two tales of a city

Ethan and I were in Boston last weekend. It was part of our plan to go to Boston.

You may be rolling your eyes, anticipating that I'll bore you with all the details of the tour. Fear not. Instead I'll just be boring you with discussion of two things we did. At the advice of Keith (who runs our horror movie class) we went on a Boston Crime Tour and a Beacon Hill Crime Tour.

Both were walking tours in which our guide took us around the designated area, telling us a variety of stories about the history of crime in the area. Both were excellent experiences -- especially if you've had your fill of duckboat rides and Faneuil Hall. But they both required a lot of walking.

But they were very different from each other.

The Beacon Hill Crime Tour, led by David Phillips, focused on -- duh -- Beacon Hill, a very wealthy area of Boston. But while the geographic area was limited (it only involved one mile of walking, though that mile included some steep hills), the scope was pretty expansive -- covering crimes from colonial times up through the 1960s. Phillips  would walk the group to a location, and then tell us a crime-related story from the area's history. The stories were discrete and self-contained; none of them were really related to each other. I should note that Phillips threw a little twist in there -- one of the stories was made up, so it was a game to figure out which one was false.

The Boston Crime tour, by contrast, was a more-expansive experience, geographically speaking. We walked about three miles in all -- starting at the Downtown Waterfront, then going up through the North End, and the West End, before ending at the sight of the Boston Massacre. While our guide, Omar Doherty, did cover some crimes from Colonial times, he focused on organized crime from the mid to late 20th century. So we heard a lot about Whitey Bulger, Stephen Flemmi and John Martorano. Rather than focusing on discrete, self-contained stories, Doherty painted a picture of a phenomenon. His tour was more of a conversation -- though that also might have been a function of the fact that Ethan and I were the only ones taking that tour. With Phillips, we were two of maybe a dozen.

While Ethan and I did do some conventional touring in Boston, I really enjoyed these less-traditional activities, and can wholeheartedly recommend them -- unless, of course, you have low tolerance for icky stories.

In case you're interested:
Beacon Hill Crime Tour
Boston Crime Tour

Tell 'em Moish sent ya.