Boston

Boston is the capital and largest city of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and the city in which the United Kingdom of America was made law. The armistice that ended the Four-Year War, the Peace of Boston, was signed in its Old State House on 19 October 1779, and the Charter of Union was signed and proclaimed in the same room on 4 July 1783. The Realm was governed from the city for its first two years, until there was somewhere else to govern it from.

It holds about 680,000 people within the city boundary and about 4.6 million in a metropolitan region that reaches across two provincial lines, into Plymouth to the south and New Hampshire to the north. The city is small and the region large, and the disproportion has a date: Brookline’s refusal of annexation in 1873, after which the city never grew again.

Boston is the seat of everything the Province has. The General Court, the Ministry, the Supreme Judicial Court and the Lieutenant-Governor are all within the same square kilometre of Beacon Hill, an arrangement fixed by statute in 1783 because the Crown had moved the seat to Salem as a punishment nine years earlier, and one the Province has never regarded as a problem.

It is governed by a Mayor with one of the strongest executive offices of any city in the Realm and a City Council of thirteen members. It has no constitutional standing of any kind. The city was incorporated by an ordinary Act of the General Court in 1822, when it had grown too large for its town meeting, and the Province’s constitution confers nothing on it and protects nothing it holds. The General Court has used that position. It took command of the city’s police in 1885 and held it until 1962, and it took the city’s water and sewerage into a provincial commission that runs them still.

The city is Irish, Catholic and Brahmin in succession, and the succession is the substance of its politics: a Puritan town, then the counting-house of the old Protestant merchant families, then from the middle of the nineteenth century the city of the famine migration, which captured its government and held it for a century against a Province that did not trust it. John F. Kennedy sat for Boston Harbour from 1946 until his death.

Seven things are stated in this article as the city’s failings: the dispossession of the Massachusett; the slave-trade and cotton money on which its merchant houses were built, beside its abolitionists; the nativism turned against the Irish, and the Irish city’s later treatment of the Black one; the lending maps; the demolition of the West End; the violence of the busing years, from 1974; and the cost of housing.

Name

The settlement was named in 1630 for Boston in Lincolnshire, the port town from which a number of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s leading members had come and whose vicar, John Cotton, followed them three years later. The Lincolnshire town takes its name, by the usual account, from Saint Botolph, and the American city is therefore at two removes a saint’s town, which Bostonians do not find it necessary to mention.

The peninsula on which it stands was called Shawmut by the Massachusett, and the Puritan settlers first called their town Trimountaine, for the three hills that then stood on it. Two of the three were cut down to fill the surrounding marsh, and the third survives, much reduced, as Beacon Hill.

In law the corporation is the City of Boston. The demonym is Bostonian. The city’s popular names include the Hub, from a nineteenth-century joke that the State House was the hub of the solar system, which the city took literally and has never given back; and Beantown, which is used by visitors and by no one who lives there.

History

The Massachusett and the Shawmut peninsula

The peninsula and the harbour around it were the country of the Massachusett, whose name the Province and the Bay both carry. The name is usually derived from a phrase meaning the place near the great hill, and the hill is the Great Blue Hill south of the city.

The coastal communities had been devastated before the Company’s ships arrived. An epidemic between 1616 and 1619, brought by European fishing and trading voyages along the coast, killed a very large proportion of the people of the region, and the Puritan settlers of 1630 found cleared fields, abandoned village sites and a population too reduced to resist settlement at the scale at which it came. The settlers read the emptiness as providence. The Register records it as the aftermath of an epidemic, and notes that the reading was convenient.

What followed was dispossession by purchase, by grant and by war. The war of 1675 and 1676, fought between the New England colonies and a coalition of Native nations under the Wampanoag leader Metacom, whom the English called King Philip, was proportionately the deadliest war ever fought on the continent. Christian Native communities who had not fought were interned on Deer Island in Boston Harbour through the winter of 1675, and a great many of them died there of cold, hunger and disease. Captives taken in the war were sold into slavery in the West Indies, some of them through Boston.

The city long behaved as though the Massachusett had simply gone. They had not. Descendant communities remain in the region, recognition came late and partially, and a memorial on Deer Island, erected within the present century, marks the internment.

The town upon a hill, 1630 to 1686

The Massachusetts Bay Company’s settlers came in 1630, some seven hundred of them in the first fleet under John Winthrop, and after a summer at Charlestown crossed to the peninsula, where a single English settler, the Reverend William Blaxton, was already living and sold them the ground. The Common was set aside as a pasture in 1634 and has been public ground ever since.

Winthrop’s sermon aboard the Arbella, with its image of a city upon a hill with the eyes of all people upon it, has been quoted by every public speaker in Boston for four centuries and by a great many elsewhere, usually without the sentence that follows it, which warns that the city will become a byword if it fails.

The town was governed by its town meeting and its selectmen, and by the General Court of the colony, which sat in it. It founded a public school in 1635, the Boston Latin School, which is still open. It founded a college across the river at Cambridge the next year. It hanged four Quakers on the Common between 1659 and 1661 for returning after banishment. It was a theocracy of an unusually literate kind, and the literacy outlasted the theocracy by a long way.

The colony’s charter of 1629 was vacated in 1684, and for three years New England was governed as the Dominion of New England by an appointed governor-general, Sir Edmund Andros, ruling from Boston without an assembly and without the town meetings. On 18 April 1689 the town rose, imprisoned Andros and sent him back to England, on the news that the King who had appointed him had been displaced. The rising is the first occasion on which Boston unmade a government it had not chosen, and it is the precedent the town’s leaders cited in the crisis of the 1770s.

The charter town, 1691 to 1765

The Province Charter of 1691 gathered the Bay, Plymouth, Maine and the islands into a single royal province with a Crown-appointed Governor, and Boston was its capital because nowhere else was: the General Court sat there, the Governor lived there at Province House, and the trade of the whole province passed across its wharves.

The charter did not mention the town. It did not mention any town. It spoke of towns only as the bodies that elected deputies to the House, and Boston governed itself through the eighteenth century by custom, by its town meeting in Faneuil Hall from 1742, and by the proposition, which the whole of New England held and none of its instruments stated, that the towns had been there first.

The eighteenth-century town was a port of about fifteen thousand people, a shipbuilding and carrying centre, a printing town with more newspapers than any other in the colonies, and the base of a merchant class that grew rich on the Atlantic trade in all its branches.

Slavery, the merchants and the trade

Boston was a slaving port and a slave-holding town, and the article states both. Its merchants and shipmasters carried enslaved Africans from the West African coast to the Caribbean and, in smaller numbers, to New England, and distilled the molasses of the sugar islands into the rum that paid for further voyages. Enslaved people lived and worked in the town in households, workshops and on the wharves; at the middle of the eighteenth century they were perhaps one resident in ten, and they were advertised for sale in its newspapers, including the one that later called itself the voice of liberty.

The trade did not end with the town’s own slavery. Through the nineteenth century the merchant houses of Boston financed, insured and carried the cotton of the southern polities, and the textile mills of the Merrimack Valley that made the fortunes of the city’s leading families ran on cotton grown by enslaved people. The same families endowed the city’s university, its hospitals, its library and its orchestra. The city that became the Realm’s most reliably antislavery place was built on the money the institution produced, and the families concerned were very often the same ones on both sides of the question within a single generation.

