Layers of the Palimpsest

Winding Streets of the North End

View of the hypermodern Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge from Copp's Hill

Produce sellers congregating at Haymarket, 1975

At odds with history: contemporary advertising near Copp's Hill Burying Ground

As the contemporary urbanite moves through Copp’s Hill, as I did, reading it Certeau suggested, they see the underlying residues of Boston’s palimpsest. The travel from Harvard Square to Copp’s Hill Burying Grounds makes the palimpsest model hard to refute. One travels across Boston at top speeds, under and above ground in the T car, observing the massive modern transportation infrastructure. Then, one emerges at the Haymarket Square, only to see Boston open up as huge expanse, the hypermodern Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge just in the distance. One heads through the North End Park and its contemporary “public space” programing, complete with bright chairs and full of dog walkers. At the end of the park, hip eateries and huge billboards give berth to the narrow passages of the North End. Through these narrow winding streets, one is hit with an intense sense of 19^th and 20^th century immigrant Boston. One is left to imagine, reading the city in this travel as de Certeau suggested, that all of these different periods of Boston history, seen as palimpsest, coalesce to form a cultural mélange that constitutes life in Boston today.

As one continues to travel and read, one arrives at a long-standing core of Boston culture in the Copp’s Hill Puritan visual rhetoric. And it’s still there, in spite of time, for all to read into Boston’s current culture. It’s a common observation that contemporary Boston still seems to struggle with its Puritan ethos, even hundreds of years after the fact in a period entirely new moral structure. Just this year, New York magazine’s “The Urbanist” pondered: Can Boston Ever Be Fun? The article canvassed the shortcomings of Boston’s nightlife – early bar and public transportation closure, difficultly of acquiring a liquor license, the late-night task force developed by mayor Marty Walsh – and focused on Boston resident’s reactions to the seeming fun vacuum.[1] At Copp’s Hill, we are reminded that perhaps reading a legacy of Puritanism into contemporary life in Boston might not be so far off base, because there the bottom layer still stands, waiting to be read.