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 The Back Bay is one of Boston’s most elegant and sought after neighbourhoods, home to its main shopping malls, key art museums, chic restaurants and expensive townhouses.
To look at the Back Bay today with its mix of elegant terraces set around leafy boulevards and modern high rise towers, its amazing to think that less than 150 years ago the area was a stinking swamp and mudflats along the banks of the Charles River.
Back when the settlers first arrived Boston was a small pinhead of land on the Shawmut Peninsula. The Charles River made its way around Boston harbour and the headland of the peninsula, to create a wide bay between Boston and Cambridge . This back-bay was coastal and the tidal waters would leave an exposed area of land until the 1800s, when the Charles River was dammed. By 1890 the Back Bay was filled in to create an extra 600 acres of land, more than doubling the size of the original Shawmut peninsula. What then appeared in the new Back Bay was a spectacular development by architects Arthur Gilman and Gridley James Fox Bryant, of harmonious, elegant three and four storey blocks centred around wide Parisian styled tree-lined boulevards.
Five of these broad streets run east to west along the Back Bay; Beacon Street, which runs down from Beacon Hill and along the shores of the Charles River, Marlborough Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury Street and Boylston Street. Commonwealth Ave (or Comm Ave as it’s known) is the most picturesque, with a broad pedestrian boulevard lined with trees running all the way from Massachusetts Ave to Boston Public Garden. Running parallel, Newbury St is the place for al fresco dining and sipping a coffee or cocktail in style, with a number of upmarket restaurants and exclusive boutiques as well as a few contemporary art galleries. Likewise Boylston Street is a centre for shopping, albeit on a much larger scale with Boston’s two main shopping malls Copley Place and the Prudential Center .
At the western end of the area linking Franklin Park to Boston Common , is the Back Bay Fens known as Boston’s Emerald Necklace. This 1,100 acre chain of decorative Lakeland and greenery was landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, who was also responsible for designing New York’s Central Park. When the Fenway was developed in the late 19th century it rivalled Beacon Hill as Boston’s most illustrious neighbourhood. Isabella Stewart Gardner was one socialite who moved from the Hill to Fenway, bringing her huge art collection with her, which is today housed in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum . Close by is Boston’s excellent Museum of Fine Art , built in 1909 and renowned as having the largest collection of Monet’s outside Paris and an unrivalled collection of 19th century American art works. On the opposite side of the Fens is another of Boston’s proud cultural icons, Fenway Park , home to the Boston Red Sox baseball team.
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