Massachusetts – Boston

Boston, Massachusetts, USA by Gautam Khattak

Last updated: January 25, 2013

Disclaimer: These are notes I’ve written or gathered from various sources. I have not experienced all things in this document nor is it intended to be a definitive guide.

General Tips

Currency: US Dollar (USD)

Tipping:

Tipping is pretty standard as in the rest of the US: On restaurant bills, tip 15-20% depending on service. Tip valet parkers $3 to $4 and taxi’s $1-2.

Transportation

Unless you’re planning a lot of travel outside the city there’s no real need to rent a car. Boston is a walking city. You can get taxis of course but it’s not like New York or Hong Kong, there aren’t cabs everywhere unless you’re downtown and the prices are more steep especially after the subway shuts down.

Are you from out of town? Are you planning on driving? Good luck!!! Seriously we’re called Mass-holes for a reason, the drivers are very aggressive. And even if you think you can handle it, the streets in Boston have very little logic or signage so it’s a stressful place to figure out where you are and how to get anywhere. Oh and I haven’t even mentioned the traffic! Drive into the city, park the car and then figure out the T. If you venture outside the city to the other towns or NH or the beach, then a car is a must.

The MBTA or otherwise known as the ‘T’ is the subway system and the easiest way to get to/from and around the city. The T is safe and ‘clean’, but a little slow on some lines. It services virtually every neighborhood in Boston, Cambridge and the nearby suburbs. You cannot pay cash on the T, so you’ll have to buy a pass (called a CharlieCard or CharlieTicket) at a T stop or convenience store. Rides are ~$1.70 apiece regardless of the destination. Last I checked the subway shuts down after midnight.

Duck Tour of Boston
A guided tour of Boston which gives guests a historical overview of Boston. This tour is probably the best way to see the most number of sites in Boston in the shortest amount of time. In 90 minutes you will see Newbury Street, the USS Constitution, the Charles River (yes your tour ‘bus’ floats!), the finish line of the Boston Marathon, famous cemeteries, and the Boston Commons all while getting a humorous history lesson of the city.

Logan International Airport is the Airport in Boston (BOS). Other close by alternatives are in Manchester, NH (MHT) and Providence Road Island’s TF Green Airport (PVD). (Southwest and Jet Blue are alternative budget airlines (you won’t find them as options on Travelocity, Orbits, Expedia) and they fly into these satellite airports. Depending on your flight time it may be better to fly into these alternatives to avoid Boston’s gridlock traffic.

Sites to see in Boston

These activities range from full day events to one hour experiences.

Note: Every title below is a link to their website

Freedom Trail through historic Boston
A 3-mile tour of the sites of the American Revolution, the Freedom Trail is a crash course in history. There are 16 sites beginning at the Boston Common and ending at the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown; depending on how many sites you are planning on visiting , the walk can take anywhere from an aerobic 90 minutes to a leisurely half day. Trail walks are led by National Park Service rangers and begin at the Boston National Historic Park Visitor Center at 15 State Street. Self-guided tour maps are available at the Visitor Information Center on the Tremont Street side of the Boston Commons.

GK Editorial: This pretty much covers all the sites. I’ve never done a guided tour and you can get the Freedom Trail App for your phone although the reviews say it’s pretty horrible!

👍Faneuil Hall
Phone: 617/635-3105
Faneuil Hall was originally erected in 1742 to serve as both a place for town meetings and a public market. Inside are the murals of Webster’s Reply to Hayne, Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington at Dorchester Heights, and dozens of other paintings of famous Americans. Just across the way from Faneuil Hall is Quincy Market, also called Faneuil Hall Marketplace. It is now a modern day shopping center and international food court with a historical flare.

The New England Holocaust Memorial – http://nehm.org/intro.html

👍 Located right outside Faneuil Hall and the North Station T stop. The New England Holocaust Memorial was built to foster memory of and reflection on one of the great tragedies of our time, the Holocaust (Shoah). The effort was begun by a group of survivors of Nazi concentration camps who have found new homes and new lives in the Boston area. This memorial is outdoors, there is no entrance or fee. You spend as much time as you chose to.

