Boston Layover in the North End

Boston’s North End starts at the foot of Hanover Street, two minutes from Haymarket station, and packs the Old North Church’s 1723 steeple, Paul Revere’s 1680 house and a dense run of Italian bakeries into a few blocks of narrow brick lanes.

Hanover Street’s bakeries and the cannoli argument

Hanover Street runs from the edge of the Greenway up through the middle of the North End, past a near-unbroken line of restaurants, cafés and pastry shops fitted into the ground floors of four- and five-storey brick blocks. The argument you will be asked to take a side in is cannoli: Mike’s Pastry at 300 Hanover, which sells them pre-filled and by the boxful, against Modern Pastry a block south at 257, which fills the shell when you order so it stays crisp. Neither side has ever conceded anything.

Eating your way up the street works fine on your own, and a guided food walk through these blocks mainly buys you the choosing, which counters the one real problem here: there are more places than an afternoon has room for and the frontages tell you very little about which is which.

Old North Church on Salem Street

Salem Street carries a plain brick church with a white timber spire that has been standing since 1723, which makes it the oldest church building left in Boston. On the night of 18 April 1775 two lanterns were held up in that steeple for under a minute, as a prearranged signal that British troops were crossing the Charles by boat rather than marching out overland.

Inside, the box pews are the original arrangement, rented by families who fitted them out themselves. General admission is $5, a self-guided audio tour $7 booked online or $8 at the door, and add-on tours of the crypt, the gallery and the bell-ringing chamber run $5 each. It opens 10am to 5pm Monday to Saturday and 11:30am to 5pm on Sunday.

The Paul Revere House on North Square

North Square is a small cobbled opening in the middle of the North End, and the grey clapboard house on it was built around 1680, which makes it the oldest building still standing in downtown Boston. Paul Revere owned it from 1770 to 1800 and left from here on the night of the ride. The overhanging upper storey and the diamond-paned windows are seventeenth-century practice, not decoration added later.

Admission is $6 for an adult and $1 for children aged 5 to 17, open daily 10am to 5:15pm. It is a small house and the visit is short, twenty minutes at a normal pace, and the reason to do it is standing inside a timber frame that old rather than anything on the labels.

Haymarket’s pushcarts on Blackstone Street

Blackstone Street, between Hanover and North Streets, fills with open wooden stands and pushcarts every Friday and Saturday from 6am to 7pm, selling fruit, vegetables and fish at prices with no relationship to the restaurants a block uphill. Vendors have traded on this ground since about 1830, when farmers brought in wagons of hay, and the market’s days and pitch are set by a 1952 state law and a 1978 city ordinance, which is why it has outlasted nearly everything built around it.

Late on Saturday, as 7pm gets close, the stands start clearing whatever has not sold at almost any price, which is the hour the regulars turn up for. The all-week version is Boston Public Market at 100 Hanover Street, a covered hall of around thirty New England producers sitting directly over the Haymarket subway platforms, open daily 8am to 8pm and free to walk into.

The lanes off Hanover are narrow brick with cars parked hard against the kerb, so on most of them a suitcase and someone coming the other way do not both fit.

The Blue Line to the airport starts eight minutes’ walk from Hanover Street

Aquarium station, at the harbour end of State Street, is on the Blue Line, and Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) is two stops along it: Maverick, then Airport, about five minutes of running time, then a free Massport shuttle bus out to your terminal every five or six minutes. From the bottom of Hanover Street that is one $2.40 fare and one train, as long as you walk the eight minutes down the Greenway rather than changing underground at Haymarket.

The North End’s whole appeal is how much is packed into it: four centuries of building on a few blocks of former peninsula, which is the opposite of the open plazas and parks the downtown walk runs through on the other side of the Greenway.