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Condé Nast Traveler

How Boston's Revolutionary Spirit Is Writing Its Next Chapter

Where the past ends and the present begins can be hard to decipher in Boston. That park bench, that lamppost, that row house—it's safe to assume that each played a role in some pivotal moment in American history. But there are no plaques and statues on Marlon Solomon's itinerary. 'You're about to go on a tour of places that don't exist anymore,' he tells me on a late-spring morning as we set off from Nubian Square in Roxbury, a historically Black neighborhood just south of downtown Boston. I've been on plenty of walking tours, trolley tours, and duck tours in the city. But Solomon, the founder of the Afrimerican Academy, a local nonprofit supporting underserved multicultural communities, has taken a different approach. Drawing on oral histories and archival images, he has created an experience that asks guests to imagine bygone Black cultural landmarks that were erased in the 1960s mania for urban renewal that transformed so many American cities. Instead of the familiar stops of Boston's Freedom Trail, we go to an athletic field at Northeastern University that was once a vibrant community playground; a vacant grassy plot where an elite Black school once stood; and a dull apartment complex on the site of the church where Martin Luther King Jr. ministered when he met Coretta Scott. Their union is commemorated in a nearby mural by the street artist Rob 'ProBlak' Gibbs. 'We sell history in Boston,' Solomon says. 'That's what we do.' But in redlined Black areas like Roxbury, 'there are no historical sites for us to show. We have to find ways to convert this history into revenue.' The Chinatown Gate entrance to Boston's centrally located Chinatown Christian Harder State Representative Christopher Worrell outside Dorchester's Strand Theatre Christian Harder Lydia Lowe, executive director of the Chinatown Community Land Trust, which works to preserve and grow the neighborhood, is on a similar mission. Her new Immigrant History Trail of the Chinatown neighborhood displays a series of interactive placards focusing not only on the area's Chinese community, but also on the vibrant Little Syria that thrived here a century ago. 'To only talk about the Chinese would not be doing justice to the rich history of the neighborhood,' she says as I study a black-and-white portrait of a Syrian family on a stoop with a hookah. With Boston gearing up to celebrate the country's semiquincentennial in 2026, Lowe is part of the Commemoration Commission, assembled by the city council to spotlight layers of Boston's history beyond its Revolutionary War credentials. Just as Boston's history is deeply intertwined with America's, my own past is everywhere here. Even two decades since I moved away, the opening bars of the Dropkick Murphys' Celtic-punk anthem 'I'm Shipping Up to Boston' are still a Proustian trigger, lurching me back to my days riding the T from my apartment near Fenway Park to work in the Back Bay. At that age I couldn't wait to get out: Boston felt too small, too clean, too dull, too homogeneous. A place where the invisible boundaries that partition communities felt difficult to transcend. I've spent the past few decades continent-hopping, from New York City to Cape Town, Mumbai to Dubai, all cities I found more cosmopolitan and exciting than Boston. But my Hyderabadi parents still live in the suburbs and so I've kept finding my way back, wondering when Boston will catch up with the world. Pistachio butter toast and Turkish-style eggs at Jadu, in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood Christian Harder Yng-Ru Chen at Praise Shadows, her art gallery in Brookline Christian Harder I'm starting to think the moment has come. From Fort Point to Southie, Dorchester to the South End, weathered-brick buildings are being revitalized with new restaurants and galleries, shifting the city's center of gravity away from well-trammeled districts like Back Bay and the North End. Changing demographics (Boston has for years been a majority-minority city) have played a role in this metamorphosis, but there are other forces at play. 'I really give Mayor Wu credit,' says Lowe. Since 2021, when she became the first woman and first person of color elected mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu has often enacted policies to support minority communities. 'Her vision,' Lowe adds, 'is to say, 'When we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, we want to celebrate all the voices that are here and that haven't been heard yet.' '