Boston

I

Introduction

Boston, the capital city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the seat of Suffolk County. It is located in the eastern part of the state on Boston Harbor, an inlet of Massachusetts Bay, at the mouth of the Charles River. Boston is the largest and most influential city in the six-state New England region. It was one of the earliest major United States cities to be settled by Europeans (1625) and the largest city in the British American colonies. The American Revolution (1775-1783) began in the Boston area.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Boston was the focus of economic activity, communications, and transportation in New England and was one of the major centers of higher education and high technology in the United States. The city is scenically located along the waters of the Charles River and Boston Harbor. It has a compact, walkable city center, which is dotted with sites of historic interest dating to colonial times.

Boston has humid summers and moderately cold winters. Temperatures in January average a high of 2°C (36°F) and a low of -6°C (22°F); July temperatures average a high of 28°C (82°F) and a low of 18°C (65°F). The city averages 1,100 mm (42 in) of precipitation a year.

II

Boston and Its Metropolitan Area

The heart of the modern city is the compact downtown area, which serves as the city’s commercial and financial district. This area contains a number of historical landmarks, including the Old State House, Granary Burial Ground, and Old South Meeting House. Old South Meeting House is where American revolutionary leaders Samuel Adams, James Otis, and John Hancock conducted many of the protest meetings leading to the American Revolution (1775-1783).

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On the southern end of the district is Chinatown, with its concentration of Chinese restaurants and food stores. To the north is an area known as Government Center, developed in the 1960s. City Hall and the John F. Kennedy Federal Building are located there. Not far from Government Center are two Boston landmarks: Faneuil Hall, built in 1742 as a public market and a place for town meetings, and Quincy Market, a retail and wholesale distribution center for meat and produce that was renovated in 1976 to form a festive food market.

To the west of the downtown is Boston Common, an open area originally reserved by colonists for grazing cattle. The Common is the oldest public park in the United States. The State House, which serves as the state capitol building, stands at the north end of the Common. Built from 1795 to 1798 by U.S. architect Charles Bulfinch, the gold-domed statehouse dominates Beacon Hill, a neighborhood that has been the traditional home of wealthy Bostonians. The neighborhood remains a prime address and contains many historical houses with handsome brick facades. Founded in 1807, Boston Athenaeum moved to its present building on Beacon Street in 1847. Privately operated and opened to members and their guests, the Athenaeum is one of the oldest libraries in the United States. It has notable historical collections on the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the works of 19th-century antislavery activists known as abolitionists, as well as other 19th-century materials and a rare book collection that includes 15th- and 16th-century materials.

The West End, which borders Beacon Hill north of Cambridge Street, changed radically as a result of urban renewal projects. In the 1960s the city razed tenements in the area. The Charles River apartment complex now dominates the neighborhood. One survivor of the razing was Massachusetts General Hospital, incorporated in 1811 and one of the nation’s leading medical institutions. Northeast of the hospital, in an old commercial district, is the TD Banknorth Garden, a sports and music arena opened in 1995 to replace an aging facility, Boston Garden. The Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the Boston Bruins of the National Hockey League (NHL) play at the Garden. The Museum of Science is located north of the hospital on the Charles River Dam.

Northeast of the downtown is the North End, the site of historic buildings such as the house of American patriot Paul Revere, the Old North Church, and Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. Paul Revere’s House is the oldest surviving house in Boston. It is the place where he departed on his historic ride in 1775 to warn anti-British forces in Lexington and Concord of the approach of British troops sent to seize military supplies held by the colonists. Old North Church is the city’s oldest church. The North End is separated from the downtown by the Fitzgerald Expressway (Boston’s main north-south traffic artery). Known as Boston’s little Italy, the North End is a district of Italian restaurants, groceries, and three-story brick apartment buildings. During August, festivals and religious celebrations take place on the North End’s narrow streets.

Water separates two of Boston’s neighborhoods from the rest of the city. Across Boston’s Inner Harbor, East Boston straddles Logan Airport. It is predominately an Italian neighborhood of one-, two-, and three-family homes. Charlestown, located across the Charles River, has long been a tightly knit, middle-class Irish community, although it began attracting professionals to its central area starting in the 1980s. Bunker Hill Monument and Museum are found here as well as the Boston Navy Yard, a National Park Service Historic Site. It is the site of the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the United States.

The Back Bay was created by landfill in the late 1800s to the west of Beacon Hill and Boston Common. Today it is a residential area of brownstone townhouses laid out on a grid pattern of streets dominated by the wide east-west boulevard of Commonwealth Avenue. Commercial centers are located on Copley Square, Boylston and Newbury Streets, and at the Prudential Center. Two important architectural sites at Copley Square are the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church. Boston’s two tallest buildings, the John Hancock Building and the Prudential Center, dominate the skyline of the Back Bay.