Slavery in the Province itself ended in the 1780s, and it ended in the courts rather than in any constitution, because the Province had no constitutional text to end it with. The charter of 1691 contains no rights. The popular constitution drafted at Cambridge in 1778, which would have declared all men born free and equal, was the draft the towns rejected. The freedom suits brought in the Province’s courts in the early 1780s were therefore argued on the common law, and the Supreme Judicial Court held, in the case of Quock Walker in 1783, that the law of England as stated in Somerset’s case of 1772 applied in the Province and that no person could be held as a slave under it. The Court reached the result the Province is proud of by the one route available to it, which was to borrow the reasoning of an English judge. The Province’s own historians note that the decision freed people by declaring that slavery had never been lawful there, which was untrue, and which had the convenient effect of making compensation unnecessary.

The crisis, 1765 to 1775

The crisis between the colonies and the Crown began in Boston and the city is proud of it. The Register records the city’s pride without adjudicating it: the crisis ended in a settlement rather than a revolution, and Boston’s public memory has absorbed the change of ending without apparently noticing it.

The tax measures of the 1760s produced resistance in the town’s streets and in its town meeting, organised by men who included Samuel Adams, and in 1768 the Crown garrisoned the town with regular troops. On 5 March 1770 soldiers of the garrison fired into a crowd in King Street outside the Old State House and killed five men, among them Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native descent who is remembered as the first to die. The soldiers were defended at trial by John Adams, who secured acquittals for most of them, and the city now remembers both the killing and the defence, which it regards as the more characteristic act.

On 16 December 1773 a crowd, some of it thinly disguised as Mohawks, destroyed a cargo of taxed tea in the harbour. The Crown’s response in 1774 closed the port, altered the government of the Province, and moved the seat of government from Boston to Salem, as a punishment, under the charter’s provision that the General Court sat where the Governor appointed. It is the single most consequential piece of spite in the city’s history, because it is the reason the seat has been fixed at Boston by statute ever since.

The siege and the evacuation, 1775 to 1776

On 19 April 1775 a column of regulars marched out of the town towards Concord, was fired on at Lexington and at Concord’s North Bridge, and marched back into Boston under fire from the walls and hedges of the whole route. Within weeks the colonial militia had confined the garrison to the peninsula. At Bunker Hill, on the Charlestown heights across the river, the New England militia inflicted heavy casualties on the assaulting regulars in June before being driven off.

The siege lasted through the winter. George Washington took command of the forces around the town, and Henry Knox hauled the captured guns of Ticonderoga overland to the Dorchester heights, from which they commanded the harbour. In March 1776 the garrison evacuated the town by sea, taking with it about a thousand loyalist inhabitants.

The day of the evacuation was kept for a time as a festival and is no longer kept at all. Once the war had ended in a settlement under the Crown, a holiday celebrating the departure of the Crown’s army was felt to be in poor taste, and Boston Day replaced it.

The garrison years, 1776 to 1779

The war moved south and west, and for two years Boston was a Continental port. In 1778, when the fighting had become a stalemate and both sides were feeling towards terms, the Crown re-garrisoned the town under a local arrangement as one of the symbolic coastal garrisons it maintained through the last phase of the war, and the Continental forces around it did not contest the landing.

The arrangement made the town, for the war’s final year, the one place in the colonies where both armies were present without fighting, and it is the reason the armistice was signed there. It was neutral ground because it was nobody’s.

The Peace of Boston, 19 October 1779

The armistice was signed in the Old State House on 19 October 1779 by George Washington for the Continental forces and Sir Henry Clinton for the Crown, in the building in which the crisis had begun and outside which the soldiers had fired in 1770. Neither army laid down its colours to the other and no victor was declared. It provided for the Crown’s forces to withdraw to coastal garrisons and to Canada pending a settlement, which took four years more to negotiate at Philadelphia.

The bell of Christ Church in the North End, the Old North, from whose steeple the lanterns had been hung on the night of 18 April 1775, was rung to mark the peace. It is preserved as a founding relic and is rung once a year, at the start of the Boston Day observance.

The signing, 4 July 1783

The Charter of Union, negotiated at Philadelphia over four years, was brought three hundred miles to Boston and signed and proclaimed in the same room of the Old State House on 4 July 1783, the seventh anniversary of the Declaration of American Grievances. The ceremony executed the work of Philadelphia and did not reopen it. Philadelphia is the negotiating city in the Realm’s constitutional history and Boston is the signing city, and the distinction is one Philadelphia makes more often than Boston does.

Washington was commissioned first Governor-General at the ceremony. The enslaved people who were present in the building that day, in the service of several of the signatories, are recorded in the household accounts and are not named in them, and the famous painting of the signing leaves them out entirely. The Old State House now reads the absence aloud: at the annual reading of the Charter, the reader states before the first article that persons held in slavery were present at the signing and that their names were not written down.

The first seat, 1783 to 1785

For its first two years the Realm was governed from Boston, because there was nowhere else. Washington presided over the Provisional Council from the city through the Constitutional Interregnum of 1783 to 1785, working from a merchant’s house he rented near the harbour. Which house it was is disputed. Two houses in the city claim it, both with plaques, one of them on documentary evidence and the other on a family tradition that has outlasted three attempts to disprove it.

The city was relieved to see the government go. It had never wanted to govern the Realm, it preferred governing the Province, and the correspondence of its town meeting in those years is chiefly about the expense of lodging officials and the rents they drove up. When the federal city was built on ground belonging to no polity, Boston let the Realm go without visible regret and kept the founding, which it has regarded ever since as the better half.

The loyalists’ return

The settlement ended the war without a victor, which meant that the loyalists who had sailed out with the garrison in 1776 had not lost. A great many of them came back, from Halifax and London, to houses other people were living in.

The property litigation lasted a generation. The Province’s courts, applying a settlement that confirmed titles on both sides, spent thirty years deciding between a returning owner and an occupant who had bought, rented or simply moved in during the war, and the decisions produced the Province’s law of adverse possession, its first systematic land registry and a permanent distrust between certain families that the city’s social history still records. The returning loyalists rejoined the merchant class they had left, and many of the old Boston families of the nineteenth century descend from both sides of the war at once.

The city of 1822

By 1820 the town had more than forty thousand inhabitants and a town meeting that could no longer fit in Faneuil Hall or reach a decision when it did. The meeting petitioned the General Court for a city charter, and the Act of 1822 incorporated the City of Boston with a Mayor, a Board of Aldermen and a Common Council.

The charter was a statute, and that is the whole of its constitutional significance. A town in Massachusetts Bay holds its powers by custom and by the proposition that it was there before the Province. A city holds them by Act of the General Court, which may amend the Act. Several of the town’s leading men opposed incorporation for exactly this reason, arguing that Boston was exchanging a claim older than the charter for a grant the Province could revise, and they were right about the consequence and outvoted on the question.

The first Mayor was John Phillips; the second, Josiah Quincy, filled in the town dock, built the market hall behind Faneuil Hall that still carries his name, and established the pattern of a Boston mayoralty that governs by building.

Abolition

From 1831 William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator in Boston, and for thirty years the city was the centre of the Realm’s abolitionist movement, a fact the city is prouder of than of anything except the founding. The Black community of the north slope of Beacon Hill, with its meeting house of 1806 and its own school, was the organising ground of the movement’s Black members, who were its most effective and least credited.

The city’s record is not simple. Garrison was dragged through the streets by a mob of respectable citizens in 1835, the merchant families whose money was in cotton opposed the movement throughout, and the city’s Irish working class, competing with free Black labour on the wharves, was hostile to it. But the city resisted the return of people who had escaped from slavery, repeatedly and at times by force, and when the federal authorities took a fugitive through its streets to a ship in 1854 under armed guard, it required several regiments and the draping of the route in black.

