Days in Boston

"One phase of those days must by no means go unrecorded – namely, the Broadway omnibuses, with their drivers. The vehicles still (I write this paragraph in 1881) give a portion of the character of Broadway – Fifth Avenue, Madison avenue, and Tweny-third street lines yet running." – Whitman, from Specimen Days, "Omnibus Jaunts and Drivers





June / July '17


Downtown Boston at Copley Back Bay on Huntington and Stuart Avenue, what stands out is the grid of streets forever wrapping – as New York does Central Park – around the Great Commons and always the question to walk or taxi.  This becomes the very network the traveler comes to see – the great park in the center, the ponds there, the grass that itself seems to stand out considerably green against the surrounding high-rises and old churches, the golden Beacon Dome, and the Charles River bi-secting the city from Cambridge.  We walked miles and miles on this trip, one most recent, from Huntington on this side of the Charles, across Harvard Bridge where the foot traffic was continuous to and fro, into MIT campus and along Cambridge Avenue down into the belly of the city where the locals live in apartment housing and yards so small hardly worth mowing.  We were on our way to

the Peabody Museum of Archeology off Harvard Square on Divinity Street when we finally decided to hail a van cab driven by a gentleman who casually told he did not know where he was going.  To Peabody, we said, and he was afraid that this was something of a different city, maybe at the outskirts of Cambridge itself.  We mentioned Quincy Street and recalculated our Phone maps and followed the lagging arrows as best we could to Memorial Union where the Food Trucks waited.  To ride the city in the cabs is a shaky experience – front seats littered with the personal belongings of the drivers, seat

belts may or may not be in order, the shocks on the cars worn down to a num so that every city pothole rattles the frame and the axles seem to complain at every turn.  We may or may not arrive at the precise spot on the campus, buildings at Harvard on squares and inter-linked and the passengers will need to get out and walk to look for signs.  Peabody off Oxford part of the famous Natural History Museum, we walk to the backside and, like the Memorial Union doors, old, nearly

crumbling, tall black wooden frames barely opening so that the front desk worker has to pry them open for us.  Pristine museum, perfect lighting, exhibitions meticulous and the air conditioning set to precise degrees. The Lakota Indians the first exhibition, then Penobscot Canoe, South American Indians, a room dedicated to Alaskan Totems.  An hour ago we were walking the seedy backroads of Cambridge, now we are towered by the 150 year old masters of wood cutting, upstairs the great collection of ancient world-wide weapons, and one floor up, the most uniform of them all, a dedication to the two great Harvard founders of the new of the discipline of anthropology and

archeology, Putnam and Boas.  Our second visit here in three days we now know Harvard, all of its shops and institutional buildings, the library with 7 levels dug underground, the statue of John Harvard who is not really John Harvard at all and the freshman dorms off the square that George Washington once garrisoned during the trials of the Revolutionary war.  The ghosts of the past, the travelers of the new, where old dusty books meet shiny new phones, where lecture rooms or chapel halls, stained glassed and iron fortified windows a sort of fortress of old knowledge forging out into the new world like old flames that never surrender.