Tag Archives: History

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.

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!

Going to the Dogs

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Thursday 29 September 2022 – Until we finally boarded our flight out of Churchill, the schedule for the day was in a more or less perpetual state of flux, as in no-one knowing what the flux going on. The first spanner in the works was that our flight would now be at midday, much earlier than originally planned. So Mark had to make some last-minute changes, involving finding our group some packed lunches and squeezing today’s excursions into a smaller window.  Later on, we found out that the midday flight had been cancelled and we were now going to fly out at (the original time of) 17.45. This meant that Mark, having crammed everything in, now had to find other diversions for us.  He managed all of this with aplomb and many phone calls.

Our first port of call was something that I hadn’t very high expectations of – very wrongly, as it turned out.  It was a visit to a dog yard.  Dogs have long been used to haul sleds and since there was no snow on the ground I couldn’t quite see how it could be made interesting. I hadn’t reckoned with the passion, energy and sheer charisma of “Big Dog” Dave Daley, the owner of the yard

who was accompanied by two of his sled dogs.

Where I had expected a routine presentation about dog sledding, he treated us to a brilliant, impassioned and amusing exposition about the relationship between man and dog, between dog and dog and between man, dog and the race he created and runs every year he can, the Hudson Bay Quest, a 220-mile wilderness race which knocks the more-widely-known 80-mile Iditarod into a cocked hat. In the HBQ, one man, 10 dogs and a sled have to complete the race unsupported except for a half-way stop for a compulsory 6-hour rest (for the dogs, not the men) and a reload of the hay that is needed to create rest dens for the dogs en route.  Extraordinarily, this distance can be covered in 40 hours, by someone who knows what he’s doing.

Much of the substance of Dave’s presentation consisted of underlining what “knowing what you’re doing” means when it comes to running a dog team, and this involves having a deep relationship with every dog, knowing its strengths, weaknesses, health and preferences.  Some dogs make good lead dogs, but would be no good as “wheel dogs”, the raw muscle power that runs just ahead of the sled, for example. (There are also point dogs and swing dogs, each with a role in the team, and “knowing what you’re doing” involves understanding and exploiting this.) Some dogs prefer to run on the left, some on the right. Some prefer sprints, some are better at marathons.  “Knowing what you’re doing” involves being a planner, physiotherapist, psychotherapist, nutritionist, physician, breeder, salesman and trainer.  Dave currently has 47 dogs in his yard and every single one of them seemed to be bursting with energy and enthusiasm when it became clear that they would be working that morning,

because after talking about the theory behind running a dog team, we actually got the chance to get a tiny insight into the practice.  There was no snow on the ground, but the dogs still need to work to keep them healthy and happy, so outside winter they pull carts; we got the chance to ride the carts whilst they were being pulled – two guests and a driver per cart, with the dogs in teams of five, rather than 10.

The energy and enthusiasm that was bursting out of the dogs increased, if anything, when they were hitched up to a cart – which had to be anchored to a huge boulder to stop them immediately rocketing off into the forest.  Jane and I were lucky – Dave picked on us as his passengers, and his team had seemingly impossible amounts of energy waiting to be harnessed.

As you can see from the video, there was a choice of track, but each ride was about 1½km, and so Dave calls the outing on the carts the “Ididamile”, which is rather lovely.  It was huge fun being carted along by these bundles of energy – and because Big Dog was our driver, we went faster than the others which necessitated veering off onto a forest path, rather than staying on the main drag, so we didn’t run into the other teams!  All in all, it was an absorbing, entertaining and thought-provoking couple of hours.

The next item on the agenda was a visit to Churchill’s museum, but before we did that we called in at the Churchill Post Office to get our passports stamped.

On the door of the Post Office building is, erm, posted a summary of encounters with bears.

So even though we’d had to search high and low for a bear, it seems as though bears are finding people, even this early in Bear Season.

The museum we visited is called the Itsanitaq Museum and is dedicated to Inuit culture, with wonderful collections of carvings and artefacts which are among the finest and oldest in the world, dating from 1700 B.C.

It used to be called the Eskimo Museum, but Eskimo is a term which has fallen out of favour; itsanitaq is an Inuit word meaning “things from the past”. This was explained to us by Lorraine, the lady in charge, who gave us a short introductory spiel,

and included further information about the principal peoples of the area.

Among the exhibits in the museum was an explanation of the script that we found on the Calm Air aeroplane safety leaflet.

It turns out that the symbols weren’t in themselves a language, but rather a phonetic code enabling the various indigenous languages to be written down.  So our safety leaflet was probably in the Cree language, that being the largest of the populations in the area.

We had a lunch stop at the Churchill Northern Studies Center, a non-profit facility that promotes and facilitates research and education about many issues that affect the northern regions, with an emphasis on sustainability and climate change. They provide accommodation and facilities for visiting researchers as well as carrying out their own research and educational programmes.

They allowed us to have our (clearly rather hastily-assembled) packed lunches in their canteen, and also hosted a tour of the place, which is sustainably designed and ecologically and environmentally secured so as not to affect the area around it.

After this, having discovered that the rescheduling of the rescheduled flight left us with time on our hands, Joe drove us slowly around the back roads whilst we searched again for bears.  Unfortunately the bloody bears had buggered off again, so all we saw was another Arctic Hare

who was reasonably close and so a bit easier to spot among the rocks than our elusive ursines. The sun came out and so this one perked up a bit

before it started raining again, with a stiff and cold wind blowing, so it hunkered down again, looking distinctly unimpressed with the weather.

Mark gave us a final chance to get images of the town, starting at the Churchill sign

and we managed to catch a couple of grab shots of artwork we hadn’t recorded before

and also an Interesting Church (see our Iceland pages).

And, barring visits to a couple of gift shops, that was that for Churchill.  We went to the airport and bade farewell to the guys who had made the last three days so interesting and varied.

We duly arrived into Winnipeg just in time to crash into the hotel’s Sports Bar where the group got together for a final time to consume (in some cases rather inadvisable) quantities of drink.  It was a good way to end this section of our holiday which was great fun, excellently guided and shared with some nice people.

Tomorrow is just a travel day – Winnipeg to Halifax, Nova Scotia via Toronto.  It’s unlikely that I’ll have anything interesting to report about two flights, so the story is To Be Continued in a couple of days.  I hope to see you then; bye for now.