"It seems the only planning stipulation was that the streets be wide enough to accommodate a pregnant cow."
The ability to tell stories is the primary requirement to work in Boston's tourism industry — that line above is about the city's Italian quarter on the North End (which is not the picture above it), writes Brian Byrne. And it seems to me that there must be a training school which teaches them the stories, because you keep hearing similar ones from different guides, trolley drivers and cruise couriers.
Which is fair enough, I guess. It's a compact city, with a compact history both in its depth of years and its geographical area. And things happened fast — the gaining of independence from the British Crown took only eight years from the time the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed from the balcony of what is now known as the Old State House in 1776.
Boston was the hotbed of the planning of independence from the colonies, and key events from the project, such as Paul Revere's Midnight Ride, the Boston Massacre, the Battle of Bunker Hill, all happened within a short distance from each other.
So doing the tourist thing is rich in yarns about how the United States got its kick-start in a very short timeline.
You literally can't avoid it. Coming up to the edge of Boston Common from the T station at Park, we found ourselves in the middle of a clatter of school kids being regaled with stories by a 250-years-old militiaman who looked remarkably well preserved for his years. As was the woman dressed from similar times further into the Common, this time talking to adults.
In both cases, their stories seemed full of blood and gore, and uncomfortable stuff like how even a husband and wife kissing in public could be punished by a period in the stocks, with resulting indignities involving rotten vegetables, and cow pats from the animals grazed on the 44 acres of land.
Of course, there were more interesting entertainments on the Common too. Hangings were good, for instance.
You can tag on to any of these walking tours that you might bump into on what the city calls its 'Freedom Trail', and get a good grounding in that story of disentanglement from the apron strings of the 'mother country'. After that, our recommendation is to book a 'trolley tour' which offers a hop-on/hop-off drive and oodles of information about old and new Boston.
City View driver Tom Collins — he has lots of relatives in Ireland, of course — mixed his commentary between the highlight points of the independence struggle with yarns about the Big Dig that took 14 years and $166m to transform the city from a massive car park to a somewhat more fast-moving automotive log-jam.
In between navigating his trolley through it, sometimes appearing to have eyes in the back of his head to manage it, he reported on the Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, which killed 492 people. Among them was cowboy film star Buck Jones, in the city to promote the buying of War Bonds. The Boston College football team had made reservations to celebrate an expected victory over Holy Cross, but didn't go out for the night after they suffered a surprise defeat.
Another big fire also features on the tour, the one in 1872 which destroyed 766 buildings, though loss of life was mercifully held down to 13. The cost was estimated at $75m. In fact, there have been a lot of serious fires in Boston down through the centuries since it was founded.
There were other disasters too, the most unusual arguably the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 — told to us by Peter on the Boston Harbour Cruise which was part of the ticket deal with City View. It seems that a 50-foot tall container of the sticky stuff used as a sweetener and a base for alcohol production burst one exceptionally hot day. The 8.7m litres contents formed a 15-foot wave that rolled through North End streets at up to 35mph. Houses and a steel elevated railway bridge were destroyed, while 21 people and an unknown number of horses died, 'like so many flies on sticky flypaper' as one reporter of the time put it.
On the same harbour tour we got a good view of the USS Constitution, still the world's oldest still-commissioned naval vessel. The sailing frigate was nicknamed 'Old Ironsides' by a British gunner in 1812 when his cannon-balls bounced off the ship's hull. He mistakenly assumed the sides were reinforced iron, when in fact they were just oak and built to a much higher standard than typical warships of the time.
They're proud of their superlatives in today's Boston. They have a new bridge which they claim is the widest cable-stay bridge in the world.
There's the Omni Park Hotel, the oldest hotel in the US. And Quincy Market is, they say, the fourth most-visited tourist attraction in the United States (the top one? — Times Square, NYC).
And the Old North Church, on which lanterns were hung to warn of the British military arrival in the embryonic War of Independence, is said to be the oldest church still standing in the US. And, of course, the Big Dig is claimed by Bostonians as the biggest individual construction job in the world.
We caught up with Tom Collins on our last boarding of the City View Trolley. He told us that he and his girlfriend would be attending the big hockey semi-final that night to support the Boston Bruins. "I've been to all their recent winning games and figure I'm something of a good-luck charm for them."
Any you know what? They won again, with the prospect of finally gaining their first championship in 39 years. I bet he figures it's the best two and a half weeks' wages he ever spent.