The design utilizes uniquely powerful symbols of the Holocaust. The Memorial features six luminous glass towers, each 54 feet high each one over a dark chamber which carries the name of one of the principal Nazi death camps. Smoke rises from charred embers at the bottom of these chambers. Six million numbers are etched in glass, suggesting the infamous tattooed numbers and ghostly ledgers of the Nazi bureaucracy. The six towers recall the six main death camps, the six million Jews who died, or a menorah of memorial candles.

👍 The North End
The North End, a warren of small streets on the northeast side of the Central Artery, is almost entirely a creation of the late 19th century, when brick tenements began to fill up with European immigrants — first the Irish, then Central European Jews, then the Portuguese, and finally the Italians. For more than 60 years the North End attracted an Italian population base, and today the area is a thriving mix of Mediterranean verve, volubility, and Roman Catholicism. This is Boston’s haven for Italian restaurants, groceries, bakeries, boccie courts, churches, social clubs, cafe and soccer games. July and August are highlighted by a series of street festivals honoring various saints. On or around Hanover Street is a good place to start looking for restaurants but you’ll pay for the location. It’s also where Mike’s Pastry’s is (a MUST stop).

👍 Boston Commons/Public Gardens
Phone: 617/635-4505
America’s first public garden is an oasis in Boston’s overbuilt downtown. Monuments include the first statue of George Washington on horseback; one of Edward Everett Hale, author of “The Man Without a Country”; and of course, Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack of the famous children’s book “Make Way for Ducklings,” which is set in the Public Garden. In spring and summer, intricate floral patterns and the blazing colors of hundreds of flowers brighten the garden’s walkways, while the scent of sweet blossoms greets wanderers. Trees and plants include magnolia, crab apple, dogwood, Japanese pagoda, tulips and roses.

GK Editorial: This is pretty weather specific. You can probably skip this in the winter time unless you want to go ice skating on Frog Pond.

👍 Shopping/Eating on Newbury Street
Eight-block-long Newbury Street has been compared to New York’s 5th Avenue, and certainly this is the city’s poshest shopping area, with branches of Chanel, Brooks Brothers, Armani, Burberry, and other top names in fashion. But here the pricey boutiques are more intimate than grand, and people actually live above the trendy restaurants and hair salons. Check out the famous faces in the mural overlooking the public parking lot between Dartmouth and Exeter streets. Toward the Mass Ave. end, cafes proliferate and the stores get funkier, ending with Newbury Comics, Virgin Megastore, and the hipsters’ housewares and clothing store, Urban Outfitters.

👍 Harvard Square
Gaggles of students, street musicians — known as buskers — homeless people, end-of-the-world preachers, and political-cause proponents make for a nonstop pedestrian flow at this most celebrated of Cambridge crossroads. Harvard Square is where Massachusetts Avenue, coming from Boston, turns and widens into a triangle broad enough to accommodate a brick peninsula. Sharing the peninsula is a local institution, the Out-of-Town newsstand. Harvard Square is bordered on two sides by banks, restaurants, and shops and on the third by Harvard University.

👍 Fenway Park
617/267-1700 – Box Office
617/267-8661 – Recorded Information
617/236-6666 – Tours
Home of the World Champion Red Sox!!! Fenway may be one of the smallest parks in the major leagues (capacity almost 35,000), but it’s one of the most loved, despite its oddball dimensions and the looming left-field wall, otherwise known as the Green Monster. It was built in 1912 and it still has a real-grass field. If the Red Sox are not in town you can take an awesome behind the scenes tour of the stadium

Esplanade
At the northern end of Charles Street is one of several footbridges crossing Storrow Drive to the Esplanade and the Hatch Memorial Shell. The free concerts the Boston Pops gives here in summer include its immensely popular televised Fourth of July show. For the almost nightly entertainment throughout the rest of the summer, Bostonians haul lawn chairs and blankets to the lawn in front of the shell; bring a picnic basket, find an empty spot — no mean feat, so come early — and you’ll feel right at home. The green is home port to the fleet of small sailboats that dot the Charles River Basin; they belong to Community Boating. Here, too, is the turn-of-the-20th-century Union Boat Club Boathouse, headquarters for the country’s oldest private rowing club. On the 4th of July this is the place to be, however it becomes crowded very early in the day.

