Beating Freedom’s Path Along Streets of Boston

I asked the taxi driver to wait while I dropped my suitcase at the Lenox Hotel across from the Boston Public Library. I had come straight from the airport and was overdue for a gathering at the Globe Corner Bookstore on School Street.

This bookstore, on the rock-bound Freedom Trail, is both old and new. Its red-brick Yankee exterior dates to 1718; its mellow interior--a mix of maple and cherry cabinetry, fine lighting and fragrant books--is from the 1980s.

Inside, I climbed gleaming wooden stairs and greeted some proper Bostonians. Then I excused myself to hang up my trench coat and search for a ladies room. As I stepped into the hallway a door shut behind me. And locked.

I rapped on the door, but no one could hear through the muffle of the cloakroom and the babble of the party. I began looking for help. Two flights up, a man was working at the Historic Boston Foundation.

Familiar Route

He led me down to the street, unlocked a side door and pointed toward the corner. I knocked on the Globe Bookstore door and was admitted by the same young clerk as before. I shrugged, rather than explain. He shrugged, rather than ask.

As I once again climbed the gleaming stairs, the manager was describing how this Early American building had been saved by the Historic Boston Foundation. I felt a link because Historic Boston had just saved me.

Over the years the brick building, with its graceful gambrel roof, served as private home and publishing house for books and periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly.

Literary Characters

The Old Corner Bookstore opened there in 1829, and provided haven for such literary characters as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

After stints as a hat shop, haberdashery and tobacco store, the ground floor became the King-of-Pizza parlor. When urban renewal threatened demolition in the 1960s, Historic Boston intervened.

The bookstore is one of the landmarks on Boston’s Freedom Trail, a 2 1/2-mile walk that begins at Boston Common, the oldest public park in America.

You are guided along the trail by a wide red line painted on bricks and sidewalks. It passes the Old State House and the site of the Boston Massacre, a 1770 skirmish between British troops and protesters in which five colonists died.

Rainy Afternoon

Several of us left the bookshop at dusk on that rainy afternoon and strolled toward the waterfront and Faneuil Hall. Our destination was The European, a North End Italian eatery. Thin, crisp-crust pizza was the order of the evening. A nearby table of Chicago natives kept insisting that there was no pizza like home, but the waiters ignored such an aberrant notion.

Pizza is big in Boston, which is better known for beans, chowder and lobster. A card in my hotel room touted “pizza made fresh in our kitchen and delivered piping hot to your room.” When I checked in, the bellman turned the TV on to the Red Sox game at Fenway Park.

“Pizza and beer and baseball,” he said in an Aussie accent. “There’s a winner.”

Boston is a consummate walking town, and pizza is not the sole reason. A compact maze of crooked lanes, cobblestones and winsome, unsigned streets fosters the urge to explore. It is not an easy path, and motorists seem to invent their own rules.

On another Boston trip, when I had a rental car and a couple of baffling maps, I asked a taxi driver for directions. He shrugged and said in an Old World way: “Follow me. I don’t know how to explain you.”

Restoration Notices

My recent weekend was far from calm. The Lenox is in the throes of restoration. Steam heat hisses at odd times. A notice on a thermostat near my closet read: “Too hot or too cold? Construction is under way to install a state-of-the-art heating/air conditioning system. The thermostat at this location will afford you individual climate control--by the fall of 1989.” I could not wait, so I opened the window.

The hotel also was wrapped in cops and barricades because it’s at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, America’s oldest annual footrace. Almost 6,500 runners signed up for the 93rd running, which starts 26.2 miles to the west, in Hopkinton, Mass.

On that same day, two lads re-enacted the April ride of Paul Revere and his less-remembered cohort, William Dawes. And the anniversary of the revolutionary battle of Lexington and Concord pitted costumed Redcoats against Patriots on the Lexington Green.

As I checked out of The Lenox a sign in the hall made me smile:

“Due to the Boston Marathon, this Ladies Room is closed for electrical work and scaffolding construction.”

The marathon affects all walks of life.