The Old Coast Road: From Boston to PlymouthRothery, Agnes
History
The Old Coast Road: From Boston to Plymouth
Rothery, Agnes
Norfolk County (Mass.) -- Description and travel; Plymouth County (Mass.) -- Description and travel; South Shore (Mass. : Coast)
While we are still on Beacon Hill we can look out, not only upon the
past, but upon the future. Those white domes and pillars gleaming like
Greek temples across the blue Charles, are the new buildings of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and surely Greek temples were
never lovelier, nor dedicated to more earnest pursuit of things not
mundane. Quite as beautiful and quite as Grecian as the Technology
buildings is the noble marble group of the School of Medicine of Harvard
University, out by the Fenlands--that section of the city which is
rapidly becoming a students' quarter, with its Simmons College, the New
England Conservatory of Music, art schools, gymnasiums, private and
technical schools of all descriptions, and its body of over 12,000
students. Harvard is, of course, across the river in Cambridge, and
preparatory schools and colleges dot the suburbs in every direction,
upholding the cultural traditions of a city which has proved itself
peculiarly fitted to educational interests.
All this time we have, like _bona-fide_ Bostonians, stayed on Beacon
Hill, and merely looked out at the rest of the city. And perhaps this is
as typical a thing as we could have done. Beacon Hill was the center of
original Boston, when the Back Bay was merely a marsh, and long after
the marsh was filled in and streets were laid out and handsome
residences lined them, Beacon Hill looked down scornfully at the new
section and murmured that it was built upon the discarded hoopskirts and
umbrellas of the true Bostonians. Even when almost every one was crowded
off the Hill and the Back Bay became the more aristocratic section of
the two, there were still enough of the original inhabitants left to
scorn these upstart social pretensions. And now Beacon Hill is again
coming back into her own: the fine old houses are being carefully,
almost worshipfully restored, probably never again to lose their
rightful place in the general life of the city.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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