BOSTON
Now let us cross the Atlantic, and note what has been effected at Boston and New York.
The former—the picturesque old-world capital of the State of Massachusetts, with its population of over a million—is familiarised to every schoolboy who knows anything of history and the War of Independence, with the city where the tea was thrown into the harbour by Colonials disguised as Mohawks, an incident that indirectly brought about the creation of the United States. It is a city also sacred to literati as being the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is so old-fashioned—or so excessively up-to-date, whichever you please—that, until recently, neither cabs, omnibuses, tubes, or underground railways were to be found within its boundaries. What with the uneven surface and the labyrinth of the streets, Boston is picturesque in spite of itself, and its old buildings emphasize this. There are the two New England meeting-houses. The “Old South” has been proudly preserved in its ancient state, although the ground on which it stands is almost as valuable as that in the City of London. Architecturally, it is a brick barn, with a pretentiously ugly steeple. “Old North” has an equally plain body, but from its steeple, as a tablet affixed to it sets forth, “the signal lantern of Paul Revere warned the country of the march of the British troops to Lexington and Concord.” King’s Chapel, another ecclesiastical antiquity of Boston, was, for a quarter of a century after 1749, the place of worship of the official British colony, and accordingly became an eyesore to the earnest puritanical Bostonians.
But Boston cannot, like Charlestown, South Carolina, boast of a St. Michael’s Church, famous for its beautiful steeple, so greatly resembling that of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields as to suggest that probably they were both designed by the same architect, Gibbs, one of Wren’s pupils.
In the Act passed by the State Legislature authorising the construction of the Boston subway, it was stipulated that its length should be some five miles, and its total cost not more than one and a half million pounds sterling.
The construction of the subway was begun at the Public Gardens, where an incline, a hundred yards long, carries the surface lines into the tunnel, passing under the edge of Boston Common to Tremont Street. It is joined by a branch subway from Pleasant Street, where another incline leads to the surface. From this junction the subway proceeds beneath the Tremont Street side of the Common to Park Street, which is the central point of the system. Thence it is carried directly beneath Tremont Street to Scollay Square, and by means of a bifurcation under Hanover Street on the one hand and Cornhill on the other to a junction under Washington Street. The tunnel continues under Washington Street to Haymarket Square, and immediately rises by an incline to Causeway Street, where it connects with both the surface and the elevated lines. Wherever possible, the subway was carried out by open excavations, and, as in the Paris Métropolitain, by the old-fashioned “cut and cover” method. The roof of the tunnel is generally about three feet below the surface, though in some places considerably lower. At and near the stations the subway sides are lined with white glazed bricks, whitewash being used elsewhere.
There are five stations in the Boston shallow underground, viz. at Boylston Street, Park Street, Adams Square, Scollay Square, and Haymarket Square. These are approached by short stairways, protected from the weather by neat clock-surmounted kiosks, or small iron structures, in shape resembling our cab shelters, and placed at convenient points, either on the sidewalks or—where there is sufficient width—in the centre of the
FIG. 23. BOSTON SUBWAY, SHOWING ENTRANCE AT THE PUBLIC GARDENS