in his shot.  We hastily moved on and – there it was!

The view of The Battery that we’d been after.

I love it when a plan comes together.

There’s actually a whole panorama across that view, which is a thing of beauty. I have a photo of it, stitched together from 10 images, and here is a video of what it looks like.

Having gone this far, we were nearly at an area called Fort Amherst, so we thought we might as well go and take a look at that.  The original 1770s fort no longer exists, but it’s a pretty enough place and it has its own lighthouse.

As we were retracing our steps (there being no other way to get back to the hotel), we saw

the big cruise ship (Fred Olsen, Borealis, 706 cabins, 1300 guests, 660 staff) coming out.  Since this bit of the harbour is called “The Narrows”, we thought it might be fun to watch it exit the harbour in case it crashed to see how it was done properly.

Nice work – you can just see the pilot boat heading in to collect the pilot after this smooth exit.

We headed back to the town, noting, in passing, the nearest we could get to the other view that Jane had seen

(that isn’t it, but we might get a go at it tomorrow);

That was the end of Part 1 of the day.  Part 2, after a refreshing cup of tea at the hotel, involved us going for a walk. Obviously. We wanted to explore further the incredibly photogenic houses and other buildings in St. John’s, during daylight (and we had a wonderful sunny day in which to do so).  So we did. And we took lots of photos. Here are a few.

The place is quite extraordinarily pretty, with each house being individually painted.  There’s no planning regulation that we could discover, but an evident pride on the part of each householder in having a house that is (a) beautifully maintained and (b) a different colour from its neighbours.

The painted boards really are of wood

and very carefully painted by hand.

These houses are not altogether surprisingly known collectively as “Jelly Bean Row” although that does not refer to a single street – they are around every corner in the downtown area.  As well as being attractively coloured, many of them have nice little styling details,

and if you look over the above photos of the houses, you can see that there’s a variety of styles – some plain, some with dormers, some new, some older.  The whole area is just stunning and gets my current vote as the most photogenic area <Clarkson Mode ON> in the world <Clarkson Mode OFF>.

There are other nice things to see, too.  There’s a Basilica

(sadly closed on a Tuesday), a Methodist Church,

a building that looks like a cross between a Flat Iron building and a windmill,

another religious-looking building whose purpose we couldn’t identify,

some fine detailing on the Appeal Court building

some statuary whose message is not quite obvious, but appears to involve ladies transporting fish

a handsome shopping street called Water Street

and a demonstration of how to use the visual character of a place to prettify an otherwise undistinguished object – the houses have become a symbol of the city itself.

I should say here that St. John’s is not all sweetness and light.  Attractive as it is, as friendly as the natives are, there are some beggars on the streets, most frequently in the evenings; there is some graffiti (but not anything like as ubiquitous as in Montreal); and so there’s a bit of a rough air to the place around the downtown bars as the light fades.

All in all it was a superb day – lovely sunshine, successful execution of a photo plan, wonderful scenery and delightful surroundings.  What more can one ask for?

Well, let’s see what tomorrow will bring.  Possibly even more striking and attractive scenery, if our luck holds.  Check in later and find out!

Not Bored Walker

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Saturday 1 October 2022 – Warning – lots of photos for you to wade through today!

Pinch, punch, first of the munch. (I hate assonance.) One week to go before we head back to the UK and we start our penultimate adventure, our time in Nova Scotia. As expected, yesterday, spent as it was in travelling two time zones eastwards from Winnipeg to Halifax, was entirely devoid of anything worth telling you about with the possible exception of the taxi ride from Halifax airport to our hotel. The (somewhat elderly) taxi driver started out being courteous and interesting and ended up ranting about the incompetence of government and the unfairness of taxes. He also delivered us to the wrong hotel, but was good enough to apologise and drive us to the right one.

So, today we found ourselves in the capital city of Nova Scotia with reasonable weather in prospect, so there was only one thing for it, which was to go for a walk. Obviously.

We had a chat with a very nice chap at the concierge desk, Tim. One thing we wanted to understand was whether there was a tall building which would give us a view over the city. Our thought was that it would be nice to be able to look down over the Citadel, which is a star-shaped fortress, to appreciate its shape. Tim suggested we go with him; he took us to the top floor of the hotel and unlocked the banqueting suite there, proudly telling us that this was the banqueting facility with the best view in the city. To be fair, it was not at all bad.

It didn’t however, give us the view over the citadel that we’d really have liked, but it did have an interesting ceiling with some great chandeliers.

The other nugget that we learned from Tim was that Halifax has its own (modest) equivalent of Toronto’s underground city, although here it’s overhead rather than underground. It’s called the Pedway, and you can see one of its aerial corridors crossing the road in the second of the view photos above. Of course we had to go and explore it. As with Toronto and Montreal, it’s linkways between halls, with some stores and eateries,

but is still in development – there are many hoardings promising a bright future with more stores to be opened.

It also gave us a view back to our hotel – you can see the inward-sloping windows of the banqueting suite at the top of it.

We also had a chat with Tim about the hotel, which is a curious mix of modern and dowdy, more old-fashioned areas (e.g. the wing where we have our room). It turns out that a complex set of circumstances involving mergers, takeovers, divestitures and pandemics means that planned improvements have not yet started.

