Welcome to Boston Bits ~ Insiders’ Tips -- our intermittently updated journal of things Bostonian, aimed to give Boston Your Way visitors a sense of our city.

Boston Bits

Click and Clack -- In our humble opinion
NPR’s Car Talk, is a huge favorite among Boston Your Way guests. They know that Click and Clack, The Tappet Brothers, are really Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Many are surprised to learn that they are for-real East Cambridge guys, with a for-real repair shop (“Good News Garage”) and who graduated, for real, from M.I.T. Sadly, they will cease broadcasting new episodes, and we will have to depend on repeats for The Puzzler and some of the best “how-to” advice (and worst puns) on the air.

Why no 1812 Overture in Bicentennial year?
What a sad fate. This of all years – the Bicentennial of the War of 1812 -- the Boston Pops were unable to perform the most popular piece of its annual 4th of July Esplanade Concert, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. With lightening on the northern horizon and a severe thunderstorm threatening the city, officials stopped the program and advised the audience of 500,000 to seek shelter. Fortunately, the storm moved east, but when the program resumed, the overture, along with the popular sing-a-long, had been scratched from the 2012 program.

What’s a smoot?
A unit of linear measurement -- 5’ 7”, to be exact -- and the height of one Oliver Smoot, an MIT freshman who, 54 years ago, was laid end to end by fellow fraternity pledges to record the length of the nearby Harvard Bridge. Take a walk today and see how the bridge is still carefully marked out -- 364.4 smoots plus/minus one ear. The word has been accepted into the American Heritage Dictionary.

The SCREEEECH in the tunnel
One constant in the city is the piercing sound the Green Line trolleys make as they round the turn in the old tunnel by Boylston Street station. Bostonians have been putting up with that noise since the early 1900’s. Certainly not the first choice for a Boston tradition, but with so much of everyday Boston disappearing, the familiar screech of metal against metal is comforting in its way.

Some Boston companies
The oldest chocolate company in America, Baker Chocolate, was founded in 1780 in Boston. Other Boston companies are Gillette Razor (now owned by P & G), New Balance Shoes, John Hancock Insurance (sold to Manu Life), Parker Brothers, Fidelity Funds, and Houghton Mifflin.

The oldest and newest park in Boston. Boston Common has been in use since it was set aside as community open space by the Puritans in 1634. From time to time, it gets a face-lift as the needs and tastes of the city change. This spring, the Brewer Fountain and Plaza was refurbished in an effort to upgrade a sad corner of the park by Park Street. The plaza has games tables, a magazine rack, visiting food trucks, a piano (yes!) and a reseeded hillside perfect for picnics and Frisbee.

Boston Population. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Boston’s population rose 4.8% to 617,500. It peaked in 1950 at 800,000.

A host of firsts for The People’s Palace. The Boston Public Library was founded in 1848 -- the first publicly supported free library in the world and the first to lend books to city residents. When the BPL moved in 1895 to its current splendid location in Copley Square, it opened the first Children’s Library. The BPL introduced branch libraries around the city in 1870, marking another first for The People’s Palace.

Where triangles are squares. If visitors look closely at Boston’s city squares -- Liberty Square, North Square, Post Office Square -- they will notice that they are really triangles. Who knows why?

Marky Mark. Actor and producer Mark Wahlberg comes from a working-class Irish Catholic corner of Dorchester. The youngest of nine children, including younger brother Donnie (“Blue Bloods”), he was often in trouble and briefly served time. Attention from caring adults and getting involved with the neighborhood Boys and Girls Club helped him turn his life around. Today he actively supports organizations for troubled kids. Wahlberg’s recent movie, Ted, was filmed in Boston.

Trimountaine. The name “Tremont” is familiar in Boston. In fact, one of the main thoroughfares through the city is named Tremont Street. The origin of the name is less familiar. It derives from “Trimountaine,” the name the Puritans gave their new settlement in 1630. It refers to a commanding three-peaked ridge that existed where Beacon Hill now stands. The settlers soon discarded that name for “Boston,” in honor of their home in England. And after the Revolution, their descendants chopped down 2 of the trimountaine peaks and shortened the central, beacon, hill to make room for a new State House and a neighborhood that has become synonymous with exclusivity.

The Puritans, not the Pilgrims, founded Boston. Both were Puritans, whose emigration from England to the New World was called The Great Migration. However, the Pilgrims, who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, were Separatists -- that is, they literally separated from the Anglican Church and England. The Puritans, who founded Boston in 1630, sought to stay within the Church to reform, or purify, it. As we all know, it did not work out that way.

Having trouble pronouncing Faneuil Hall? Think it sounds like Fanooel or Fahneel? Think of Daniel or Dan’l, but say it with an F, and you will nail it.

