Back Bay, Boston

Start with your feet. The brick sidewalks here are uneven, lifted in places by the roots of old trees. Under the bricks, and under every house you can see, there was once no ground at all. There was water. Salt water, mud flats, and reeds that smelled of the tide. Everything around you, the stone stoops, the wide avenues, the church towers, stands on land that people made by hand.

This is Back Bay. The name is not a poetic invention. It comes from a real bay, a shallow tidal basin of the Charles River behind the narrow peninsula of old Boston. For two centuries it was a backwater. By the early nineteenth century a mill dam had cut it off from the tide, and the trapped water turned foul. The basin became a health problem, and the city began to look for a solution.

The solution was gravel, and a lot of it. In the late 1850s, workers began to fill the marsh. Trains carried gravel from hills outside the city, many kilometres to the west. Day and night, for decades, the cars arrived, unloaded, and went back for more. Block by block, the new land crept west from the Public Garden. The filling took until the end of the nineteenth century. It is one of the largest land-making projects in American history.

Because the land was empty, planners could do something rare in Boston. They could draw straight lines. The old city has crooked lanes that follow cow paths and shorelines. Back Bay has a clean grid. The designers looked to Paris, where wide boulevards were reshaping the city in the same era. Here is the first surprise for many visitors. Walk west, and the cross streets go in alphabetical order: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester, Hereford.

That little alphabet is a gift. If you are ever lost, read a street sign and you know roughly where you are. The east-west streets have their own pattern too. Beacon Street runs along the river side. Then comes Marlborough, then the great Commonwealth Avenue, then Newbury, then Boylston. Each one has a different personality, from quiet residential calm to shop windows and traffic. You can feel the change in a single block.

Commonwealth Avenue is the heart of the plan. Look down its centre and you will see a long green strip, the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, lined with trees and benches. In the Parisian manner, it is a park and a promenade in one. Statues stand along the path at intervals. In spring, magnolias along the house fronts open in pink and white. People walk dogs, push strollers, and sit with coffee, exactly as the planners hoped.

Now look at the houses themselves. Most are Victorian row houses, built tightly side by side. Many are brownstone or red brick, with tall front steps and heavy doors. Notice the bay windows, the curved and angled fronts that push out toward the street. They let in more light and gave owners a view up and down the avenue. Small front gardens sit behind iron railings. Wealthy Boston families moved here in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the neighbourhood became the city's fashionable address.

Here is the second surprise, and it is underground. Many of Back Bay's great buildings rest on wooden pilings, tree trunks driven deep into the filled land. As long as the wood stays wet, it lasts for a very long time. If the groundwater drops and air reaches it, the wood begins to rot. So the city watches its water table closely. Monitoring wells are spread through the neighbourhood, and property owners pay attention to the level beneath their basements.

Walk south to Copley Square, and the scale changes. On one side stands Trinity Church, designed by the architect Henry Hobson Richardson and completed in the 1870s. It is built from warm, rough stone in shades of red and tan, with deep round arches and a massive central tower. His style became so influential that people named it after him: Richardsonian Romanesque, a heavy, rounded style inspired by medieval churches in southern France and Spain.

Across the square is the Boston Public Library, its main building designed by the firm McKim, Mead and White and opened in the 1890s. It looks like an Italian Renaissance palace, calm and symmetrical, in pale granite. Look above the entrance for the words carved in stone: Free to All. That idea was radical at the time. Inside, there is a quiet courtyard with a fountain, a good place to sit and let the street noise fall away.

Rising behind Trinity Church is a very different building, the glass tower at 200 Clarendon Street, long known as the Hancock Tower. It was designed by Henry Cobb of the firm I. M. Pei and Partners. Its thin, mirrored shape reflects the old church at its feet, so stone and glass appear in the same view. Soon after construction in the 1970s, many of its window panes cracked and fell, and they had to be replaced.

A short walk west on Boylston Street brings you to a line painted across the road, near the library. This is the finish line of the Boston Marathon, held each April. On race day, crowds fill the sidewalks here, and the noise carries for blocks. On other days, people still stop to stand on the line and take a photograph. One block north, Newbury Street offers galleries, cafés, and shops in the ground floors of old townhouses.

Before you leave, walk north to the river. Beyond Beacon Street, footbridges cross to the Esplanade, a long park along the Charles. From there you can look back at the rooftops, chimneys, and church towers of the neighbourhood. Remember that all of it sits where water once moved with the tide. As you walk away, listen to the sound of your steps on the brick. You are walking on a city that people built from gravel, wood, and ambition.