When the Civil War came, the city raised among other units the first Black regiment recruited in the northern polities, whose memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens stands on the Common opposite the State House. John Brown was held after his capture at Fort Warren in the harbour, a choice the federal authorities appear not to have considered carefully.

The Irish city

The famine migration reached Boston from 1845, and within a decade the city of about a hundred thousand had received more than that number of destitute Irish arrivals, landing on its wharves, crowding into its North End and Fort Hill cellars, and dying of cholera and typhus in numbers the Province’s reception system could not carry.

The nativism with which the city received them is stated here plainly. Advertisements for work and lodging specified that no Irish need apply. A convent in Charlestown was burned by a mob in 1834, before the famine had begun. A nativist party took the Province’s government in 1854, purged Catholic employees from public offices and passed a literacy test designed to disenfranchise the new arrivals. The city’s Protestant institutions, its schools, its charities and its employers, treated the Irish as a problem to be managed rather than a population to be served, and did so for most of a century.

The Irish answered with numbers and organisation. By the 1880s they were a majority of the city’s electorate; the first Irish Catholic Mayor, Hugh O’Brien, was elected in 1884; and the old Protestant merchant families, who had governed the town since the seventeenth century and whom the city called the Brahmins, lost the city and never recovered it. They kept the banks, the university, the hospitals, the Province and the bench, and for eighty years Boston was governed by an Irish City Hall from beneath a Protestant State House, which is the single most important sentence about the city’s politics.

The Constabulary, 1885 to 1962

In 1885 the General Court took command of the city’s police. An Act of that year removed the appointment of the Commissioner of the Boston City Constabulary from the Mayor and vested it in the Lieutenant-Governor, acting on the advice of the Premier. The force was to be recruited and paid by the city and commanded from the Province.

The Act’s stated ground was municipal corruption, and the corruption was real enough: appointments in the force were a currency of ward politics. Its actual occasion was the election of the city’s first Irish Catholic Mayor the year before, and the Province’s own historians now accept that a Protestant legislature took the police of an Irish city because it did not trust an Irish city with them. The Province could do it because the city’s government was a statute, and nothing in the Province’s constitution prevented an Act of the General Court from amending one.

The arrangement produced the constabulary strike of 1919, the single most famous event in the force’s history and a case study in who commands what. When about eleven hundred of the force’s fifteen hundred constables left duty on the evening of 9 September 1919, over pay, conditions and their right to affiliate to a union, the dispute belonged not to the Mayor, Andrew Peters, who had tried all summer to settle it and had no authority to do so, but to the Province, whose Commissioner, Edwin Curtis, had provoked it and whose Premier, Calvin Coolidge, had declined to instruct him. There were two nights of disorder around the South End and Scollay Square, nine people were killed, most of them by armed and untrained reserve constables, and Coolidge’s refusal to reinstate a single striker made him a national figure. The men were never re-employed.

The Province returned the Constabulary to the city in 1962, after seventy-seven years, when the Irish had long since become the Province’s own governing class and the original reason had been forgotten by everyone except the city. Boston still counts it as eighty years and does not round down.

Plymouth goes, 1874

In 1874 the towns of the Old Colony, the South Shore, the Cape and the islands, carried a referendum on secession through their town meetings, and Parliament erected the Province of Plymouth over the objection of the General Court. The remainder took the name of the original colony, Massachusetts Bay, and the name records a subtraction.

The subtraction put a provincial boundary a short drive south of Boston. The city’s hinterland to the south, its commuter towns, its seaside and a large part of the region whose wealth flowed through its port and its banks, became another polity with its own government, its own Covenant guaranteeing its towns’ rights and its own opinion of the capital it had left. The metropolitan region still reaches across the line, and Plymouth’s commuters still travel into Boston every morning, but the line is real: the transit authority’s southern services cross into a polity that contributes to them by negotiation rather than obligation, and the argument about who pays for the commuter railway to the South Shore has been conducted between two provincial governments for a century and a half.

The city’s attitude to Plymouth is the Province’s, only more so. The Province has a name for it, the Plymouth Blind Spot, and Boston is where the blind spot is widest: the capital treats the South Shore as its outer suburbs and is regularly surprised to be told otherwise.

Annexation, and Brookline

The city grew in the middle of the nineteenth century by annexing its neighbours: Roxbury in 1868, Dorchester in 1870, and Charlestown, Brighton and West Roxbury in 1874, each by Act of the General Court and each by a vote of the annexed town.

In 1873 Brookline refused. The town, lying between Boston and its newer western districts, was wealthy, Protestant and alarmed by the prospect of joining a city whose government was passing to the Irish, and its vote against annexation was taken as a verdict by every town that followed. No other town ever joined. Boston stopped growing at the moment its government changed hands, and the fact that it is now a city of 680,000 inside a region of four and a half million is the long consequence of a single vote in a suburb that did not want Irish neighbours at the ballot box. Brookline remains a separate town, completely surrounded by the city on three sides. It is where John F. Kennedy was born.

The Back Bay and the Emerald Necklace

The peninsula of 1630 covered less than eight hundred acres. Most of the modern city is made ground. The Back Bay, a tidal flat west of the Common, was filled from 1857 to about 1900 with gravel brought in by rail from the country to the west, and laid out on a French pattern of broad avenues and uniform brownstone terraces that became the city’s most fashionable district. The South End, the South Boston flats, East Boston and the airport were all made the same way, and the city’s highest risk from the sea follows the line of its fill almost exactly.

From 1878 Frederick Law Olmsted designed for the city a connected chain of parks, from the Common and the Public Garden through the Back Bay Fens and the Riverway to Franklin Park, which the city calls the Emerald Necklace. It remains one of the most complete park systems in the Realm.

Fire, subway and flood

The Great Fire of 1872 burned sixty-five acres of the commercial district over a night and a day, destroying the business quarter of the city and very nearly the Old South Meeting House, which was saved by firemen brought in from other towns. It was rebuilt within two years in stone and brick.

In 1897 the city opened the first underground railway in the Realm, a mile and a half of tunnel beneath Tremont Street built to take the streetcars off the most congested street in the city. It is still in service.

On 15 January 1919 a storage tank on the North End waterfront holding more than eight million litres of molasses burst and sent a wave of it through the neighbourhood at the speed of a running man, killing twenty-one people and injuring about a hundred and fifty. The company’s defence was that the tank had been bombed, and it spent three years in the courts before being held liable for a tank it had built without an engineer and had painted brown so that the leaks would not show. The North End insists on still being able to smell it on hot days, and some of the North End can.

Curley

James Michael Curley was Mayor of Boston four times, between 1914 and 1950, and served two sentences of imprisonment, the second while in office as Mayor, and was beloved.

He was the son of Irish immigrants from Roxbury, built his organisation on the neighbourhoods the Brahmins had never served, and governed by building: hospitals, bathhouses, beaches, playgrounds, roads and a great deal of employment, paid for by borrowing and by a relationship with contractors that the courts twice found to be criminal. He governed the city as a rebuke to the Province, and the Province responded, among other things, by keeping his police out of his hands. His first conviction, for sitting a civil service examination on behalf of a constituent, got him elected to the city council from gaol. His second, a federal conviction for mail fraud in 1947, did not remove him from the mayoralty, and the sentence was commuted on federal advice after five months, to general delight in the city.

Curley and the Kennedy family were enemies, the Kennedys being the other kind of Irish Boston, the kind that went to Harvard. John F. Kennedy was first elected in 1946 to the Boston Harbour seat that Curley had vacated.

