Boston Guide
Beacon Hill and the West End
No visit to Boston would be complete without an afternoon spent strolling around delightful Beacon Hill, a dignified stack of red-brick rising over the north side of Boston Common. This is the Boston of wealth and privilege, former home to numerous historical and literary figures – including John Hancock, John Quincy Adams, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne – and still the address of choice. The narrow, hilly byways are lit with gaslamps and lined with quaint, nineteenth-century townhouses, all part of an enforced preservation that prohibits modern buildings from disturbing the carefully cultivated atmosphere of urban gentility.
It was not always this way. In colonial times, Beacon Hill was the most prominent of three peaks, known as the Trimountain, which formed Boston's geological backbone. The sunny south slope was developed into prime real estate and quickly settled by the city's political and economic powers, while the north slope was traditionally closer in spirit to the West End, a tumbledown port district populated by free blacks and immigrants; indeed, the north slope was home to so much salacious activity, that outraged Brahmins – Beacon Hill's moneyed elite – termed it "Mount Whoredom."
By the end of the twentieth century, this social divide was largely eradicated and clever real estate agents and developers have been quick to bracket the West End with Beacon Hill. Condominiums have recently been built on Bowdoin Street, and businesses up to ten blocks from the Hill itself have taken on a "Beacon Hill" prefix as part of their names. The result is that Beacon Hill has lost a bit of its exclusionary feel (though members of polite society still refer to the south slope as "the good side"). Both sides, in fact, have much to offer: on the south slope, there's the grandiose Massachusetts State House, residences of past and present luminaries, and attractive boulevards like Charles Street and Beacon Street (the former is Beacon Hill's main thoroughfare, and full of boutiques, antique shops, and cafés; the latter is snugly crowded with prim townhouses). The north slope is home to the superb African Meeting House, the stellar Robert Gould Shaw/54th Regiment Memoriald, and a warren of alleyways once used by fleeing slaves to escape capture.