There and back again

The nice thing about the North End – the nicest for me, anyway, on a sleepy Saturday afternoon – is that it’s a superb enclave for exploring and doesn’t require the commuter rail.

I left at noon with my roommate James. Our itinerary was mercifully brief: lunch at Galleria Umberto.

Umberto’s offers one of the best deals in the city. The restaurant only opens for lunch, and the menu refuses to define when “lunch” is, but you’ll be fine if you show up between 12 and 2:30 p.m.

A slice of pizza and a Coke cost two bucks and change. I recommend getting more than one slice. The restaurant, located at 289 Hanover St., is an unassuming hole in the wall from the outside. Inside, scads of locals queue up in a line that typically spills out the door. Don’t be put off by this; the wait is worth it. You can kill time with friends by guessing the difference between how much cash Umberto’s pulls in and how much cash the IRS thinks it pulls in.

After Umberto’s, I encountered a travel block. I’d been to the North End many times. I’m sure my eight or so regular readers have been to the North End many times. And I don’t think James wanted to check out Paul Revere’s house or pose with a statue of St. Francis.

What more could I do? And for that matter, what more could I say? The North End is a great neighborhood, one I’d love to live in or at least work near, so I can eat Umberto’s every day. Still, I wasn’t in the mood to walk around more or come up with 10 different ways to explain how the North End has retained its original character. Seriously, the closest the North End has ever come to selling out is when St. Stephen’s Church switched from Unitarianism to Catholicism in 1862.

So we left the North End, heading still north, into Charlestown. Again, our itinerary was daringly short. This time, however, we had the more admirable goal of a historic war site instead of pizza. (James insists that pizza is more important.)

We walked across the rusty-looking Charlestown Bridge. A little in the distance we could see the Bunker Hill Monument. The large obelisk peering over the squat houses made for an easy point to walk toward, so we meandered in that general direction while keeping an eye out for other places of interest in Charlestown. James spotted an eye-catching Gothic church on Warren Street.

St. Mary’s was built in 1887. I’ve been in some of the older churches downtown, but I think that St. Mary’s is arguably the most beautiful church in the area. We walked in and were blasted with a swell of organ music. It was a little after 3 p.m. and nobody except the organist had yet arrived for the four o’clock Mass.

I stood in a trance for at least 10 minutes, listening to the music and occasionally looking up at the carved cherubs lining the walls. I turned from the altar and back toward the pipe organ on the second floor over the entryway. The organist, unaware of our presence, was executing frenzied Baroque runs. James called the disquieting scene apocalyptic. I was too awestruck to disagree.

I’ve been to old synagogues in various countries, and – with due apologies to the religion of my fathers – it just doesn’t compare. Since medieval times, the Church might have gotten away from much of Christ’s simplicity, but I’ll be damned if Christians aren’t the best at fostering an esoteric, transcendent experience.

We left St. Mary’s in silence and continued to the Bunker Hill Monument. James asked why there was a statue of Zorro in front of the monument. In fact, it’s a statue of Colonel William Prescott, who commanded the troops at Breed’s Hill (yes, the battle occurred there, not on Bunker Hill) and to whom the saying “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” is attributed. Still, when I looked at the statue’s cocked head, swaggering step, silly hat … Good God, it was Zorro.

The monument is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and visitors can climb the 294 steps to the top of the obelisk. Somewhere around step 125, I realized that three slices of pizza and a panzarotti for lunch was a bad, bad idea. I stopped to stave off a heart attack, lying to James that it was so I could write down some notes. I hoped that the fit 40-somethings who breezed past me couldn’t hear my labored, porno-like panting.

One hundred and threescore steps later, I made it to the top. My heart was pounding. I got a great view of fog rolling in, obstructing the city with a white waistband across the skyscrapers’ midsections.

I was sweating heavily, and each thump from my heart sounded like my body telling me, “You need to get back into shape. I hope you enjoyed that panzarotti, tubbo.”

Two white-haired men appeared at the top. I was happy that they were panting harder than I was, but also embarrassed – did the kind people already at the top also look at me with the same degree of cardiac concern when I summited?

The fog soon wholly obstructed the view of the city. And then we walked back down.

I sat on a bench right outside the obelisk and shot a vertiginous look at the top. Panting notwithstanding, I felt a real sense of accomplishment about doing such a proactive tourist attraction.

James and I spent another five minutes speaking a gibberish Slavic language to passing tourists, periodically throwing in an English word like “rollerblades.”

We’d gone beyond the North End, climbed almost 300 steps and reached the end of the Freedom Trail. It was time for a nap.