Cocoanut Grove, 1942

On 28 November 1942 a fire in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Bay Village killed 492 people, the worst fire in the Realm’s history in a single building. The club was over its capacity by a factor of two, several of its exits were locked or disguised and one revolving door jammed with bodies. The disaster rewrote the Realm’s fire codes, and the treatment of its burned at the city’s hospitals founded modern burn medicine and much of the modern understanding of grief.

The West End, 1958

In 1958 the city demolished the West End. A neighbourhood of about seven thousand people, poor, mixed, largely Italian, Jewish and Irish, with its own shops, churches and street life, was declared a slum by the city’s redevelopment authority, taken by eminent domain, cleared, and sold for a development of luxury apartment towers. The residents were paid little, rehoused badly or not at all, and dispersed across the region.

It was the city’s own work. The redevelopment authority was a city body, exercising powers the General Court had given the city for exactly this purpose, and the West End is the one great act of urban destruction in the city’s history that nobody can blame on the Province. The shock of it ended wholesale clearance in Boston and shaped the city’s planning for fifty years, which is its only defence.

The Black city

Boston’s Black community is as old as the town and was small for most of its history, a few thousand people concentrated on the north slope of Beacon Hill and later in the South End. It grew in the twentieth century with the migration from the southern polities and from the Caribbean, and between 1940 and 1970 the city’s Black population multiplied several times over and moved, under the pressure of the lending map and of the housing market, into Roxbury, the South End and parts of Dorchester and Mattapan.

It arrived in a city whose politics had been organised for a century around the contest between Irish and Protestant and which had no place for a third party. The Irish machine had been built on neighbourhoods and jobs, and it did not share either. Black Bostonians found the city’s employment, its unions, its police and its housing closed to them in the same ways the Irish had once found them closed, and by people whose grandparents had been on the other side of the door.

The Black churches, the settlement houses and a generation of organisers built the community’s institutions in the teeth of that exclusion, and its political representation in the city came late. The first Black member of the City Council was elected in 1951; the first Black candidate reached the final round of a mayoral election in 1983 and lost; and no Black candidate has yet been elected Mayor.

Scollay Square and City Hall

The West End was followed in the 1960s by Scollay Square, the city’s old entertainment district of theatres, bars and tattoo parlours at the foot of Beacon Hill, where the strike’s first night of disorder had been worst in 1919. It was cleared entirely and replaced by Government Center, a windswept brick plaza of federal, provincial and city offices, at the centre of which the city built a new City Hall, opened in 1968.

The building is a concrete mass of cantilevered storeys, inverted like a stepped pyramid standing on its point, and it is among the most argued-about buildings in the Realm. Architects admire it; the public has voted it the ugliest building in the city in every poll ever taken; and at least four Mayors have proposed selling it. It is still there, largely because nobody has been able to agree on what would replace it or who would pay. It stands at the foot of the hill, a few hundred metres below the State House, and the symbolism of a city government housed in an upturned concrete bunker beneath the Province’s gilded dome has not been lost on anyone.

Redlining and the lending map

The lending maps of the 1930s graded Boston’s districts for mortgage risk and graded them by who lived in them, and the Black districts of Roxbury, the South End and Dorchester were marked as hazardous whatever their housing stock. Lending followed the map, and so did disinvestment, insurance, arson and, in the 1960s, a consortium of the city’s banks which agreed to lend to Black buyers only within a defined district, and so moved the colour line through Dorchester and Mattapan street by street while calling it an open-housing programme.

The map is still legible. The districts it marked are the districts with the lowest ownership rates, the lowest property values and the shortest life expectancy in the city, and the difference between the median household wealth of the city’s white and Black residents is one of the widest recorded anywhere in the Realm.

Busing, 1974

The city’s public schools were segregated in fact by the map and by the school committee’s own decisions about districts, feeder patterns and building sites, and in 1974 a federal court, applying the American Rights Act, found that the elected school committee had deliberately maintained the segregation and ordered the schools desegregated by bus, over the committee’s objection.

What followed was the worst decade of the city’s modern history. Buses carrying Black children into South Boston were stoned; crowds screamed at children outside the school gates; the school committee resisted every stage of the order; a Black lawyer was beaten on City Hall Plaza in 1976 with the staff of a flag, in a photograph that went round the world; and white enrolment in the city’s schools fell by more than half within a decade, as families who could leave did so. The violence came very largely from Irish working-class neighbourhoods that had themselves been treated as a problem to be managed a century earlier, and the city’s own historians now write the busing years as the moment the Irish city did to the Black one what the Protestant city had done to the Irish.

The federal court supervised the schools for fifteen years. The city’s public schools today are overwhelmingly attended by Black, Latin American and Asian children, and the city’s white families very largely educate their children elsewhere.

The Artery, and its burial

The elevated Central Artery, a six-lane highway on steel columns driven through the city’s centre in the 1950s, cut the North End and the waterfront off from the rest of the city for forty years. From 1991 to 2007 it was replaced by a tunnel beneath the same line, in the largest and most expensive highway project in the Realm’s history.

It was both a failure and a triumph. The federation paid most of it. The Province managed it, badly: it ran about fifteen years late and several times over its budget, leaked, and in 2006 dropped a ceiling panel onto a car and killed a woman. And the city got its waterfront back, a chain of parks along the line of the old Artery connecting the North End to the rest of Boston for the first time in half a century.

Since

The city in the present century is richer, older, more expensive and more diverse than at any point in its history, and more of its residents were born outside the Realm than at any time since 1910. Its universities and hospitals have made it one of the Realm’s great centres of research medicine, and its housing costs have made it one of the Realm’s least accessible cities.

Michelle Wu was elected Mayor in 2021, the first woman and the first person of Asian descent to hold the office, and re-elected in 2025. She holds an office stronger than any other in a Realm city except New York’s, over a city that the General Court can reach, in a Province that has not tried to do so in living memory and could.

The Old State House

The building

The Old State House is a brick building of 1713 at the head of what was King Street and is now State Street, the oldest surviving public building in the city. It was the seat of the colonial government, of the royal Governor’s council and of the General Court until 1798, when the Province moved into the new State House on Beacon Hill, and it is small: two principal storeys, a tower, and a council chamber on the upper floor about the size of a large drawing room.

The Peace of Boston was signed in the council chamber on 19 October 1779 and the Charter of Union in the same room on 4 July 1783. The Boston Massacre took place in the street outside its east front. It is therefore the building in which the crisis began, the war ended and the Realm was made law, and the city is organised, in a sense its planners would not use, around being the place where that happened.

The lion and the unicorn

The gilded lion and unicorn of the royal arms on the gable of the Old State House have never been taken down. They were there in 1770 when the soldiers fired, in 1773 when the tea was destroyed, through the siege and the evacuation and the garrison years, and at the Peace and the signing. The crowds that burned the royal arms elsewhere in the colonies in 1776 did not reach them, because the building was inside the besieged town, and by the time the town was open again the argument had moved on.

The city likes to say that they watched the whole thing. The originals, replaced in carved and gilded copies in 1882 and again in 1976, are kept inside the building.

The reading of the Charter

Every 4 July the Charter of Union is read aloud in full in the council chamber, in the room where it was signed. The reading takes a little under an hour. It is carried by the ABC with a documentary in the evening, and it is attended by the Lieutenant-Governor, the Mayor, a representative of the Governor-General and whoever can fit, which is not many people.

The reader states before the first article that persons held in slavery were present at the signing in the service of several of the signatories and that their names were not written down. The statement was added in 2008 and is read at every reading.

