Introduction to WalkBoston: A peripathetic (What Else?) Guide to WalkingBy Jane Holtz Kay Walking defines our humanity, amplifies our curiosity, and shapes our destiny. As an ambulatory species and intellectual hunter/gatherer of things ordinary and extraordinary, mental and menial, you might say that we are what we walk. This is the tenet that persuaded WalkBoston, the nation's first pedestrian advocacy organization, working in conjunction with the Appalachian Mountain Club, to launch you on a trip through what we chauvinistically believe is the nation's premier pedestrian world.
"A traveler on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wildman, or an out-of the-way being who is stared at, pitied, suspected and shunned by everybody that he meets," an 18th century foot traveler once described his trip. Striding through an era when the motor vehicle threatens not only foot power but livability, today's harassed walkers will find that distinctly not so on these tours. Demonstrating that walking is the wave of the future, WalkBoston's multifarious authors serve as guides to take you to eye-opening vistas, engaging sights, and mind-widening explorations. On foot. Our member-writers let you bear witness not only to the splendor but the quirks of the workaday; you will also see quiet eras savored by walking within the circumferential highway of Route 128 that defines metropolitan Boston. Forget the windshield view. Our member-writers stretch the usual tourist map, relying on the public transportation that shaped this venerable city as it created the pre-automobile era.
Using the Guide's Sites and Sights Through this original guide, WalkBoston hopes readers and walkers will appreciate the diversity, history and architectural neighborliness of these sites. These guided visits invite you to recall the troop movement of the Revolution War or consider the long timeline of the landscape at a screw factory at Newton Upper Falls on land purchased from Chief Nahatan. There are no conventional "so and so slept here" routes, however. Our opening jaunt rejects a "Disney-fied" view of Boston to reveal a good or "ghastly deed lurking around every corner." (Even natives familiar with the venerable collection at the Boston Athenaeum may be aghast to find a skinbound book amidst its more scholarly and aesthetic treasures.) Moving from "then" to "now" to "then" in fascinating proximity, WalkBoston's journeys offer innumerable built and natural landscapes. You can tour the stately mansion of the Shirley-Eustis house in Roxbury or catch the whiff of the sea on the beach at Savin Hill and view countless sites compressing history on a narrow landmass with modern conveniences.
Trotting out on Foot Walking Bostonians (and WalkBoston) take pride in moments of contemporary activism embedded in both the old and new lines of pedestrian movement that carry the reader/walker through unique journeys. A walk down the splendid Southwest Corridor is a testament to the act of political will by which Boston's communities stopped a highway, diverting funds to plant this five-mile park atop Back Bay's railroad. WalkBoston guides you along this route as it traverses city and suburbs, from the South End to Jamaica Plain to Forest Hills, with a return trip by the Orange Line subway. Of varied length, other walkways, including the Minuteman Rail-Trail through Cambridge, Arlington and Lexington, atop Brookline's and Boston's peaks, or along the Charles River; forge a place for our guided tourists to walk. The longest journey takes you to a western point of the Charles River where migrating shad, congregating gulls and cormorants are abundantly on view with the Charles River Museum of Industry nearby.
Getting on With It On your mark, then, book in hand: Get set. Go. Don't expect this book to prescribe a formula for your walk. As distinctive as the various authors who decided what places and what paces the reader will tread, so, too, the style and content vary in this idiosyncratic and personal book. The timing is theirs but the choice is yours. Your own pace‹defined by fatigue, fascination and the four seasons---will determine the length. Go through the paces of these walks and you'll find transportation to carry you back home after an outing certain to leave you informed, restored and reinvigorated by this more mobile, and, yes, more humanized view of Boston's "City Upon a Hill." Bon voyage and enjoy the pedestrian view. Introduction to WalkBoston: Walking Tours of Boston's Unique Neighborhoods.
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You, as a sturdy walker or novice pedestrian, are about to follow paths that will not only lead you through historic and contemporary places but demand that you do so in the most human way: one foot in front of the other. It is that act that allows us bi-peds to get the footprint and feel of the past and present life of this great and extended city. By taking you on a walk through the history and scenery of 30 neighborhoods via this most everyday of motions, Boston's premier pedestrian organization emphasizes that a pedestrian - i.e. human - approach is the historic source and enduring sense of Greater Boston.