JFK Library
The spectacular Kennedy Library is a must-see for anyone interested in the Kennedy’s. You will see de-classified memos from the Kennedy administration.

Trolley Tour of Boston
A hop on and off guided tour of Boston which allows guests to step off the trolley and spend time at various historic sights of Boston.

Cheers Bar & Restaurant (Bull & Finch pub)
The bar and restaurant which inspired the hit NBC show featuring Sam Malone, Cliff Clavine, and Nooooorm!!!! But, keep in mind that the original Cheers bar looks nothing like the TV-set. It is a full working restaurant with extensive gift shops. There’s also a replica in Faneuil Hall.

GK Editorial: This is a super touristy thing to go see…but if you don’t care about the TV show (I bet a lot less people even know about it these days) don’t bother because it’s not all that exciting.,,

Boston Symphony Hall
One of the finest orchestras on the planet for nearly a century in the globally renowned acoustics of Symphony Hall.

Sailing on the Charles River
Enjoy the spectacular Boston and Cambridge skylines while cruising the beautiful Charles River.

USS Constitution
Phone: 617/242-5670
Better known as “Old Ironsides,” the USS Constitution rides proudly at anchor in her berth at the Charlestown Navy Yard. The oldest commissioned ship in the U.S. fleet is a battlewagon of the old school, of the days of “wooden ships and iron men” — when she and her crew of 200 succeeded at the perilous task of asserting the sovereignty of an improbable new nation.

Paul Revere’s House – The home was built about 1680 on the site of the former parsonage of the Second Church of Boston. Increase Mather, the Minister of the Second Church, and his family (including his son, Cotton Mather) occupied this parsonage from 1670 until it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1676. A large and fashionable new home was built at the same location about four years later.

Boston Harbor Cruises & Whale Watching – http://www.bostonharborcruises.com/

Check to see what seasons are best for Whale Watching but if the weather is good this may be a fun thing to do.

Museums

👍 Museum of Fine Arts – http://www.mfa.org

👍 Museum of Science
Phone: 617/723-2500
With 15-ft lightning bolts in the Theater of Electricity and a 20-ft-high Tyrannosaurus rex model, this is just the place to ignite any child’s Jurassic spark. More than 500 exhibits cover astronomy, astrophysics, anthropology, progress in medicine, computers, the organic and inorganic earth sciences, and much more.

GK Editorial: I love coming here but it might be the nostalgia

👍 New England Aquarium
Phone: 617/973-5277 whale-watching information
More than just another pretty fish, this aquarium challenges you to really imagine life under (and around) the sea. Seals bark outside the West Wing, its glass-and-steel exterior constructed to mimic fish scales. Inside the main facility, you can see penguins, jellyfish, sea otters, a variety of sharks, and other exotic sea creatures — more than 2,000 species in all — some of which make their home in the aquarium’s four-story, 200,000-gallon ocean reef tank, one of the largest of its kind in the world. Ramps winding around the tank lead to the top level and allow you to view the inhabitants from many vantage points. Don’t miss the five-times-a-day feedings; the procedure lasts nearly an hour and takes divers 24 ft into the tank.

GK Editorial: I love coming here but I love aquariums

Boston Children’s Museum – http://www.bostonkids.org/

Less known sites

Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) on Fan Pier. http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/onview/
GK Editorial: I really liked this place but it always depends on what the exhibits are. Fan Pier is pretty nice to walk around since they’ve redone it.

