Boston: Day Three

Enlightened by the Duck Tour and missing our third explorer (Shawn had to work), Stuart and I decided to take a closer look at Trinity Church while also checking-out Newbury Street (the Rodeo Drive of Boston) and the Prudential Center/ Boylston Street (the slightly less upscale shopping district on the other side of Copley Square)

The day started with a traditional Boston favorite, pizza from a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria on Charles St: Nino’s. It might have been the most superb, greasy, thin pizza I have ever encountered and had the added benefit of being remarkably cheap.

Newbury and Boylston street were both interesting and went pretty fast. The best part about shopping in Boston is that the stores are, in general, so expensive that it's easy to save your money.

As I noted to Stuart there a few things to know about Fashion in Boston. Women in Boston do not know how to dress; it isn’t that they have bad taste, in fact, they consistently wear one incredible article of clothing that completely captures my imagination, but the outfit spirals down from there. Confounded by ideas like “matching” local women proceed to pair this jaw dropping piece with clashing, outlandish, or dysfunctional clothing. Actually, they might fail to wear it properly at all. They are also fascinated with the extremely short, the ill fit, and the remarkably prudish. They harbor a deep love of spice girl wedges and wellington rain boots and swear by white and navy. As such, people watching was impressively entertaining but there was very little shopping to be had and the majority of the day was spent is the confounded wonder of Trinity Church.

Outside, the Church demands attention at the head of Copley Square although it is situated in the shadows of John Hancock Tower (Made of glass to reflect it).

The façade features fantastic renditions of various religious masterpieces such as the last supper, carved into the entablature (Definition) It also showcases statues of some of the more famous saints (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Augustine, Paul, Moses, etc.) Designed By Henry Hobson Richardson with the inclusion of rector Phillip Brooks, the Church is now the birthplace of “Richardson Romanesque” architectural style, characterized by a clay tile roof, polychromy (the use of various color stones in architectural decoration), rough-faced stone, heavy, rounded arches, and a massive tower, all of which are prominently featured in Trinity Church.

It is honestly impossible to really communicate the awe and reverence that the interior of the church inspires and, as far as our own attempts and a scan of Google Images indicates, virtually impossible to capture on camera (though we thought we’d show our feeble efforts)

The interior of Trinity Church was once of the most ambitious commissions in America in terms of scale and scope, aiming to integrate art and architecture into a unified whole. Richardson and Brooks decided a richly colored interior was essential to the church aesthetic and turned to John Lafarge to help them realize this dream. Lafarge was primarily an easel painter and had never done a project of this magnitude but saw the church as an opportunity and offered to do the work at cost. The painted decoration was completed in only five months under abysmal conditions-he and his team were forced to wear gloves and coats in the unheated church during the bitter Massechutes winter and often competed with masons and other workers to use scaffolding. Many of the designs are based on motifs found in early Christian churches while other elements echo byzantine and medieval influences as well as the Renaissance.

The Church also features a magnificent stained glass collection that features examples from most of the major European and American stained glass studios of the 19^th century. With only one exception (the baptismal window) the church only contained clear glass at tit’s consecration in 1877. Most of the glass is European but the church also houses four examples of Lafarge’s groundbreaking technique of layering opalescent glass, which suspends opaque particles and allows different colors to be blended in a single sheet.

With his experiments in opalescent glass, Lafarge was able to create new colored effects like shading and three dimensional space by skillfully arranging glass in layers (called plating) rather than the traditional method of painting on the glass.

After Working our way back down Boylston and a full day of walking, Stuart and I picked up a Chocolate shake from a Truck Vendor and spent an hour in the gardens, watching people pass by and ducklings swim across “the lagoon”. It is important to note that to a local, everything in Boston is five minutes away (Link to you know you’re a boston when…) and while everything is strangely walk-able in this huge metropolis, Boston has more than 900 miles of sidewalk (it also has 87 Starbucks-to Shawn’s gleeful astonishment- and 107 Duncan Donuts according to our guide though those numbers are as yet unconfirmed).