With November halfway over, I took this weekend to look back on what I’ve done and haven’t done this semester. For all the traveling in and out of the city, I was missing a big picture. How does Boston pitch itself to travelers? What’s it like to experience Boston as that most dreaded of all weekenders — the tourist?
I bought a ticket for on the Old Town Trolley tour and left my Boston Off the Beaten Path guide at home, which isn’t such a bad thing – it rejoins travelers to “never forget” the Holocaust and the four towers constituting the memorial at Government Center. This is a nice gesture, except the guide has already forgotten that the memorial has six towers. Even my very much on the beaten path trolley tour got this one right.
I was probably one of the few tourists who used a monthly T pass to get downtown. As I was getting increasingly frustrated waiting for the T to arrive at Harvard Avenue, I realized I would have to adjust my attitude for the day. I was a tourist, damn it. The very existence of an electrical trolley that travels through the middle of a city should fascinate me. And once I was on the T, the man next to me who spent most of the ride picking his nose should also fascinated me. I’m in a city! People in my New Jersey suburb only comport themselves like that at traffic lights.
The trolley was completely full, and my fellow tourists included a group of vocal Texans, some quiet convention-goers who still had their name tags on and an older gentleman who kept yelling up to the front about how he could get to the Kennedy Library. Our driver and conductor introduced himself as Mr. Wylie.
The early part of the tour meandered around Commercial Street and into the North End, and was essentially a primer on America’s colonial history and the prominent role Boston played. It was all fascinating stuff, if you’ve never taken a U.S. History class or watched “The Patriot.”
I was amazed at how well tour drivers maneuver trolleys around Boston streets, especially in the North End, while rattling off a history textbook. There was one minor incident when Mr. Wylie, who up until then had epitomized Mr. Rogers’ friendliness, earned my respect for the way he effortlessly veered around a large crane blocking traffic on Charles Street, cutting off two trucks in the process, so we could arrive at Stop 6 on schedule.
The tour continued from the North End into Charlestown, stopping at the U.S.S. Constitution. I’ve visited “Old Ironsides” twice before and was content to look at it from the trolley. I did learn from Mr. Wylie that the ship is still commissioned and towed around the harbor every year. I found this strangely reassuring; they say history repeats itself, and you never know when the Barbary Coast might act up again.
The tour made a brief detour into Cambridge, getting as far as Kendall Square. The driver instructed visitors who wished to see Harvard Square how to get there, and he also talked about the falsehoods on the John Harvard statue. He did not, however, add that students like to pee on it.
Much of the latter half of the tour was spent in the Back Bay. I’d been on the trolley for about an hour already, and started to feel as if I was somehow cheating Boston. We’d been driving through places I’ve walked to and from many times, and here I was sitting on a tour with out-of-towners who needed to take a moving vehicle to get from one end of the Common (Stop 6) to the other (Stop 7).
The Back Bay portion of the tour was pretty but lacking in opportunities to hop on or off the trolley. This didn’t seem to bother most of the people on the tour. To his credit, Mr. Wylie scored major points with me for pointing out the hideousness of 330 Beacon St., a building with a “modern” (read: ugly 1960s) facade that has long made me want to slit my wrists and vomit into the gaping, bleeding wounds every time I walk past it.
The rest of the tour was mostly hotel stops, as well as one at the Hard Rock Café. For all my wandering around the city, I never knew Boston had a Hard Rock Café. The tour paid for itself with that factoid alone.
Overall, I actually enjoyed touring Boston far more than I thought I would. Old Town Trolley does visitors a great service by encouraging them to frequently hop off and on at stops. Yet the tour was as striking for where it goes as where it doesn’t go. The South End, East Boston, South Boston, Chinatown, Cambridge, most of the North End, Charlestown … these areas are reduced to anecdotes, causing visitors to experience less of what we know as Boston and more of what should be termed “Boston.”
Still, as far as an introductory Boston experience goes, it ain’t bad. You could steer visiting family members in worse directions (a self-guided tour of the closed-down Combat Zone strip clubs comes to mind).
I knew my day as a tourist had officially ended when, while waiting for a train at Government Center, I was shocked to see a Boston College train with a non-electronic header at the front of the car. It’d been a year since I last saw that.
Well how about that. The T still finds ways to fascinate me, tourist persona or not.
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