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Is this heresy? I've been a habitué of New York's northernmost subur...er, the Hub of the Universe, for many years and have made over a dozen visits. Over that time I've discovered so many Forgotten relics that they simply cannot be kept out of cyberspace any longer. On to Massachusetts we go...

Boston's nooks and crannies are crammed with fading advertising. Bostonia Cigars sign, circa 1910 or earlier, contrasts with modern Toyota neon sign, at Cross and North Streets at the epicenter of the Big Dig. Just Suits, on Quincy Court and North Street, across the way from Paul Revere's place in the North End, home of Prince Spaghetti. Just a couple of blocks away from the Coke sign, you can spot this very faded Pepsi Cola sign on a South End side street near Tremont. Faded sign for a St. Vincent de Paul consignment outlet on Washington Street in the South End. It was placed high so it could be seen from the old Washington Street el, which was removed and replaced with an open cut subway a few blocks to the east in the early 1980s.

Quaker Oats, Cambridge and Grove Streets on Beacon Hill. Nothing better than Southern fried chicken and a Coke, especially when you're in the South End on Tremont Street. Incidentally when you're in Boston, it's pronounced Trem-mont, please, but if you're in the Bronx, it's Tree-mont. The moving finger, having writ...stays where it is. The sign says Y'S. It's likely that the top floors were removed from this building in the historic Blackstone Block.

Boston dates to the early 1600s, and it was never laid out on any semblance of a grid plan (with the exception of Back Bay, which was built on landfill.) As a consequence its street pattern, if it can be called that, developed haphazardly and followed natural contours such as now-vanished rivulets and springs. Boston is filled with tiny alleys, and an entire book can be written on their lore and the stories behind their sometimes colorful names, like Crab Alley and Henchman Street. Unmarked Quaker Lane, in the shadow of the 1711 Old State House, proceeds in two directions: from Washington Street east to Devonshire Street and another piece of it goes south to another intersection with Devonshire. This picture shows where it diverges. Gaslamp on Main St and Hurd's Lane in Charlestown Charlestown, like other older sections of Boston, is also alley-filled and we've selected tiny Hurd's Lane as representative of its brothers. Like many Boston alleys, it is paved with bricks. Unlike New York City, many Boston lanes and alleys are still paved with...

Board Alley, in the North End, is one of a number of crooked alleys such as Baker's Alley, Mechanics Alley and Quincy Court, that cannot be found on all but the most meticulously detailed maps. For a description of the North End's networked maze of back alleys, read H. P. Lovecraft's horror story Pickman's Model, which describes what can sometimes be found there... Brickfaced Hurd's Lane in Charlestown

In Charleston and elsewhere in Boston, new gaslamps and brick sidewalks were installed in the 1980s.

Old examples of streetlighting in Boston are sometimes difficult to pick off, because its streets are dominated by gaslamps and new lamps fashioned in the traditional acorn and teardrop diffuser styles. Here and there, though, an old codger can be still found shuffling its way through the streets. Boston has also retained quite a number of ancient wall lamps, from which hang incandescent bulbs with fan-like radial wave reflectors. This one can be seen in Quincy Court in the North End. This one can be found in Mechanics Alley, off Hanover Street in the North End. An added treat is one of the old lampposts that light the approach to the Sumner Tunnel, which crosses Boston Harbor on its way to Logan Airport and beyond. As long as I have been coming here, it has never had its reflector repaired. Note the cast iron filigree on the wall unit. Monmouth Street, near B.C. Wall-mounted unit in the South End A parallel can also be drawn in the method Boston uses to mark its fire alarms. In New York, the alarms are marked by an orange lamp affixed to the post in a variety of methods; in Boston, a red lamp is used, mounted on a telephone pole or on the alarm itself. Typical fire alarm in Boston. These are manufactured by Gamewell, of which not too many can be found on NYC streets.

Old-style cast-iron post at Causeway and Portland Streets, near the old Boston Garden (now the Fleet Center) Crescent moon wall lamp, on Knox Street, a narrow alley in Bay Village. Typical goosenecked concrete clad post on Comm. Ave.

Closeup of the pole's fluted base, rather similar to New York City's cast iron posts. Another distinctive feature is footrests for repairmen who need to climb up to change lightbulbs. Freestanding cast iron lamps are among the oldest left in Boston, and can be found in back alleys and service lanes. Above and left are two examples found in Brookline. Both have concrete-clad bases (which most Boston lampposts do have)

In Boston, trolleys are not fossils whose bones are occasionally dug up, as in NYC. They are a living, breathing, important part of the transit system; all of the MBTA Green Line, which has four branches, is made up of trolley tracks and catenary wire. Coolidge Corner, at Beacon and Harvard Streets in Brookline, retains an original trolley shelter with Spanish-style roof and polished wooden interior.

These may appear green, but they are actually a part of the Red Line. A short spur of the line connects Ashmont and Mattapan. The spur uses very old PCC cars from the 1940s. Similar cars were used until quite recently closer to home on the Newark City Subway.

Boston's street signs are of the boring green on white type, as in New York City, but an an occasional straggler can still be found. Most Bostonians are now too young to really remember Scollay Square (no, it's not named for Mulder's partner), which was once the heart and soul of Boston's entertainment district. It was home to Boston's first streetcar line as well as the first hotbed of burlesque. Boston has had a reputation of being Puritanical and opposed to merriment, but luminaries like Oliver Wendell Holmes and John F. Kennedy were regulars at the Old Howard Theatre, to ogle the chorines and strippers. Scollay was home to tattoo parlors, bars, dozens of other vaudeville and burlesque houses as well as its answer to Nathan's, Joe And Nemo's Hot Dogs. Needless to say Scollay was the first destination of any sailor on leave until well after WWII. After the war, though, Scollay suffered the same ignominy as NYC's 42nd Street. Like "The Deuce" Scollay attracted more and more crime and Bostonians started to desert it. When the entire West End was torn down for urban renewal in the early 1960s, it was also decided to tear up Scollay and replace it with the largely sterile Government Center and new City Hall that are there now. A sign on Congress Street (below) marks the epicenter of old Scollay.

