MONUMENTAL

MEMORY IN SPACE

Monuments venerate a person or commemorate an event, relevant to a social group’s collective memory, history.

In recent years communities are rethinking who and what they have memorialized, and if in fact the monuments are commemorating intolerance, violence and hate when viewed through a fuller understanding of history. Some memorials are being rethought, altered or removed. Once a memorial is removed, so is all visual evidence of the controversy. This project preserves the memory, and journey of the debates, controversies and changes. It opens up new ways to imagine the how memory and history is used in the public space, and challenges people to ask whose memory and whose history is preserved? The geographic scope of this project is limited to Boston.

Beacon Hill

The Beacon Hill Walk begins at the Massachusetts State House with the statues of two seventeenth century women religious dissenters. The walk continues up, down, and across Beacon Hill, often paralleling the Black Heritage Trail. Starting with intense activity in the period before and after the Civil War and continuing into the nineteenth century, women writers and artists living here supported social movements ranging from anti-slavery to suffrage. The walk pays particular attention to the story of Beacon Hill’s African American women and of Boston’s first women doctors and professional nurses. Beacon Hill is a designated Historic District with narrow, steep, sometimes cobblestone streets, and brick homes featuring beautiful doorways and window boxes. It was first developed by the Mount Vernon Proprietors in 1795. Charles Street along its western edge includes antique and specialty shops, restaurants, and grocery stores.

Backbay West

The Back Bay West Walk starts at Copley Square and ends at the Boston Women’s Memorial. Focusing on women of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sites demonstrate the high energy devoted by women to the arts and education, pointing out educational institutions, clubs, and art associations as well as women’s sculptures.

Backbay East

The Back Bay, originally a mudflat, was filled in with gravel brought from suburban Needham by train between 1852 and 1890. The land is flat, with streets laid out in a straight grid. The cross streets are conveniently named alphabetically from A to H. This elegant neighborhood includes Commonwealth Avenue with its tree-lined mall of grass, center walking path, and sculptures, as well as the “uptown” shopping area with high-end stores, art galleries, and restaurants. The Back Bay East Walk starts and ends at the Public Garden. The sites highlight the work of women in the arts and in education, and women who led the way in environmental protection, suffrage, and peace.

Downtown

The Downtown Walk begins at the State House and goes past many of Boston’s earliest historic sites, ending at Franklin and Washington streets, a block below Tremont Street and the Boston Common. The walk features women across the centuries, with a focus on the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. It includes women who wrote poetry, essays, and plays and spoke out publicly before members of the Massachusetts State Legislature and in Boston’s halls and churches for the abolition of slavery, woman suffrage, and African American and Native American rights. Boston’s downtown area is home to its business and financial institutions, as well as to a major shopping area and the Quincy Market at Faneuil Hall.