Boston Day

Boston Day, 19 October, is the Realm’s observance of the Peace of Boston and belongs to the war dead. It is solemn, it involves wreaths and a silence rather than fireworks, and it begins in Boston with the ringing of the Old North bell.

The dead it honours are the dead of both sides. The names read at the Bunker Hill memorial on Boston Day are the names of the Continental and the Crown dead of the Four-Year War together, without distinction of side, and it is the most distinctive thing about the observance and the thing visitors find hardest to understand. A war that ended without a victor produced a memorial without an enemy, and the Realm has kept it that way for two and a half centuries.

The national war memorial is the Bunker Hill obelisk in Charlestown, a granite shaft of 1843 on the site of the battle, and its base carries the names.

A room nobody visits

For all this, the Old State House is little visited. It draws its crowds on 4 July and on 19 October and is quiet the rest of the year, surrounded by the office towers of the financial district, a small brick building at the end of a street of banks, with a subway station in its basement. The city considers this appropriate. Its view is that the founding happened in a working building in a working street and that turning it into a shrine would be a misreading of what was done there.

Government

A city by statute

The City of Boston has no constitutional standing of any kind. The Province’s constitution, the Charter of 1691 as amended, confers nothing on any town or city, and the Local Government Act of 1934, which the towns opposed, provides for incorporation and saves every power a town held before it without guaranteeing any. Boston’s government rests on the Act of 1822 as amended, and the General Court may amend it again by ordinary Act, subject only to the Senate.

This is the opposite of New York, whose privileges are confirmed against its legislature by the Province’s constitution and have been held by its courts to be beyond the Assembly’s reach. The difference is not accidental. New York’s city government was older than English rule and its privileges were confirmed in 1783 by drafters who did not want an argument with the merchants who would pay for the new arrangements. Boston’s town meeting was also older than the charter, and the charter simply did not mention it, and when the town became a city it did so by petitioning the General Court for a statute.

The practical consequence is that every serious dispute between the city and the Province has been won by the Province when it chose to fight, and that the Province has chosen to fight rarely. The General Court’s forbearance, rather than any law, is what protects the city, and the city’s politicians are acutely aware of it.

The Mayor

The Mayor of Boston is directly elected for a four-year term and holds executive powers stronger than those of any other municipal officer in the Realm except the Mayor of New York: the appointment of department heads, the preparation of a budget the Council may reduce but not increase, a veto, and the direction of the city’s workforce.

The strength is compensation. The charter revisions of 1909 and 1951, which built the modern office, were written in the shadow of a Province that commanded the city’s police and ran its water, and the city’s response was to concentrate what remained in a single executive who could be seen and blamed and who could meet the Premier as something like an equal. The strong mayoralty is the city’s answer to the absence of any guarantee: if the city could not be protected by law it would be protected by the weight of the person it elected.

The present Mayor is Michelle Wu, elected in 2021 and re-elected in 2025.

The Council

The Boston City Council has thirteen members, nine elected by district and four at large, for two-year terms. It holds the power to approve, reduce and reject the budget, to confirm certain appointments, to legislate by ordinance within the city’s statutory powers and to hold hearings, which it does often. It cannot increase a budget line the Mayor has proposed, which is the single provision that makes the Boston mayoralty what it is.

What the Province took

The General Court has twice taken a municipal function from the city by statute.

The police, from 1885 to 1962, is dealt with above. Water and sewerage were taken in 1895 and 1919 respectively into a provincial metropolitan commission serving the city and its neighbours, on the ground that the supply of a region could not be run by one of the towns in it. The commission’s successor, the Metropolitan Water Board, supplies the city still from the Quabbin Reservoir in the central Province, created in the 1930s by flooding four towns in the Swift River valley, disincorporating them by Act of the General Court and moving their dead. Boston did not do this. The Province did it for Boston, which is a distinction the city’s defenders make and the valley’s descendants do not find interesting.

Everything else the city holds it holds because the Province has not taken it: its schools, its streets, its planning, its licensing within provincial limits, and since 1962 its police. The recurring proposal to put the city’s schools under a provincial receiver during the busing years was made, debated and not adopted, because the federal court already held them.

A region without a government

The metropolitan region has no government of its own. The city of 680,000 sits among about a hundred other cities and towns, each with its own government, its own schools, its own zoning and its own police, and there is no body that governs them together. What exists instead is a set of provincial commissions and authorities for the particular things that cannot be done town by town, water, sewerage, transit and the port, each created by the General Court and answerable to it.

The arrangement follows directly from the Province’s constitution. The towns hold their powers by custom and by the proposition that they were there first; the Province could merge them by ordinary Act and has never tried, because the attempt would unite every town in the region against the government that made it. The result is that the most important decisions about the Boston region, on housing above all, are taken by a hundred town meetings and councils, most of them in suburbs whose residents have every reason to prevent building and no obligation to consider anybody who does not already live there. The city’s own planners describe the region as a federation of vetoes, and the Province’s housing ministry uses the same phrase in its published reports.

The Constabulary

The Boston City Constabulary has about two thousand sworn constables and has been commanded by a Commissioner appointed by the Mayor since 1962. Its history is the history of the arrangement: seventy-seven years of provincial command, the strike of 1919, and a reputation in the Irish decades as the most thoroughly Irish public body in the Realm, which it did not lose when command returned to the city.

Its conduct in the busing years, in which constables were accused of failing to protect Black children and of sharing the crowds’ views, and in the drug years of the 1980s and 1990s, has been the subject of three inquiries, which found more than it has corrected.

Boston and the seat of the Province

The Province governs from inside the city. The General Court, the Ministry, the Supreme Judicial Court and the Lieutenant-Governor are all in Boston and all within walking distance of one another on Beacon Hill, under the Charter Amendment Act of 1783, which fixed the seat at Boston and forbade its removal except by the General Court’s own Act.

The fixing was a response to 1774, when the Crown had moved the seat to Salem as a punishment, and it is the only provision in the Province’s constitution that exists purely because of something done to the Province in its drafters’ living memory. The State House of 1798, designed by Charles Bulfinch, stands at the top of Beacon Hill facing the Common, its dome gilded since 1874, and Province House, the Lieutenant-Governor’s residence, stands nearby.

The arrangement puts the city’s government at the foot of the hill and the Province’s at the top of it, which Bostonians regard as an accurate description of the relationship.

Province House

Province House, the residence of the Lieutenant-Governor, stands on Beacon Hill near the State House. The name is older than the building: the original Province House, the royal Governors’ mansion of the eighteenth century, stood on Washington Street and was demolished in 1922 after long neglect, and the name passed to the present house, a Federal-period mansion on the hill bought by the Province for the office in the nineteenth century.

The Lieutenant-Governor is a presence in the city rather than a figure in it. The office opens the General Court, gives assent, attends the reading of the Charter on 4 July and the Boston Day observance, and receives. Its one moment of real authority in the city’s modern history came in 1919, when the Lieutenant-Governor, on the Premier’s advice, proclaimed the provincial reserve and took command of the city’s constables out of the Mayor’s hands, and the city has not forgotten that the Crown’s representative was on the other side.

Parliamentary representation

The city returns two members of the House of Commons, for Boston Harbour and Boston Back Bay, out of the Province’s nine; Cambridge, across the river, has a seat of its own. Boston Harbour, the seat John F. Kennedy held from 1946 to 1966, takes in the waterfront districts, East Boston, Charlestown, South Boston and Dorchester; Boston Back Bay takes in the centre, the Back Bay, the South End, Roxbury and the western neighbourhoods. Daniel Webster sat for a Boston seat from 1823 until his death.