Separated by the Massachusetts Turnpike (Interstate 90) from the Back Bay area, the South End is a trendy and diversified neighborhood with many upscale restaurants, art galleries, and renovated Victorian row houses. West of the South End is Fenway, one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city. The population has substantial numbers of African Americans and Hispanics and includes the largest concentration of Asians in Boston. The Fenway area is notable for its educational, cultural, and recreational facilities. Boston University, the New England Conservatory of Music, Northeastern University, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the world headquarters of the Christian Science Church are located here. Fenway Park, one of the oldest baseball parks in Major League Baseball, was built in 1912 for the Boston Red Sox.

East of the South End, across a narrow strip of water known as the Fort Point Channel, is South Boston. Once called America’s Dublin, South Boston housed a host of immigrants by 1900, many from Ireland. The area has maintained its ethnic and economic diversity as well as its attractive Victorian architecture. Boston Children’s Museum and the neighboring Computer Museum are located in the area.

The remaining neighborhoods lie west and south of the city center. Roxbury is a largely black neighborhood and one of the poorest residential areas. Franklin Park, the city’s largest park, is located here. Dorchester evolved from an upscale Victorian-era suburb to a working-class community, first attracting Irish-Americans and Jews and later a mixture of ethnic groups and blacks.

Jamaica Plain, one of the first U.S. suburbs connected to a major city by streetcars, is a residential area with a mixture of Hispanic, black, and white populations. Arnold Arboretum and Jamaica Pond are located here. Roslindale remains a quiet, predominately white, working-class community full of families and three-story houses. Roslindale borders West Roxbury, a predominately white, middle-class area, and Mattapan, a predominantly black residential area. Hyde Park still resembles a suburban town.

The neighborhoods of Allston and Brighton occupy the northwest corner of the city to the west of Fenway. The Allston-Brighton area is bordered to the east, north, and west by the Charles River and to the south by the Massachusetts Turnpike and the town of Brookline. It is an industrial and residential neighborhood that is also the location of Boston College and Harvard University Business School. Boston has been unsuccessful in annexing Brookline, the birthplace of U.S. president John F. Kennedy and an affluent suburb only 6 km (4 mi) from the center of Boston.

Boston’s greater metropolitan area includes the cities and towns in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and southern Maine from which people commute to jobs in Boston and its suburbs. They make up the Boston Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA). The smaller Boston Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area (PMSA)—with 129 cities and towns—encompasses many suburban communities that are closely linked to Boston. Large communities in the surrounding area include Revere, Everett, Somerville, Cambridge, Newton, Brookline, Dedham, Milton, and Quincy. Suburbs fan out to the south and west, and extend north to the New Hampshire border.

Boston offers several walking tours of historical locations. The Freedom Trail connects 16 locations that make up Boston National Historical Park, including major sites of the American Revolution. The trail begins at Boston Common. It passes the site of the Boston Massacre in front of the Old State House, where British troops opened fire on a mob of citizens in 1770. The trail continues to the Granary Burying Ground next to the Park Street Church, where the victims of the Boston Massacre and revolutionary patriots Paul Revere and John Hancock are buried. Other stops include Old South Meeting House, Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere’s House, Old North Church, and the Bunker Hill Monument. The Freedom Trail ends in Charlestown at the Bunker Hill Monument, the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major military confrontation of the American Revolution. The name “Battle of Bunker Hill” is a misnomer, as the actual battle site and the monument are located on Breed’s Hill, a short distance from Bunker Hill.

Another important walking tour, the Black Heritage Trail, traces the history of African Americans in Boston. It includes major sites such as the Abiel Smith School, the first public school for black children; the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, the oldest black church building still standing in the United States; and the Charles Street Meeting House, where 19th-century abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth, spoke in favor of abolishing slavery in the United States.

Along the waterfront, a multi-billion-dollar effort has transformed Boston Harbor from one of the most polluted harbors in the United States into one of the cleanest. During the 1990s, people again began setting traps for lobsters, and harbor seals have returned. In the nation’s first urban aquaculture project aimed at raising fish for the commercial market, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the neighboring city of Cambridge have successfully raised edible fish using untreated harbor water.

