HISTORIC BOSTON

On this balmy summer evening, we met Mary from Boston On Foot Tours right beside the Samuel Adams statue, in front of Fanueil Building.  This building, right in from of the Quincy Market, was donated as a place for trade exchange, with a hall on the second floor, for public meetings and debates.

A lot of where we walked on this tour is reclaimed land.  When the first settlers arrived, three mountain peaks faced them.  Today, only one remains, as they have used that for land fill.  We heard a lot tonight about the early citizens of Boston, how it once as larger than New York, its links to the founding of the country.  In the Granary Cemetery, three of the signatures to the Declaration of Independence are buried.  But it was so many different buildings and their histories which was also a feature of the tour.

On this balcony, the newly signed Declaration of Independence was read aloud to the amassed crowd below.

The Boston area was abundant with granite and this building has no steel structure.  It has enormous granite foundations and is one of the largest stone buildings.  It would be too expensive to replicate such a building these days.  But the old girl had real elegance and style about her, unlike many of the plain faced modern ones.

 This is the old City Hall.

 Right next to it is this building, from which one Mr. Ponzu operated his now infamous "Ponzi scheme" for about five years before being rehoused for a while in prison.

This is King's Chapel Cemetery and is about two to three times bigger than what I could capture in this photo, yet five thousand of the departed are buried here.

After so many beautiful buildings, our tour concluded in an enormous brick forecourt of the current City Hall.  To the left in the distance (the evening light didn't allow a photo) was the church spire where Paul Revere had waited for the signal, before setting out to issue his famous warning.  And apparently he never cried, "The British are coming".  That is just part of the myth.

 Let me say, this has to be the ugliest, gloomiest, most overpoweringly awful Public Building I have seen in Australia, Great Britain, USA or Western Europe.  Some of the Communist buildings we saw in 2012 would rival it.  

On seeing it finished for the first time, the then Boston Mayor is said to have remarked, "What have we done."  I can only agree.