Everyone has their quirks, right? There are people who put ketchup on scrambled eggs, who, like Ted Cruz, vacation in Florida in the summer. I love Boylston Street. To the uninitiated, it’s just a busy city road in a landscape full of them.
But viewed in a different way, it’s the most regal commercial street in Boston, what Tom Menino used to refer to as “Boston’s grand boulevard.” Drive or walk down Boylston Street and you can look up, way up, at the tallest buildings in Boston, the Prudential and the Hancock. Boylston Street is where the duck boats inch through a swarm of humanity to celebrate our sports championships.
It’s where Trinity Church and Old South Church serve as but two expressions of a city’s faith. It is where people of all walks of life come together, where four- and five-star hotels like the Mandarin Oriental and the stately Fairmont Copley Plaza are just feet away from Raising Cain’s and Trader Joe’s, where the knowledge of the world is free to anyone who wants it inside the two stately buildings that make up the Boston Public Library. Advertisement Boylston Street is where this region felt tragedy in a way that it had never endured before with the Boston Marathon bombings.
It’s a place where the city shows its resilience every year when thousands of runners round Hereford Street toward the finish line just before Copley Square. Boylston Street is a place to spread out, to think big, to feel what brings us together and know what sets Bos.