POST ROAD HISTORY
The original Post
Road went through Hartford, Springfield and Worcester MA, and into Boston.
The “Post Road” originally went from New Haven to Hartford.
[Long list I wrote down of the order of
towns on the three separate Post Road paths- the ‘Lower’, ‘Middle’, and
‘Upper’.]
[Sketch of 1775 map of Boston environs: the “Shawmut
Peninsula”, significance of the landmass. “Boston Neck” –Orange St—is the
connection to the mainland.] Puritans settled on the peninsula for the
excellent spring water. (Springs where the Old State House and King’s Chapel
stand today.)
The main library. Busts with the irises dug out. Beautiful
reading room with hunching green lamps all down its length, vaulted ceiling. At
the old reading tables, a vinegar smell in the skin-oils trapped in the wood. A
graceful place to be, high in the air above the city streets, looking out onto
a courtyard, the smell of books.
1620- The Mayflower
lands at Plymouth. Governor John Carver.
The Royal Governor of New York during the time of the first
mail carrier was Francis Lovelace, and he designated that the mail delivery
operation be carried out. (John Winthrop was the governor in Connecticut at
this time.) The idea of a royal mail-carrying route actually belonged to King
Charles II.
The first mail in America was dispatched from NYC on Jan 22, 1673, and appeared in Boston on or about February 5th.
(I find the spot where the mail arrives, the old newspaper building). The mail
would have been dispatched on Jan 1, but the unknown rider was held up waiting
for dispatches from Albany, New York. Lovelace stipulated that the rider should
be “a stout fellow, active and indefatigable, and sworn as to his fidelity.”
(He went by way of Hartford.) Pequot Indians made travel dangerous through
these forested reaches. Shortly after the rider’s journey, the mail was forced
to stop for 2 years on account of King Philip’s War. Nov. 5, 1639: Order of the
General Court of Mass.
“Richard Fairbanks
his House in Boston” Site of the old
Globe office.
--I think of Iraq. Who is excited for Iraq’s threshold of
‘Liberty’? Last night, Bush announced the “surge”: 21,500 more troops in Iraq,
for starters.
--What’s “the news”? What’s truly new? What transpires. Qui
transtulit. Qui sustinet. (‘Novels give us the news.’ About how we live.)
January 6, 1868: despite great protest by Roxbury residents,
Roxbury is annexed to Boston. (Like Brooklyn to NYC: date??)
Capt. Nathaniel Urig, visiting Boston in 1710: “The Neck of
Land betwixt the city and country is about forty yards broad, and so low that
the spring tides sometimes wash the road, which might, with little charge, be
made so strong as not to be forced, there being no way of coming at [Boston] by
land but over the Neck.” (Travel can be a bitch.)
**
I walk around Boston
past nightfall, eventually I go wait in a diner for the first Amtrak train of
the morning, back to New Haven.
Nice to be in a big city, a wintery one. Boston seal: ‘SICUT
PATRIBUS SIT DEUS NOBIS’. I’m wearing the Ace bandage as tight as it will go
and taking pain relievers, but it seems like a good night’s sleep took all the
little points of ache out of my back.
The map kiosks around downtown are printed with the motto:
“BOSTON: America’s Walking City”.
Across the Charles: the obelisk commemorating the Battle of
Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775. The patriot army of irregulars ran out of ammo
defending the hill, but it was a courageous stand and very costly for the
British.
(At 12:30pm I start the walk from the outskirts back into
Boston.) Forest Hills: ‘You are at the transportation center of the streetcar
suburbs.’
In the 1630s Puritan settlers arrived in this area, and they
constructed the toll road from Roxbury to Dedham.
-The SMELLS when you move to different terrain.
-The cool earthiness of Rhode Island.
-The particular chemical cocktail as you approach Boston.
-The gentle complexity of downtown: smells of human grease
and street grit.
Jamaica Plain: graffitti-style ads for real products, like
Axe Deodorant. New, quaint, small-scale housing projects.
John F. Eliot Square: (b. 1604, d. 1690)
“On this hill the Puritans in Roxbury built their first
meetinghouse, in 1632.” Eliot was known as ‘Apostle to the Indians’: in 1663 he
translated the entire Bible into Massachussetts Algonquin (the language of the
people of Neponset).He was the second minister of the First Church in Roxbury.
(Seems like a fascinating story, converting Indians. How did he approach the
philosophical problems of holy writ translation?)
