During our week in Boston, we made a couple of excursions into North End, one of the main downtown areas. North End is home to Quincy Market, Faneuil Hall, part of the Freedom Trail, Little Italy, the New England Holocaust Memorial, and a lot more!
Quincy Market is a grand old building, constructed in 1824-26 to meet the demand for shop space that had surpassed the capacity of nearby Faneuil Hall. Inside the market were a variety of food vendors offering everything from ethnic cuisine to seafood to roast dinners. We ate a couple of meals there and saw some colourful street entertainers outside.
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| Quincy Market |
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| Some costumed market customers |
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| An entertainer drawing a crowd |
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| Balloon lady |
Faneuil Hall (close to Quincy Market) has been a marketplace and meeting hall since 1742. The building itself has undergone various changes over the years; most notably, it was entirely rebuilt with non-combustible materials at the end of the 1800s. We don't have any photos of the outside of the building, but it was where we started our Freedom Trail walking tour from.
The
Freedom Trail is a path through downtown Boston that weaves past 16 historically significant sites (although our tour only covered part of the full 2.5-mile trail). Our walking tour was led by a ranger from the National Park Service. She told us anecdotes about the
American Revolution and
Paul Revere, while leading us through the streets to a series of sites ending at a statue of Paul Revere outside Old North Church.
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A pub similar to the one where secret
Revolution-planning meetings were held |
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| Resting from walking |
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| A printing press demo we watched after our walking tour |
We walked through part of Little Italy during our Freedom Trail walking tour, and went back again afterwards. The area is famous for its bakeries and many Italian restaurants.
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| Haha! |
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| A Little Italy side alley |
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| Mike's Pastry |
Throughout the day, we had seen a number of people in Little Italy carrying small cardboard boxes tied up with string and labelled with a Mike's Pastry logo. However, when we actually found Mike's Pastry and saw the line-up of customers out the door and down the street, we decided to go to a slightly less popular bakery instead (where there was still quite a significant line-up)! Our dinner after the walking tour was three pastries from Modern Pastry. There hadn't been any prices on the bakery shelves, so I was expecting around $15 or so for three pastries... and was amazed that our order only came to $8!
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| Modern Pastry options |
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| Our box of goodies |
On our way back to the T station, we stumbled upon the
New England Holocaust Memorial. It was in a narrow park beside a main road, but the memorial was extremely well done. We didn't take any photos, but it was very moving to walk through the six steaming glass towers and read the survivors' and witnesses' recollections. The six towers represented the six major Nazi death camps, and were engraved with seemingly endless columns of numbers symbolising the six million Jews that died. It was one of the most creative yet sobering memorials I can ever remember seeing.
Here are a few other random Boston buildings that don't really fit into a particular blog entry...
To be continued...
1 comment:
Mother Anna's - cute!!!!
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