👍 Mary Baker Eddy Library at the Christian Science Church has the “Mapparium” – http://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/exhibits/mapparium

GK Editorial: I really liked the Mapparium! I didn’t know about it until after I left Boston and was looking for new things to do but so happy I learned about this place. The viewings are very limited in number so I think you have to book in advance.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: http://www.gardnermuseum.org/
GK Editorial: Never been but I’m told it provides a uniquely Boston experience

African Meeting House on Beacon Hill: http://www.afroammuseum.org/afmbeaconhill.htm

GK Editorial: Never been

Restaurants

Boston has a lot of little Mom and Pop Italian shops…you can’t really go wrong with an Italian sub with pickles from anywhere (Quizno’s, Subway, D’Angelo’s and the like don’t count!!!) or a Cheese Steak (with mushrooms).

GK Editorial: It’s very hard for me to keep up on restaurants in Boston since I haven’t lived there in so long so it’s best to do some searching online. To be honest, the list below is more what I am nostalgic for and a local would have a totally different advice to give you. But walking down Faneuil Hall, the North End and Newbury Street is a must to get some grub here and there.

Boston Magazine – The 50 Best Restaurants of 2012

👍 Famous Atlantic Fish Company on Boylston (in Back Bay near Newbury Street) is one of my favorite restaurants but its pretty pricy. I love the Blackened/Cajun Swordfish

Legal Sea Foods is a very good and fairly priced seafood chain restaurant all over New England especially for visitors.

Faneuil Hall has a lot of great restaurants to grab a quick bite or mix and match (Clam Chowder in Bread Bowl with some Lobster Mac & Cheese!). They also have a few Todd English Restaurant’s in the area that are good to check out.

👍 Pizzeria Regina – Best Pizza in Boston! It’s all over the place now (like seriously it’s in every mall) but the original one is in the North End and is the best hence the hour long line. The one at Faneuil hall is good too if you don’t want to stand outside in the cold for the original. So I guess since you can get it everywhere just keep your eyes out for it…unless you’re in the North End you probably don’t have to make the special trip for it unless you’re obsessed with Pizza like I am.

👍 Mike’s Pastry’s – If you haven’t gone to Mike’s in the North End for a Cannoli you haven’t lived.

300 Hanover Street

Boston, MA 02113
(617) 742-3050

Papa Gino’s – Locals may hate me for putting this chain restaurant on here, but this is my favorite pizza on the planet (besides Regina’s). It’s just easily available wherever in New England and the Pepperoni pizza is phenomenal.

Michael’s Harborside – http://michaelsharborside.com/

Great Seafood restaurant on the water in Newbury Port

Bisuteki – My favorite Japanese Steak House. To be honest the Teppanyaki has gone done from like 15 years ago because they changed up the vegetables. But you wouldn’t know that so it won’t matter to you! This is still my favorite one in the world because they use Ginger Butter (I’ve asked at hundreds of others all over the world and no one else uses it). When you get rice, make sure you ask them to put some ginger butter on top of the rice. Seriously…it’s worth the future heart attack.

There are two locations (they seemed to split off ownership but the food is the same) one in Cambridge and one in Revere:

Kelly’s Roast Beef – If you’ve eaten Arby’s you’ll want to kick yourself in the face for thinking that was roast beef. THIS is roast beef. Get it with the sauce…or don’t bother living. The Shrimp plate and lobster rolls are good too and so are the fries.

Sample Itinerary

Okay I’ll throw down some usual tours I’ve given of the city. It used to be historical but not it’s more centered around what food cravings I have! If you want more historical, follow the Freedom Trail itinerary

Day 1 – Beantown!