Before there was Julia there was Fannie. Today she is known for chocolates and a cookbook. In her day, Bostonian Fannie Farmer was as much an icon as Julia Child. Director of The Boston Cooking School, and author of the book eventually named for her, Farmer advocated good nutrition and diet. But most important, she introduced precise standard measurements, which we use today. Level teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups replaced “a pinch here,” “a teacupful there” and the many homey measurements generations of mothers passed down to their daughters.

P I L O T. What’s a city to do when it depends on property taxes for its revenue yet over half its real estate belongs to tax-exempt “charities,” such as BU, Northeastern, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Medical Center, and the Archdiocese of Boston. Many, but not all, do make voluntary Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT), equal over all to barely 9% of what their total tax would be. A Mayoral Task Force has asked non-profits to contribute 25% of their tax liability, comparable to the municipal budget for police, snow removal and other essential services.

Air conditioners and other snowstorm traditions. Following big snow storms, we figure we “own” the parking spaces we dig out and bring stuff from the house to guard them. Unfortunately, the Mayor is not impressed with our collection of lawn chairs, bbq grills and window fans, which litter the curbs. He believes the streets belong to everyone and makes us clear up our creative space-savers within 48 hours.

Acorn Street is the most photographed lane in Boston. Its modest row houses, seemingly out of place among the Federalist mansions on Beacon Hill, were home to workmen who served the rich families nearby. Now they are home to residents so wealthy they had the clout to require a utility company to replace cobblestones to their exactly original positions after completing repairs to the street.

Boston’s accidental mayor. Thomas Menino, as President of the Boston City Council, was appointed in 1993 to complete the term of Mayor Ray Flynn. He has won 5 successive campaigns, making him the city’s longest serving mayor.

The first class at Harvard College, the oldest college in the country, had nine students and one headmaster, who was fired because he was too abusive for even the puritanical Puritans. Today Harvard has 6,500 undergraduate students and 12,000 graduate students, and it is headed by Drew Faust, its first female president.

The author of Little Women and other children’s classics had her early manuscripts rejected by Boston’s top publisher, Tichnor and Fields, who advised Louisa May Alcott to give up writing and become a teacher.
Every city has its hip and happening neighborhood, rising from obsolete industrial corners. Boston has SoWa, or South of Washington Street, in the South End, where lofts, restaurants and galleries are rapidly replacing vacant lots and abandoned factories.

Victorian Bostonians had a street-wise indicator of wealth for their new Back Bay enclave. If you lived on Beacon Street, you were old family and old money;
Marlborough Street...old family but no money;
Commonwealth Avenue...new family and new money;
Newbury Street...no family and no money.

The Paul Revere house, oldest residential building in the city, was already almost 100 years old when Revere moved into it in 1770 with his wife and 5 of his 15 children. The house was built for a rich Bostonian, Robert Howard. The ground floor of the house is furnished to reflect Howard’s era and upper-class status, whereas the second floor reflects Revere’s era and middle-class status. Some say the museum should dedicate one room to the house’s tenement years in the 1800s.

Beacon Street, the most exclusive street in today’s Boston, was Poor House Lane during Colonial days. It ran between the far side of Boston Common and the bottom of the steep Trimountaine, in the least habitable corner of town. At the foot of the lane was the town’s almshouse.

No, scrod is not a fish. It is a traditional fish dish, introduced at the Parker House Hotel and popular only in New England. It is made with small white fish, usually cod or haddock, that is filleted, baked and topped with buttered breadcrumbs. People debate the meaning of the word. Some say it stands for Small Cod Remaining On Deck. Others...Small Cod or Haddock of the Day.

The Italian North End should be called the Immigrant North End. Because it is on the side of the city nearest the harbor, it has been the first home of each successive wave of New Bostonians, who arrived before the era of air travel. The neighborhood has belonged to the Puritans, the earliest African Americans, the Irish (who swarmed the small district by the thousands in the 1830s and 40s), the Jews and now Italians.

“Beacon Hill again vetoed legislation...” Because the Massachusetts State House sits at the crest of this neighborhood, the term “Beacon Hill” refers not only to the enclave but to state government activities. Today on Beacon Hill, The Governor....

The Zakim Bridge, the iconic landmark of the Thomas P. Tip O’Neil (Big Dig) Tunnel, is named for Leonard Zakim, the late director of the Anti-Defamation League of New England, who used his gift for building bridges to calm the strife among Boston’s warring ethnic and racial communities. He died at the age of 45 in 1999.
350,000 -- That is the number of students who attend the some 65 colleges in and around Boston. You can imagine the impact they have on the city’s style, culture and energy.

Why are they called the Brahmins? Boston’s upper class was nicknamed “Brahmins” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, because, like the Brahmins of India, they are “a harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy.” To be a true Brahmin, one’s family must be descended from Bostonians who made their fortunes both in the colonial maritime trade and the 19th-century textile industry (the marriage of wharf and waterfall).