April 18, 1775: William Dawes sets out from the Meeting
House Hill Common, riding to Lexington and Concord, at the same time Paul
Revere was riding from Charlestown. This Town Common was occupied by patriots
as part of the defense of Boston. The grand 1804 church now standing on this
common is the fifth one to occupy this spot. It had been one of only three
churches in Puritan Massachussetts to admit Indians as members. Speaking of
converts: Near the Common, Washington Square intersects El-Hajj Malike
El-Shabazz Boulevard. As a teenager, Malcolm X lived in the Dudley neighborhood
of Roxbury. He made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964. There are beautiful,
decayed 19th century buildings boarded up here. It’s a distinctively
black shopping thoroughfare. I’ve been seeing the spines of churches and other
large buildings on the horizon way out to the east.
A big ‘T’ distaster happened the day before I arrived. Human
error. Several crewmen were killed. –In the ‘Chinatown’ area the streets have
New York City streetnames. (There was some reason for this.) The information
kiosks all have big graphics that say “BOSTON:
America’s Walking City”.
In the late 1700s, Revolutionary War patriots began to
settle along Washington Street south of what is now East Berkeley Street.
(Recall: in July 1824 the single avenue of Washington was consitituted out of
all the main boulevards.)
1801: Charles Bulfinch lays out the streetplan for the South
End. (George Washington had recently made a tour through the area.) This region
was built-up in the mid-19th century. In the 1830s-1850s, the city
filled in the tidal flats on either side of the peninsular neck. These flats
were full of oysters, and the oysters were used for paving. In the 1870s, with
the rise of the streetcar, most of the well-to-do left this area and moved to
the Back Bay. An immigrant population moved in here. By 1855, there were 55,000
Irish in Boston, because of the famine. In the 60s, yuppies took over the old
Victorian houses.
ULTRA DIAMONDS
-Thriving 2-story Borders
across the street from the old Ticknor and Fields. The Borders has just
ousted a Barnes and Noble, as if to provide here a perfect concrete example of
the banality of ‘alternatives’ and ‘choice’ offered by modern chain retailers.
Spring Lane. [Sketch of The Old South Meeting House; Old
State House.]
“Rich’d Fairbanks,
his house in Boston is the place appointed for all the letters and hee is to
take care that they bee delivered or sent according to their directions.” Order
of the General Court, November 5, 1639. This plaque, by the original site
of the Globe office, was placed in
1924.
The Old State House: the Declaration of Independence was
read from the east balcony on July 18th.
I watch junior high hockey pregame warm-up at Sterrit Rink
(Suffolk University). It’s Winthrop vs. Revere, very Boston school names. The
hockey action is pretty cool to see this close up, the swerves on the ice.
Community roundtable meeting (tenant association?) visible
from the ground-floor window of a building in the Concord Housing Projects;
there’s Dunkin Donuts pastries and coffee in the middle of the table.
“The largest solar system model east of Peoria, Illinois” is
distributed through the malls and public buildings of Boston and its suburbs,
Newton, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain. The Sun is located in the Hayden Planetarium.
Here in the food court at South Street Station, on a pedestal, is the model of
Jupiter, in textured bronze showing its bands of cloud in relief. It’s about
one and a half feet in diameter. “Visit all 9 planets and experience the
awesome vastness of space!” I like this. Note: the giant planets orbiting the
sun farther out from Earth protected the fragile blossoming of life, because
they attracted away the giant intergalactic debris that could have smothered,
knocked around, disrupted Earth.
12 am, 40 degrees, I’m wandering the south half of the
Freedom Trail. The first skyscraper in Boston is the 1911 tower addition on top
of the 1847 Greek Revival Customs House on State Street. Today, the clock up
there is lit colorfully.
Winthrop’s daughter Ann (Pollard) was ten years old when she
came over with him. They landed near Prince Street. She later described the
landing site as having been “very uneven, abounding in small hollows and
swamps, covered with blueberries and other bushes.”
The old South Street Diner: the only place downtown to eat late
at night, it seems. A young waitress with a black and white tattoo up the
inside of her pale left arm. “It’s an octopus strangling a swan. …It’s…I have
this whole thing,” she tells me. I play ‘Going Back to Cali’ by B.I.G. on the
jukebox at my right, as I eat my eggs, toast and coffee.
I take the 6:05 (Amtrak #95) back to New Haven, but I’m
asleep for the ride and the sunrise, even with the cup of coffee on the floor
by my feet. Shooting pain in my knee makes it hard to get into a good position
to rest in.
MIGRATING: I get a thrill whenever I see a backpacker
wandering in the city, in the subway, or crouching in a train station or on the
train next to their gear, opening a book, face sharpened and eyes slightly
fuzzy with the effort of the day’s forward motion. I’m ready to plunge right
back into a book again, a book about walking forward where I can walk forward
vicariously. (There’s always somebody somewhere stomping toward the horizon.)
Over the landbridge from Siberia into the New World, following game herds and
heartsickness or religious mystery.
**End
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