Start off at Faneuil Hall (Take T the train to North Station)
Get out and see the six towers of the Holocaust Memorial (10-20 Minute –obviously depending on personal impact)
Walk around the corner into the Faneuil Hall area and grab some food in the food court (1-2 hours) or at one of the Todd English restaurants or wait til you get to the North End for some amazing Italian food (check out the area on or near Hanover Street.
Walk through the North End and find Mike’s Pastries…(30 minutes)
Keep going and maybe come across Regina’s come over through Beacon Hill (known for its gas-lit streets and brick sidewalks) and find yourself at Beacon Street at the beginning of the Boston Commons.
- Walk through the Commons (Stay to the right (North) and you’ll see the Bull & Finch (Cheers) on Beacon Street. Stop in for a Pint (don’t bother)
- Okay so now you’re through the Commons and Public Gardens
- Probably 20 minutes but could be 1-2 hours in the Public Gardens if its Spring/Summer
- All this walking could be skipped if its Winter time and you could jump on the T and head to Back Bay (South Station and/or Copley T station)
At the end (but middle) of the Boston Public Gardens is Newbury Street. You’re now in the Back Bay area (South Station T stop on the Orange Line). Walk there to see one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the US. The beginning is sparse but when you go up a few blocks it starts to get busier with high end shops, boutiques, café’s. This is awesome in the Fall! (1-2 hours)
When you get to Clarendon Street you can pop over to the left to see Copley Square and the Trinity Church and John Hancock Tower. (15 minutes)
- You can go to the John Hancock Observation deck (hour)
- Then go back to Newbury street
If you’re not exhausted, keep going to the Mapparium at the Christian Science Center (have tickets booked in advance) (1 hour)
Head to Fenway Park for a tour of the greatest ballpark for the greatest baseball team in the world. No I’m serious (1-2 hours)
Go back to Back Bay/Copley for some Atlantic Fish Company – you’ve earned it but if you can’t afford it, go to the Prudential mall (also back bay) for some Legal Sea foods

Day 2 Museums and Cambridge!

Check out the Museum of Science, Arts or the Aquarium (2-4 hours) or all of them
Head over to Harvard Square in the afternoon/evening to take a stroll
- Grab some pints at a pub
- Get into some fights with some Harvard kids.
Could also check out MIT while you’re over in Cambridge

Day 3 Road trip!

Depending on the season go up to the fishing villages to stuff your face and pretend you’re George Clooney reenacting the Perfect Storm
Could go to Kittery Maine to check out the Outlet shops (only 1 hour from Boston)
It’s beach season? Go to Cape Cod (8 hours due to traffic)
It’s Autumn? The Kancamagus Highway is calling!

Places to visit outside Boston

This is tough because there is SO much to see outside the city. Some quick honorable mentions:

Go for a drive in the fishing villages of Newburyport, Gloucester and Rockport. See an oyster house and stop for some oysters, then make a stop at the next clam shack you see…don’t forget to get some clam chowder to help put it all down.

Salem, Massachusetts – http://www.salem.org/

Visit the site of the small tough infamous for the Salem Witch Trials, as well as Nathaniel’s House of the Seven Gables. There are various museums and tributes and Wiccan shops

Links about Gloucester

Things to do in Gloucester
Yahoo’s Things to do in Gloucester
Hammond Castle – in Gloucester – http://www.hammondcastle.org/

Antiquing in Essex – http://www.wickedlocal.com/goodlife/good_times/x473074732

Head to the beaches in Cape Cod in the summer time or go see the leaves changing in New Hampshire in the fall.

Kancamagus Highway – http://www.kancamagushighway.com/ – 34 mile stretch of scenic driving through the backroads of New England. Also check out: http://gonewengland.about.com/od/nhsightseeing/a/aakancamagus.htm

Cape Cod – http://www.capecodchamber.org/ or http://www.capeguide.com/ – Beaches and small beach towns.

Martha’s Vineyard – Martha’s Vineyard is an island located south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, known for being an affluent summer colony. Often called just “The Vineyard,” the island has a land area of 100 square miles and a very beachy, small town feel. Warning, getting here is a bit of a project.

GK Editorial: There’s a lot of beach alternatives with a lot less traffic than the Cape located in Maine.

Casino’s (located in Connecticut)

Useful Links