Engl 101/200: Boston=Culture City
Field Trip to Boston Common
Class Notes
Field Trip #2: Downtown Trip to
Boston Common/State House/Boston Garden
Paper #1: will be handed back on Monday
Paper #2: “Observation Paper” assignment will be handed out on Monday
For Monday, read chapter 3 in A Short History of Boston; read Chapter 3 in Boston
Voices and Visions—pick your favorite literary source; take 2-column notes
on that source and be ready to show them to me (!!),
Plan to visit an urban public space over weekend/early next week: by Wednesday,
Oct 1: observe space, take notes, use 3 different observation techniquese
Continue to think about layers of meaning:
1. City as architectural space
2. City as people
3. City as history
4. City as symbolic, imaginative space
Continue to think about: what makes a great public space?
Continue to think about: how would I observe & analyze an urban space?
1. City on a hill:
--Beacon Hill
--heart of “Old” Boston
--one of three hills (“Tremont Street”)
--Park Street Church: 1809: first Sunday school’s first singing of “My Country
‘tis of Thee”; Abolitionist (anti-slavery) movement
2. Boston Common (1634): oldest/first city park: 17th-century design
--48 acres
--owned by William Blackstone (first European), purchased by Puritans
--grazing of cows until 1830; 70 cows with keeper
--public hangings until 1817 (1656: Anne Hibbins for witchcraft; 1660:
Mary Dyer for Quaker preaching)
--used as camp by 1750 British soldiers before Revolutionary War; leave for
Lexington/Concord, Bunker Hill from here
--contains the Central Burial Ground
--waterline: Charles Street
--events: Martin Luther King, protest rallies, first papal mass in US in 1979
--restoration: Brewer Street Fountain
--Founders Memorial: 1930: William Blackstone welcomes John Winthrop
3. Massachusetts State House
--built in 1798: “new” State House
--built on land owned by John Hancock, first elected governor
--Charles Bulfinch, leading architect
--wooden dome overlaid with copper by Paul Revere; old leaf in 1874;
painted gray in WWII
4. Robert Gould Shaw/54th Regiment Memorial
--sculptor: Augustus Saint-Gaudens; unveiled May 30, 1897
--first all-volunteer African-American regiment
--Shaw died at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, July 1863
5. Frog Pond
--one of three original ponds
--1848: made into a ornamental pond with a fountain
--swimming, skating
---Poe derides Bostonians as “Frogpondians”
6. Boston Public Garden (1837): first botanical garden: 19th-century design
--24 acres, once marshes
--plotted gardens; tropical displays; specimen trees
--shaped Lagoon with island
--sculpture memorializing famous men, literature, events:
--Make Way for Ducklings sculpture: book by Robert McCloskey published in
1941 (near Beacon and Charles Street)
--Ether Monument: first use of ether at Mass General Hospital in 1846 (near
Arlington and Marlborough St)
--9/11 memorial: dedicated to 206 MA residents killed in attack; dedicated
July 2004 (near Arlington and Newbury Streets)
--George Washington Monument by Thomas Ball, dedicated July 3, 1869
7. Swan Boats
--launched in 1877
--created by shipbuilder Rober Paget; Paget family still operates boats
--foot-paddles—only boats of this kind
--oldest boat: 1918; newest 1956
8. Commonwealth Mall leading from Garden: Emerald Necklace
--Fredrick Law Olmstead, 1890s
--landscape architect; designed NYC’s Central Park
--engineered parks
9. Granary Burying Ground
--established 1660; approx 5000 people buried here
--Benjamin Franklin’s parents, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Sam Adams,
victims of Boston Massacre