This sign is of the previous generation of Boston street signs that predates the white-on-greens; it can be found on Lakeshore Terrace near the Boston-Newton line north of BC. Another Scollay remnant. The Government Center station on the Blue Line was once called Scollay Under, and remnants of the tiled Scollay mosaic can still be found at the very end of the station just inside the tunnel. There's 'always something doing' at the Scollay Square website.

Modern Theatre Opera House These doyennes of Boston's Theatre District endured Washington Street's Combat Zone era, where XXX porn reigned supreme from the 60s into the early 1990s. Both date to the 1920s and, though both are shuttered these days, like Elton John, they're still standing, which means they can always be redeveloped. The North End is home to Copp's Hill Burying Ground, one of the oldest cemeteries in America, with stones dating to the mid-1600s. It's the final home to dozens of patriots from the Revolutionary era, but probably no other patriot is immortalized quite like Daniel Malcolm. A Son of Liberty and a successful merchant who, in 1768, instigated an embargo of British goods and participated in the Liberty Riot, opposing officials who had seized John Hancock's sloop Liberty, his gravestone is pockmarked by holes--which were left by redcoats using the stone for target practice! No longer in the shadow of an el that obscured it for decades, Warren Tavern in Charlestown bills itself as Boston's oldest tavern. Other Boston watering holes make the same claim. Records show, though, that Warren Tavern has been on Main and Pleasant Streets since 1780 and was one of the first new buildings constructed after the British burned Charlestown that same year. Its namesake, Joseph Warren, was a general in the Massachusetts Army but enlisted as a private in the Continental Army for the battle of Bunker Hill, where he perished. It's not the oldest continuously-operated bar in Boston, though; that prize goes to Jacob Wirth's on Stuart Street in the Theater District. Carver Street, Edgar Allan Poe's birthplace   Edgar Allan Poe may be more notably associated with New York, where he possibly wrote The Raven; Philadelphia, where he wrote The Gold Bug and edited Graham's Magazine; Baltimore, where he died; or even Providence, where he romanced Sarah Helen Whitman, but he was born right here, on Carver Street just south of Boston Common. Some time ago, Carver Street was demapped and now serves as pretty much a driveway, but a plaque on Boylston Street (left) marks the birthplace of the macabre master of the weird tale.

On 44 Hull Street opposite Copp's Hill can be noted the narrowest house in Boston...just ten feet wide. It is the last remnant of a series of similarly-built homes in about 1800. According to legend, it was built to spite a neighboring house, blocking its light and view.. More popular with pigeons than people nowadays, Boston Stone, on Marshall Street in Blackstone Block, may just be the oldest object in town from the Colonial era. The story goes that it was fashioned in London and brought to Boston in 1635 and was used as a grinding stone by Thomas Child in his paint mill. Child died in 1706, and a few decades later, in 1737, the stone was removed and placed in the brick wall in the building that still stands today. According to legend, it was once used to measure distances from the center of Boston to other points, but that is in dispute. However...London does indeed have its own stone used for measuring distances dating back to the Roman era. From the Boston Street Necrology Department, we find one of Boston's former busy thoroughfares, Broadway, reduced to a couple of unconnected blocks in Bay Village. Broadway was once a main route that connected the Common to Southie, but over the years it has been hacked away until only a small portion remains. Even the old Broadway Bridge, which spanned the Fort Point Channel, was torn down in 2001. Boston still has some old-fashioned slotted mailboxes, like this one at Mount Vernon Street and Louisburg Square in the heart of Beacon Hill.

Green Line North Station stop Els have become increasingly rare in Boston; like New York it has been eradicating them with vigor over the decades. Within a few years, the North End will lose the Green Line el, as it is scheduled to be moved underground with a direct cross-platform connection with the Orange Line as part of the Big Dig reconfigurations. That means Causeway Street will see sunlight for the first time since about 1905!

View of the el from Causeway Street

Chandler Pond is one of the small kettle ponds that can be found all over the Boston region. This is at Boston's western city line north of St. John's Seminary on Lake Street. SOURCES: Blue Guide to Boston & Cambridge, John Freely, W.W. Norton & Company 1994 BUY this book at Amazon.COM Boston A to Z, Thomas H. O'Connor, First Harvard University Press 2001 BUY this book at Amazon.COM Buildings and Landmarks of Old Boston, Howard S. Andros, University Press of New England 2001 BUY this book at Amazon.COM "Bygone Boston", Michael Kenney, Boston Globe, September 23, 2000

For my last visit in December 2001 I ventured some distance from the Back Bay, Charlestown, Beacon Hill, Cambridge, the South End and went to some of Boston's western and northern suburbs and found some un-Bostonlike scenes. Take the Blue Line all the way to the Wonderland Race Track, walk a couple of blocks and you're at Revere Beach, which is not usually deserted like this in season. On the peninsula across Broad Sound is the town of Nahant.

More on Boston

The $5 billion hole in Boston's downtown
Urbanphoto's Boston page
Boston-online.com

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E me at erpietri@earthlink.net or kevin@forgotten-ny.com