Anyhow, we had more of the city to explore, so we headed out to wander about according to the plan that Jane had formulated. We passed City Hall

which overlooks the Grand Parade.

As you might infer from the picture above, an event was brewing in the Grand Parade, involving people of African-Canadian extraction, dressed in their finery and setting up a sound deck. Their mood was jolly and we hope they had a good time, but we had a city to explore so had to move on. Before we did, though, I took a picture of a mural that overlooked a building site

and the City Clock.

Behind the clock above, you can see a hill, atop which is the historic Halifax Citadel (climbing it also gives a nice view over the city’s impressive – but closed for maintenance – Angus L. Macdonald Bridge and the Clock).

We decided to visit the Citadel, as they offered a decently low entry price for us two old people, and so began to appreciate that Halifax has a great historical richness. The Citadel was first established in 1749, and the present citadel, built starting in 1828, is actually the fourth fortification built on the site.

The citadel’s fortifications were built and rebuilt to defend the town from various enemies – the indigenous Mi’kmaq and Acadians, for example, raided the capital region (Halifax and Dartmouth) 12 times, four times against Halifax itself. While never attacked, the Citadel was long the keystone to defence of the strategically important Halifax Harbour and its Royal Navy Dockyard.

The present citadel took thirty years to build and the general introduction of rifled artillery (with greater range and accuracy than earlier guns) shortly after its completion rendered the costly installation obsolescent. It was partially rearmed in the 1860s and 1870s, and continued in use as a barracks into the 20th century.

It is easy to understand its superb strategic location, overlooking the original town and harbour. It’s a very well-maintained institution, staffed with people dressed in period costumes who can tell you about various facets of life there in the 18th Century.

The central courtyard

is littered with cannons

as are the ramparts,

including a 12-pounder

which is still active and which is fired every day at noon – apparently a really loud bang.
After our visit, we walked along to the Public Gardens, a very pleasant environment.

Items of interest included a weeping beech tree

and a beautifully-coloured Blue Jay.

After the gardens, we passed the statue of Winston Churchill

were checked out by a starling

and then visited St. Mary’s Basilica,

a cathedral with a very handsome interior.

I was particularly struck by the stained glass half-dome above the altar. It being in the competitive nature of these things, the cathedral has, close by, the Anglican Church of St. David and

St. Matthew’s United Church.

Our rambling then took us in the general direction of the harbour, but en route we noticed that among all the modern high-rise constructions there are plenty of handsome old buildings in the city.

The downtown area has some interesting buildings, too;

and we were pleased to note that there is street art among the attempts to make the city look attractive.

We reached the harbour clock

which marks the start of a boardwalk stretching a couple of kilometres south, from the ferry terminal to the seaport. A lot of effort has gone into making this an attractive and pleasant area to walk, with artworks both mysterious and quirky along its length

(the tower structure is covered with plastic flaps, which flutter in the breeze – it’s rather lovely)

(the above street-light diptych is called “Get Drunk, Fall Down”)

as well as eating and drinking establishments. One of them, the BG (Halifax Beer Garden), was obviously paying its local tribute to Germany’s Oktoberfest, it being October first and that.

There is a life-size replica of the flagship of Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage of circumnavigation, 1519-1522 – the Trinidad

which in its day would have had 45 crew on board. I know people were smaller in those days, but I reckon it would still have been pretty cosy.

The rest of the walk down to the seaport passes many items of statuary – The Émigré, A tribute to Women in History, Samuel Cunard and three of the many examples of what might be figureheads that line the boardwalk here.

One significant statue is of Ruth Goldbloom, who fought for Pier 21 in the seaport to be restored and commemorated in recognition of the nearly one million immigrants who were processed through it between 1928 and 1971.

The plan was to get to Pier 22 which we thought might have some nice eateries and/or drinkeries. We were wrong. It turns out to be a tourist tat haven only open on cruise ship days intended, I imagine, to attract people who are boarding and who need to find just that one more special something for a special someone. Since there was a cruise ship in, only slightly larger than the substantial buildings of Pier 22,

it was open.

By this time, we were feeling somewhat sharp set, so we made our way back along the boardwalk with the idea of eating at a place that we’d seen earlier on, called Sea Smoke. There was a diversion en route in the form of a 1968 Routemaster London Bus,

used for hop-on-hop-off tours and, unsurprisingly, somewhat modified from the original,

because getting off the way we UK folk might consider would probably precipitate a traffic accident and lot of attendant paperwork. So an alternative exit is needed for the passengers

and an alternative entry for the driver.

As we ate our (very fine) meal at Sea Smoke, the cruise ship which had been at Pier 22 came by on its way out;

I’ve never seen so many radar aerials on a boat before.

We watched the ship do a graceful pirouette before exiting the harbour and then we ourselves exited the restaurant, which is distinguished by having many fire tables outside – very pleasant as the evening was chilly.

By this time, the light was fading (possibly matching your interest level in this post).

We passed a final, mystery piece of art

and then, as the evening light flared and then died,

we made our way back to the hotel.

Again, sorry for a long post with lots of photos, but I hope you found the read worthwhile. We had a really enjoyable day discovering the historical, arty and eat-y sides of Halifax, which comes across as being a very pleasant place to be.

Tomorrow has a planned excursion, if all goes well – a 10 mile hike. If we survive, I will be sure to document our progress here, but for now it’s time for bed. See you tomorrow!