The most photographed neighbourhood in Boston — a small hill of nineteenth-century Federal and Greek Revival row houses behind the gold-domed State House, with gas lamps still lit in the evening and cobbled lanes wide enough only for a single carriage. Beacon Hill is what people picture when they imagine old Boston, and the picture has hardly changed.
Charles Street, the main commercial spine at the bottom of the hill, has antique shops, bookshops, neighbourhood restaurants, and a famously well-stocked corner grocer at DeLuca's. Acorn Street, three blocks up — short, narrow, steeply pitched, hopelessly photogenic — is probably the most-Instagrammed lane in the United States.
Beacon Hill was also a centre of Black history and abolitionism: free African Americans settled the north slope of the hill from the eighteenth century, building the African Meeting House (1806) and contributing to a network of safe houses on the Underground Railroad. The Black Heritage Trail runs through these streets and is far less crowded than the Freedom Trail.