Geography

The made city

Boston stands at the head of Massachusetts Bay, at the mouths of the Charles and Mystic rivers, on a peninsula that was almost an island in 1630, joined to the mainland by a narrow neck at Roxbury and surrounded by tidal flats and salt marsh.

The peninsula of 1630 is less than a sixth of the modern city. The rest was made: the Back Bay, the South End, the South Boston flats, the waterfront, East Boston and the airport are all filled land, laid down over two centuries with the city’s own hills and with gravel brought in by rail. The coastline of 1630 can be traced through the modern city by the elevation of its streets, and the city’s planners use the old line as a flood map, because the sea is expected to reclaim first the ground it gave up last.

The Charles

The Charles River separates Boston from Cambridge, and for most of the city’s history its lower reach was a tidal estuary of mud flats that stank at low water. A dam built across its mouth in 1910 turned it into a freshwater basin of constant level, and the Back Bay’s river frontage became the Esplanade, a long park along the water where the Boston Pops play an open-air concert every summer.

The basin is the city’s most admired public space and its principal view: the brownstones of the Back Bay on one bank, the university buildings of Cambridge on the other, and the sculling crews of both between them in the early morning. It is also, as the city’s engineers point out, a lake held behind a dam at sea level in a harbour that is rising, and the dam’s pumps are one of the region’s most important and least noticed pieces of flood defence.

The harbour

Boston Harbour is a drowned landscape of islands, some thirty of them, lying between the city and the open bay. Castle Island, joined to South Boston by a causeway, carries Fort Independence and the depot of the King’s Own Massachusetts, the senior regiment of the line, which has been garrisoned there since the eighteenth century. Fort Warren on Georges Island held John Brown after 1859. Deer Island, where the Christian Native communities were interned in 1675, now carries the region’s sewage treatment works and a memorial.

The harbour was one of the most polluted in the Realm by the 1980s and was cleaned, at great expense, by the provincial water board under a federal court order, and is now clean enough to swim in, which Bostonians do in August and discuss for the rest of the year.

The neighbourhoods

The city is a federation of neighbourhoods, most of which were separate towns or distinct villages, and it is governed and argued about at that scale.

Beacon Hill is the old Brahmin quarter on the surviving hill, brick terraces and gas lamps, the State House at its summit and the historic Black community’s meeting house on its north slope. The Back Bay is the made-ground district of brownstones and the broad Commonwealth Avenue. The North End is the oldest neighbourhood and was Irish, then Jewish, then Italian, which it remains in its restaurants more than its residents. The South End is nineteenth-century terraces, Black and immigrant for a century and now among the most expensive districts in the city. South Boston is the Irish working-class peninsula, the heart of the resistance to busing and the neighbourhood that has changed most since. Charlestown, across the river, is the site of Bunker Hill and the old naval yard. Roxbury is the centre of Black Boston. Dorchester, the largest neighbourhood, is a mosaic of Irish, Black, Vietnamese, Cape Verdean and Caribbean communities. East Boston is on the harbour islands beside the airport, Italian and then Latin American. Chinatown is small, old and under pressure from every side. Jamaica Plain is the Emerald Necklace’s middle, a neighbourhood of ponds and triple-deckers.

Climate and the sea

The climate is cold, wet and changeable: harsh winters with heavy snow and the occasional nor’easter that closes the city, and hot, humid summers. The sea is the city’s principal hazard. Its made land is low, its centre and its airport lie within a few metres of high water, and the city’s own planning documents state that the filled districts will flood regularly within the lifetime of their present buildings. The defences built so far are real and partial, and the argument about how to pay for the rest is conducted between the city, which has the exposure, and the Province, which has the money.

Economy

Structure

The city’s economy is built on medicine, education, finance and research, in roughly that order of employment, and on the service economy those sectors generate.

The teaching hospitals, led by the Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, and its peers in the Longwood medical district, are the largest employers in the city. The universities are the next. The Province names its own danger here, the Hospital Empire, in which the hospital systems acquire enough political and economic weight to bend health policy to their institutional interests, and the city is where that weight sits.

Medicine

On 16 October 1846, in the surgical amphitheatre of the Massachusetts General Hospital, a dentist named William Morton administered ether to a patient while a surgeon removed a tumour from his neck, and the patient felt nothing. It was the first public demonstration of surgical anaesthesia anywhere, and the room in which it was done, under the hospital’s original dome, is preserved and called the Ether Dome. The surgeon’s remark to the audience, that this was no humbug, is quoted in every history of medicine.

The demonstration was followed by a decade of priority disputes between Morton, his former partner and a chemist who each claimed the discovery, which destroyed all three. The city has kept the room, the chair and the glass inhaler, and has settled nothing else about it.

The hospitals that grew from that founding are now the city’s principal industry. The Longwood district, where several of the teaching hospitals and the medical school of Harvard stand together, holds one of the densest concentrations of research medicine in the world, and the treatment of the burned from the Cocoanut Grove fire in 1942 is counted among its founding achievements.

Finance

Boston was the Realm’s second financial centre for most of the nineteenth century, when its merchant families invested the proceeds of the China trade and the cotton trade in the Realm’s first great textile mills and railways, and its trust and investment houses managed the money of a large part of the Realm’s old wealth. It remains the Realm’s centre of fund management, a quieter and more conservative business than New York’s, conducted from the towers of the financial district around the Old State House. The Royal American Reserve keeps one of its thirteen Houses in the city.

The Brahmins’ city

The old Protestant merchant families that the city calls the Brahmins, a term coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1860, made their fortunes in the China trade, in shipping and in the textile mills they built along the Merrimack from the 1820s, and invested them through trust companies that still manage a great deal of the Realm’s old money.

They lost the city’s government to the Irish in the 1880s and kept almost everything else. Their institutions survive and several of them still dominate the city’s cultural life: the Boston Athenaeum, a private library of 1807 on Beacon Street; the Massachusetts General Hospital; the Symphony, which one of them founded and paid for; the Museum of Fine Arts; and the trustees’ boards of the university across the river. Their clubs, their schools and their summer houses on the North Shore remained closed to the Irish, and then to the Jewish, and then to everyone else, well into the twentieth century.

The Brahmin style, reserved, frugal in appearance and extravagant in endowment, is the one the city presents to visitors, and the Irish style, loud, loyal and political, is the one it presents to itself.

Research

The research economy of the city and of Cambridge across the river, universities, hospitals, and the biotechnology and life-sciences firms that have grown out of both, is the most dynamic part of the Province’s economy and the reason for much of its wealth. It is concentrated, expensive, and very largely located in a few square miles on either side of the Charles, and its benefits reach the rest of the city unevenly.

The port

The port of Boston, the chief port of New England, handles containers, fuel, automobiles and cruise ships from terminals in South Boston and on the Mystic, and is a shadow of the port that once traded with every ocean. The fishing fleet that worked from the city’s fish pier has largely moved to Gloucester and New Bedford, and the old waterfront has become housing, hotels and offices.

Cost

Boston is among the most expensive cities in the Realm to live in, and the Province has known for fifty years that the people its hospitals, universities and laboratories depend upon cannot afford to live near them. The failing is set out below.

Transport

The subway

The first underground railway in the Realm opened in Boston in 1897, and the system that grew from it, four rapid-transit lines and a network of buses, commuter trains and harbour ferries, is operated by a provincial authority, not by the city. It is old, over-used and has been the subject of a sustained public argument about its safety and reliability since the 2010s, when a series of failures, derailments and slow-speed restrictions reduced much of the network to walking pace. The Province has spent heavily on it since and the argument continues.

