Boston, MA - State House

I drove into Boston from the North and stopped at Costco to resupply. My one-gallon thermos had cracked and I was hoping to find a replacement. As is often the case for me at Costco, the item was no longer available. On the bright side, Costco recently issued a Visa card and as part of that deal, they accept all visa cards now as payment. A month ago, I wasn’t able to use any of my credit cards at Costco; I had to use cash. They now support Apple pay as well with visa cards. Hooray!!

In the parking lot of Costco, there were hundreds of birds. People with good intentions stop and through bird feed onto the parking lot and there are a lot of birds. This somehow creates rage in some people because they have to slow down to diagonally cross the parking lot. Instead of slowing down, they intentionally try to kill birds by speeding up as they come close to the birds. I witnessed a large goose being run over because it couldn’t get off the ground quickly enough.

Massachusetts State House

Boston was also an opportunity to capture another State House. As always, parking was difficult to find in Boston. I’ve had my share of expensive parking tickets there. Traffic was heavy and the public parking that I knew of, under the commons, had been converted to monthly only parking. I tried, like many others to find parking on the street. I eventually gave up and used google to find a public parking garage located at one corner of the commons. Parking was 13 USD per hour which kept me on purpose.

I stopped for coffee at The Thinking Cup Coffee Bar right on Tremont Street. The coffee was excellent and the crossoints were good. Certainly not from Paris, but levels above the typical Starbucks pastries. WiFi was available, and I pulled out the laptop to see if there was anything interesting near the State House that I hadn’t seen before. There wasn’t.

The Boston Common, established in 1634, is America’s oldest public park and is start of the Freedom Trail walk. If you’re interested in the pre- and post-revolutionary war events, this is good place to start your inquiry. I’ve done the Freedom Trail walk before, so I continued on my mission of photographing the State House. This is actually the new State House. The original, or Old State House, still stands and is part of the Freedom Trail walk. Books have been written about these places and the events that took place on those sites. My favorite book about these events is 1776, by David McCullough who recently passed.

Wikipedia states,

The building is situated on 6.7 acres (2.7 ha) of land on top of Beacon Hill in Boston, opposite the Boston Common on Beacon Street. It was built on land once owned by John Hancock, Massachusetts's first elected governor. The Masonic cornerstone ceremony took place on July 4, 1795, with Paul Revere, Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, presiding.

Massachusetts Fallen Firefighters Memorial

The Massachusetts Fallen Firefighters Memorial is located in a small park on the grounds of the capital in the back. The area is a dedication to the fallen firefighters of the state.

Park Street Church

The Park Street Church has a long history which is interesting in and of itself. It’s also one of the stops on the Freedom Trail walk. It’s located one block from the new State House building off the common.

Neighborhood

It’s fun to walk the streets behind the State House and look at the old red brick buildings of centuries past and think about all the events that had taken place on these streets.

The parking was 38 USD for three hours of parking. This is by far the most expensive parking I’ve seen. I left Boston around 3:00 pm on my way South to Cape Cod. It was very slow moving out of Boston because of of blocked lanes on the highway, rush hour traffic and heavy rains.