III

Population

Boston’s population peaked in 1935 with 817,713 people. In 1950, from a population of 801,444, the city began a slow decline in the number of inhabitants that was to last for three decades. During the 1980s and 1990s the population of Boston slowly increased again. By 2000 the city’s population was 589,141. In 2005, the population was estimated at 559,034. The Boston Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA) had a population of 5,819,100 in 2000. Physically, Boston is quite small at about 126 sq km (about 49 sq mi), ranking 69th in physical size among U.S. cities. However, Boston has one of the highest population densities among cities nationally, with about 4,700 persons per sq km (about 12,000 per sq mi) in 2000.

At the time of the 2000 census whites made up 54.5 percent of Boston’s population, blacks 25.3 percent, Asians 7.5 percent, Native Americans 0.4 percent, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders 0.1 percent, and those of mixed heritage or not reporting race 12.2 percent. Hispanics, who can be of any race, made up 14.4 percent. In contrast, in the Boston Metropolitan region in 2000 whites made up 85.1 percent, Hispanics (who may be of any race) 6.2 percent, blacks 5.1 percent, and Asians 4.0 percent. In the city of Boston, the three largest ancestry groups in 2000 were African American, Irish, and Italian. About one in four Bostonians was foreign-born. Two out of three speak only English, while one in eight speaks Spanish. The next four most commonly spoken languages are French, Chinese, Portuguese, and Vietnamese.

Boston was the largest city in the British colonies until 1760, when Philadelphia surpassed it. Boston’s inhabitants exceeded 100,000 in the 1840s, reached 250,000 in 1870, and then more than doubled in size to 560,892 by 1900. Boston had 20 percent of the population of Massachusetts at that time. With a nearly identical population size in 2000, however, it had only 9 percent of the state’s inhabitants.

Boston’s population decline in the mid-20th century was due to several factors: urban renewal, which removed high-occupancy tenements and replaced them with new construction; the expansion of commercial office space into areas that had once been residential; and freeway construction, which made the movement of people to suburban communities easier.

Boston underwent a reduction in the number of family households during the 1990s. About 75 percent of new residents were single people from age 18 to 40. The Boston Redevelopment Authority has reclassified neighborhoods into five demographic groups: older family, younger family, mixed family and singles, young singles, and young-to-middle-age singles.

In Suffolk County (Boston, Brookline, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop), the number of people who do not adhere to any religion slightly surpasses the number who follow Judaism or Christianity. Of those committed to a religion, Roman Catholics make up more than half, followed by Protestants, who make up slightly less than one-third of the population, and Jews, who account for a little more than one-tenth. Nearly one-third of Protestants are Southern Baptists, many of whom are black. Other religions practiced in Boston include Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism.

IV

Education and Culture

Boston was an educational forerunner, both as part of a British colony and as a U.S. city. In the British colonies, the city established the first free public school in 1635 and the first public library in 1653. As part of the United States, it founded the first high school for girls in 1825 and the first kindergarten in 1860. Boston has continued to be a leader in education with more than 65 colleges and universities in the metropolitan area. Well-known institutions include Northeastern University, Boston University, the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts, Boston College, and the New England Conservatory of Music, all located in Boston; Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; Brandeis University in Waltham; Tufts University in Medford; and Wellesley College in Wellesley.

Boston’s cultural heritage also includes American literature. The Atlantic Monthly, the oldest general magazine published in the United States, was the voice of liberal Boston when it was launched from the Old Corner Bookstore in 1857 under the editorship of writer James Russell Lowell. Under the direction of writer and publisher James Fields, who edited the Atlantic Monthly and was the publisher of many of the foremost American writers of the time, the bookstore became a gathering place of 19th-century writers. These writers included essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, social reformer Julia Ward Howe, and novelists Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Boston and the surrounding area have been home to poets Phillis Wheatley (an 18th-century African slave), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. Among the notable black leaders who attended universities in the Boston area are intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois (Harvard University), Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West (Boston University), and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (Boston University’s School of Divinity).

Boston has a rich cultural life. The celebrated Museum of Fine Arts, established in 1876, houses American, European, Egyptian, Chinese, and Japanese collections. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Fenway neighborhood holds a personal collection of European and American paintings, sculpture, textiles, and furnishings. The collection was willed to the city following the death of art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1924. The exhibits are housed in Gardner’s former home, Fenway Court. Other museums of note include the Children’s Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Boston Museum of Science, and the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. A unique museum is located in Charlestown aboard the USS Constitution, the world’s oldest commissioned warship afloat. The Boston Public Library, with one of the nation’s largest collections, contains murals by U.S. painters John Singer Sargent and Edwin Austin Abbey.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1881, and the Boston Pops, with its repertoire of lighter music, provide world-class music to the city. The Boston Ballet Company, the Boston Lyric Opera, and an active theater district are among the abundant cultural offerings of the city.