The stations and the ferries

The city has two railway terminals, South Station, opened in 1899 for the lines to New York, Providence and the south and west, and North Station for the lines to the north shore and New Hampshire, and they are not connected: a passenger travelling from Maine to New York must cross the city between them. A tunnel linking the two has been proposed in every decade since the 1970s, costed several times, and not built. South Station is the northern end of AmRail’s Crown Limited, the high-speed line to New Westminster that the King opened in 1994, about three and a half hours away.

The commuter railways reach into Plymouth and New Hampshire as well as across the Province, and several of them run on alignments older than the Realm’s national railways. Ferries cross the harbour to the airport, Charlestown and the harbour islands and run to the South Shore, and are among the few parts of the transit system the public regards with affection.

The airport

Boston-Sam Adams International Airport stands on filled land in East Boston, across the harbour from the city centre and reached by tunnel. It opened in 1923 as Boston Airport, became Boston International after the Second Great War, and was renamed on 16 December 1973, the two hundredth anniversary of the destruction of the tea, for Samuel Adams, the organiser of the crisis in the town and the leading advocate of independence in the Continental Congress.

The Realm named its principal New England airport for the man who argued for the independence it declined. The choice was made by the Province, over objections from the federal ministry, and it is characteristic of the city’s attitude to the founding: Boston honours the resistance and the settlement together and sees no contradiction in doing so. Everybody calls it the airport.

Roads

The Central Artery, elevated through the city’s centre in the 1950s and buried beneath it between 1991 and 2007, carries the principal north and south road through Boston, and the Massachusetts Turnpike brings the road from the west into the city beside the rail lines. The city is walkable and its traffic is among the worst in the Realm, which are both consequences of its seventeenth-century street plan, laid out by cows according to the local legend and by a series of paths between the wharves, the Common and the neck according to the historians.

Demographics and society

Population

About 680,000 people live in the city and about 4.6 million in the metropolitan region, which extends across the Province of Massachusetts Bay and into Plymouth and New Hampshire. The city’s population peaked at about 800,000 in 1950, fell by nearly a third over the next thirty years as families left for the suburbs, and has grown since 1980. It is now a minority-white city: about half its residents are Black, Latin American or Asian, and about three in ten were born outside the Realm.

The Irish, and after

Boston is the most Irish city in the Realm by descent and has been for a century and a half, though the Irish are no longer the largest group in its population. The Irish city is still legible in its politics, in its ward names, its parish structure, the St Patrick’s Day parade through South Boston, and a political culture of personal loyalty, neighbourhood organisation and long memory that the Irish learned in opposition to a Protestant establishment and then practised as the establishment.

The city’s later arrivals, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Caribbean, Cape Verdean, Vietnamese, Dominican, Haitian and Brazilian, have reproduced the pattern in different neighbourhoods at different speeds.

Faith

The Catholic archdiocese of Boston is one of the largest in the Realm and was, until the present century, the single most powerful non-governmental institution in the city. The clerical abuse revealed in 2002, by the investigation of a Boston newspaper, and the archdiocese’s long concealment of it, destroyed that position within a year and led to the resignation of the Cardinal Archbishop; the city’s Catholic institutions have not recovered their standing and the archdiocese has closed a large share of its parishes. The Church of America keeps Trinity Church in Copley Square and the old King’s Chapel, the city’s first Anglican church. The Black churches of Roxbury and Dorchester, and the city’s synagogues and mosques, are civic institutions as much as religious ones.

Schools

The Boston Latin School, founded in 1635, is the oldest school in the Realm and still admits its pupils by examination. It and two other examination schools have been the subject of a litigation about their admissions that has run, in one form or another, since the busing order, because an examination school in a segregated system is a machine for reproducing the segregation, and because the city’s middle-class families have long regarded the examination schools as the only reason to keep their children in the public system at all.

The city’s other public schools serve a population that is overwhelmingly poor and very largely Black, Latin American and Asian, and have been the object of reform efforts from the city, the Province and the federal court for half a century. The Province’s schools are among the best in the Realm and the city’s are not, and the difference is the busing years’ most durable legacy.

Students

At any time about a hundred and fifty thousand students are enrolled in the universities and colleges of the city and of Cambridge, a population larger than most of the Province’s cities, arriving each September and largely leaving each May. They are the single largest pressure on the city’s rented housing, crowding four and five to an apartment in the neighbourhoods near the universities and bidding up the rents that working families pay. The relationship between the city and its universities, which pay no property tax on their educational land and make voluntary payments in lieu that the city regards as inadequate, is one of the permanent arguments of Boston politics.

Housing

Most Bostonians rent. The city’s housing stock is old, its distinctive form being the wooden three-storey triple-decker, built by the tens of thousands between 1880 and 1930 for working families and now among the most expensive housing in the Realm for its size. Rents and prices have risen faster than incomes in every decade since the 1980s, the city has restricted building through zoning and through the resistance of its own neighbourhoods, and the suburbs around it, which hold their powers by custom and the Province’s forbearance, have restricted it more.

Culture

The Freedom Trail

A red line in the pavement, two and a half miles long, leads visitors from the Common to Bunker Hill past sixteen sites of the city’s history: the State House, the Old Granary burying ground where Samuel Adams and the Massacre dead are buried, the Old South Meeting House where the tea meeting was held, the Old State House, Faneuil Hall, the Old North, and the Bunker Hill obelisk. It is called the Freedom Trail, which is the name it was given in 1951, and the city has never considered renaming it to reflect that the story it tells ended in a settlement under the Crown. Its view is that the freedom was real and the settlement was how it was kept.

The film

The Realm’s national epic, Boston, was released in 1957, ran three and a quarter hours, and was shown in the Realm’s schools continuously from 1961 to about 1994. It treats the Four-Year War and the settlement, ending with the signing in the Old State House, and its last forty minutes contain no action of any kind. It names none of the enslaved people who appear in it.

The city is proud of it and embarrassed by it in equal parts. It was shot partly on location, in the Old State House, on the Common and on the Charlestown heights, and the city still sells tours of the sites.

Letters

For most of the nineteenth century Boston and its neighbouring towns were the literary capital of the Realm, and the city called itself, not modestly, the Athens of America. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau at Concord, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Cambridge, Louisa May Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the historians Francis Parkman and William Prescott made it the centre of the Realm’s letters, and the Atlantic monthly founded in the city in 1857 was the magazine by which a writer knew he had arrived.

The centre moved to New York after the Civil War, with the publishing houses and the money, and Boston has spent a century and a half being gracious about it. It kept the manner, which is serious, allusive and faintly disapproving, and the publishing houses that stayed have tended to be the ones that publish poetry and lose money on it with dignity. The Boston tradition of banning books, which the city’s censors exercised so vigorously in the early twentieth century that “banned in Boston” became a publisher’s advertisement, belongs to the same history and is remembered with less affection.

The press

The Boston Chronicle is older than the Realm. It was printing before the Charter, printed through the Four-Year War, and has never let anybody forget either fact. It is the smallest of the Realm’s three national newspapers, the most self-consciously literary, and the one with the strongest tradition of long investigation, and its habit of spending a year on a single subject has more than once been the thing that kept it from being sold.

