Another adventure I had while tooling around Boston in the normally snowy month of January was to see a few of the sights centered around Boston's Old City Hall, as well as the first public school in America!
First, and totally unrelated, I love the architecture at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church on Tremont Street! This super cool looking building opened in 1896 and has largely been a place of worship, but has also served in other capacities, with various offices for lease. It had also served as a location for public speeches by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was read here in Boston for the first time and in December 1867, Charles Dickens gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol. The original building (built before this one in 1827 but lost to fire) had been the Tremont Theater where John Wilkes Booth's father Junius Brutus Booth had taken the stage before it was purchased by the Free Church Baptists in 1843. I just spotted this on my way to see the old city hall - see? So much cool stuff to see in Ma City!
The Omni Parker House hotel is the longest continually running hotel in the United States and it sits directly across the street from King's Chapel. The original was opened in 1855 although this building dates back to 1927. The hotel website says, "It was here where the brightest lights of America’s Golden Age of Literature—writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Longfellow— regularly met for conversation and conviviality in the legendary nineteenth-century Saturday Club. It was here where baseball greats like Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and David Ortiz wined, dined, and unwound. And it was here, too, where generations of local and national politicians—including Ulysses S. Grant, James Michael Curley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Colin Powell, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, William Jefferson Clinton, and Deval Patrick—assembled for private meetings, press conferences, and power breakfasts." Even the kitchen and wait-staff once included Emeril Lagasse, Malcolm X, and Ho Chi Minh - I mean, if that isn't an impressive list, I don't know what is! AND they created the Boston Cream Pie here! AND JFK announced his candidacy for Congress, proposed to Jackie AND had his bachelor party here! I could go on and on with the history of this place!
The bar attached to the Omni Parker House Hotel is called the Last Hurrah, and Dickens actually gave his first "private" reading of A Christmas Carol here before he gave the public reading down the street at the Tremont Temple.
All within a one block area you can also find Boston's Old City hall which was used between 1865 and 1969.
This site was also the site of the Boston Public Latin School, the first public school in America which was founded in 1635 (Superlative, check!) While Native Americans were taught for free as of 1645, women were not admitted until the mid 1800s.
There is a very ornately decorated hopscotch plaque on the sidewalk (next to the double brick line that is the Freedom Trail) in front of the Old City Hall. The school was here from 1635 to 1812 when it moved across School Street and was located there until 1844. That location eventually became the back side of the Omni Parker House hotel. Boston Latin next moved to Bedford Street (Downtown Crossing area) where it lasted until 1881 before it moved to Warren Avenue near the South End. In 1922, Boston Latin moved to Avenue Louis Pasteur where it is still in existence and is still known as one of the best schools in the state today.
This version of the Old City Hall is actually the third building to stand here, which was built in 1865. It was built in the beautiful French Second Empire style and now? It currently houses a Ruth Chris Steakhouse among other offices and retail space. When I think of the Founding Fathers, democracy in America and the rise of the public school system, I definitely think of overpriced beef!
There is a statue of Ben Franklin in the courtyard of the Old City Hall, even though he dropped out of Boston Latin when he was 10 to become the apprentice at his brother's printing shop when he was 12. He had *beef* with his brother and ran away at 17 to Philadelphia where he began his illustrious diplomatic career.
Even though I don't love the idea of overpriced steak dinners being sold at such a cool historic site, this really was an excellent (and one of the first) example of how a historic building could be repurposed rather than being torn down.
Another interesting statue in the courtyard of the Old Boston City Hall is the Donkey of Democracy. He has a really strange story. A man named Roger Webb purchased this bronze donkey in Florence, Italy and "envisioned" it on the Freedom Trail in Boston as something that children might enjoy on an otherwise history-heavy tour. But the city officials wanted no part of it. He was able to convince them that it was appropriate to place it in front of the Old City Hall with the idea that the city had been ruled by Democrats for many years - so here he stands!
Blogger is autorotating my pictures without my permission - and the one thing I don't like about this platform is the fact that I can't rotate a picture by hand here. Grrr. Anyway, Republicans of the city weren't very happy with the donkey's placement, so this (errr, much smaller) Republican Elephant plaque was placed directly in front of it as a call to "Stand in Opposition" to the Democratic Donkey. Webb didn't have a bronze statue of an elephant, and no one offered up a free one as he had offered the free donkey to the city, so he had his cousin create this small sculpture instead. How very diplomatic of him!
Until next time Old City Hall and Boston Latin Public School!
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