The Harvard Hoar House

My apologies for not blogging sooner, but I've rarely had access to a computer since my return to the States. I shall devote this post to Boston. The next will be devoted to Baltimore and to the change in travel plans I have been forced to take.

My stay in Boston was not everything I had hoped it would be. I arrived in Boston on a Sunday night, after 7 hours on Greyhound, and got a cab to my hostel. This hostel proved to be only a stone's throw from Commonwealth Avenue and Newbury Street, the main streets of Boston's fabled Back Bay. Planned as Boston's Champs Elysee, Commonwealth Avenue is indeed quite pretty, though not so grand as I imagine the Champs Elysee to be. Newbury Street had quite a nice selection of restaurants, and I eventually settled down for an Indian meal of chicken tikka masala, nan, and iced tea, before heading back to the hostel for a good night's sleep.

The first day I went on Boston's famous Freedom Trail. Briefly, the Freedom Trail is a network of 14 famous sites involved mostly in the Revolutionary War (though a couple are linked more to the abolitionist movement and the Civil War). To take the trail, you start out in Boston's famous Boston Common and follow a red brick line that eventually takes you through the winding and narrow streets of Boston's downtown all the way to the Bunker Hill Monument across the harbor in Charlestown.

I spent almost a full day on the trail, stopping off at Quincy Market for lunch and at the Paul Revere house for a tour. Quincy Market is a prime example of a 30-odd-year trend in America of taking unused historic or "historic" sites in central business districts and turning them into--you guessed it--upscale shopping venues. The market at Quincy Market, located just behind Boston's famous Fanueil Hall, has functioned as a market in one way or another for over 150 years. In its current incarnation, it houses a food court and is surrounded by such stores as Ann Taylor and Sunglass Hut.

Paul Revere's house was interesting less for the site itself than for what I was able to learn about his life. The man had no fewer than sixteen children, by two different wives. Even by the standards of the 18th century, this was quite a prodigious amount of offspring. I was also surprised to learn that, in addition to his work as a silversmith, Paul River was known for his printing and engraving.

My second day in Boston, I decided to venture up to Harvard. The weather was a tourist's worst nightmare--pounding rain. Wandering into Harvard Yard from the Cambridge T stop, I managed to hook onto the tail end of a campus tour. I got to see the famous statue of John Harvard--who, it turns out, did not actually found the university but merely bequeathed it a shipload of money early in its history. I was surprised to learn that the statue is not a genuine likeness of John Harvard, all images of the man having been destroyed in a 1730s fire. No one knows exactly who served as the model for this statue, but rumor has it that the statue is a likeness of a Harvard president by the name of Hoar. At the time Hoar served as Harvard's president, the campus was expanding, and a tradition had developed of naming new undergraduate houses after retiring presidents. For understandable reasons, the story goes, Harvard was none too keen about having a Hoar House (whorehouse...get it...get it) on its campus, and so they agreed to honor President Hoard by making this statue in a likeness either of him or of his nephew, depending on which version of the story you believe.

Sadly, I was unable to get the full tour of Harvard. The tour guide was kind enough to tell me where to go to get the start of the tour, but as I was walking there, the rain, which had temporarily abated, started to come down so fast and furious that I was forced to seek refuge in the Harvard Co-op, the main bookstore for Harvard. Started as an independent store, the Co-op now so thoroughly resembles a Barnes & Noble that it even serves Tazo Chai tea lattes. By the time I ventured out again into the rain and over to where the tour began, the last one of the day had already ended.

The third day, the weather improved enough that I decided to venture out to Salem and see what I could of sites relating to the famous witch trials. I shouldn't have bothered. Salem is a classic tourist trap. Were it not for the history of the 1690s witch hysteria, Salem would be a perfectly ordinary bedroom community for Boston. I saw three witch-realted museums. The first turned out to be almost entirely child-oriented, with a light-and-tableaux show giving the general history of the witch trials. The second, in the basement of a store on Salem's pedestrian mall (what is with America's fascination with pedestrian malls?), took me down into a basement to see more lights and tableaux.

The third museum, the famous Witch House, belonged to one of the judges in the witch trials. While it was pleasant enough to see a restored 17th-century home, I didn't really feel I knew any more about the witch hysteria after touring it than I had before.

There is quite a lot more to see in Boston, and I hope to go back and see it at some point during my time at Penn, but I felt oddly compelled to move on to Baltimore after three days. As my next post will reveal, I needn't have.