Music, museums and learning

The Boston Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1881 by a single Brahmin banker who paid for it himself for nearly forty years, plays in a hall of 1900 whose acoustics are the model every later hall in the Realm has tried to copy. The Museum of Fine Arts holds one of the Realm’s great encyclopaedic collections. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Venetian palace built in the Fenway to house a private collection, was robbed on the night of 18 March 1990 of thirteen works, among them paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer, by two men dressed as constables. The theft has never been solved and the empty frames hang where the pictures hung, because the founder’s will forbids any change to the arrangement of the rooms.

The Boston Public Library of 1848 was the first large free municipal library in the Realm. The city’s universities, among them Boston University, Northeastern and Boston College, and Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology across the river in Cambridge, make the region the densest concentration of higher education in the Realm.

Sport

The Red Sox play at Fenway Park, the oldest ground in the senior leagues, opened in 1912. The club sold Babe Ruth’s contract to New York after the 1919 season and did not win the Autumn Classic again for eighty-six years, a drought the city called the Curse and ended in 2004 by coming back from three games to none against New York in the pennant series. The rivalry with the Yankees is the defining rivalry in the Realm’s national game, and the city regards it as its own.

The Celtics, the basketball club, have won more championships than any other club in their league. The Bruins play ice hockey. The New England Patriots play football at Foxborough, south of the city.

The Marathon

The Boston Marathon has been run every year since 1897, from Hopkinton to Copley Square, and is the oldest annual marathon in the Realm. It is run on Boston Day, 19 October, and has been since the first race, which was organised as part of the Peace’s observance, and the race starts after the Old North bell has been rung and the names read at Bunker Hill. The city regards the combination as natural and visitors regard it as the strangest thing about Boston.

Patriots’ Day, the anniversary of Lexington and Concord on 19 April, is kept as a public holiday in the Province and nowhere else, commemorating the day the Province resisted. New Westminster finds it faintly embarrassing and has never said so in public.

Food

The city eats chowder, fried clams and lobster, baked beans in honour of a Puritan Sabbath custom that almost nobody keeps, and the pastries of the North End, where two rival Italian bakeries on the same street have been disputing the best cannoli in the Realm for three generations. It drinks a great deal of coffee, most of it from a chain of doughnut shops founded in a neighbouring town in 1950 that has more branches in the Boston region per head of population than anywhere else in the world, and it regards that fact as a matter of civic identity.

Speech and manner

The Boston accent drops its r’s after vowels, broadens its a’s and is the most recognisable regional accent in the Realm’s north. It is strongest in the Irish working-class neighbourhoods and weakest on Beacon Hill, whose own accent was once distinct and is now nearly extinct. Bostonians are reserved, argumentative, loyal and slow to accept newcomers, and the city’s manner has been described by its own writers as a cold exterior around a warm interior that nobody from outside has ever reached.

Failings

The Register states the following plainly, as the city’s own.

The Massachusett. The city was built on a peninsula emptied by epidemic, on land taken by purchase, grant and war, and in the war of 1675 it interned the Christian Native communities who had not fought on an island in its harbour through a winter in which many of them died. Captives from the war were sold as slaves through its port. It behaved for three centuries as though the people whose name the Province carries had gone.

The slave-trade money. Boston’s merchants carried enslaved people across the Atlantic, its households held them, and its merchant houses financed, insured and carried the cotton of the southern polities through the nineteenth century, building the fortunes that endowed the city’s university, hospitals, library and orchestra. The city that led the Realm’s abolitionist movement was built on the proceeds of the institution it opposed, and slavery ended in the Province by a court judgment declaring that it had never been lawful, which made compensation unnecessary and history tidier than it was.

Nativism, and its inheritance. The city received the famine Irish with contempt, burned a convent, excluded them from employment and elected a nativist government to disenfranchise them. When the Irish captured the city, the Protestant Province took its police. And a century later the Irish city received its Black citizens with the same contempt it had been shown, in housing, in employment, in policing and, in the busing years, with violence.

The lending map. The city’s Black districts were marked as hazardous in the 1930s whatever their housing, and a consortium of the city’s own banks later moved the colour line through Dorchester and Mattapan street by street under the name of an open-housing programme. The map is still legible in the ownership, wealth and life expectancy of the districts on either side of it.

The West End. In 1958 the city’s own redevelopment authority declared a neighbourhood of seven thousand people a slum, took it, cleared it and sold it for luxury towers. The residents were paid little and dispersed. It is the one great act of destruction in the city’s history that cannot be blamed on the Province.

The busing years. When a federal court ordered the city’s schools desegregated in 1974, the city’s elected school committee resisted at every stage, and crowds in the city’s Irish neighbourhoods stoned buses carrying Black children and attacked them at the school gates. The city’s schools were supervised by the court for fifteen years and the white families who could leave did.

Housing. The city cannot house the people who make it work. Its hospitals and universities recruit nurses, technicians and graduate students who cannot afford to live near them, its zoning and its neighbourhoods have restricted building for fifty years, and the Province, which could override both, has chosen not to.

Symbols

The city’s seal, adopted in 1827, shows the town as it stood on its peninsula seen across the harbour, its steeples and the domed State House on the hill behind the wharves, with two sailing vessels on the water. Around it runs the inscription Bostonia condita AD 1630, civitatis regimine donata AD 1822, “Boston founded in 1630, granted the government of a city in 1822”, and beneath it the motto Sicut patribus sit Deus nobis, “as God was with our fathers, so may He be with us”.

The inscription records a grant. The city put on its seal, five years after the event, the date on which the General Court gave it a city’s government, and it has carried the word donata on every document it has sealed since. The Register notes that New York’s seal records nothing of the kind, because New York’s government was never anybody’s to give.

The flag is the seal in blue on a white field. The city’s colours are the blue and white of the seal, and its sporting colours are nobody’s business but the clubs’.

Assessment

Boston holds the founding and not the government. It is the city in which the Realm was made law, where the war ended and the Charter was signed in the same small room, and it has been governed ever since from somewhere else: the Realm from New Westminster, the Province from the top of its own hill, and for seventy-seven years its own police by a Commissioner the city did not appoint.

The city’s government has no constitutional protection and has never had any. It rests on a statute the General Court may amend, and the General Court has amended it when it wished, most notoriously to take command of an Irish city’s police from the Irish. What protects Boston is the Province’s forbearance and the weight of the Mayor it elects, and the city’s strong mayoralty is the monument to that position: if it could not be protected by law it would be protected by the person.

What the city built with the powers it did have is considerable: the first public school, the first large free library, the first subway, the Emerald Necklace, a concentration of learning and medicine that has no equal in the Realm. What it did with them is also on the record. It demolished the West End with its own authority, resisted the desegregation of its own schools with its own committee, and has restricted the building of its own housing with its own zoning for fifty years, and nobody on the hill made it do any of those things.

The Register does not settle whether the city’s lack of any guarantee has been a burden or a discipline. The city’s own view is that the Province has used its power over Boston rarely and badly, and the Province’s that it has used it rarely and well. Both can point to 1885.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• AmRail, whose Crown Limited starts at South Station
• Province of Massachusetts Bay, whose capital this is
• The Constitution of Massachusetts Bay, which never mentions the city
• The Four-Year War, which began outside the city and ended inside it
• The Charter of Union, signed in the Old State House
• The Philadelphia negotiations, which made the settlement Boston signed
• Calvin Coolidge, and the constabulary strike of 1919
• John F. Kennedy, member for Boston Harbour
• Harvard University, across the river
• New York City, the city whose privileges its legislature cannot reach
• Province of Plymouth, which left in 1874

Categories

• Land & Landscape
• Cities and Places
• Province of Massachusetts Bay
• The Four-Year War