Harvard Square and Boston by Night

We got up early today to visit Harvard Square. We took the red line train and arrived just in time for the 10:30 a.m. tour of the Longfellow House. We had a great guide and a small tour group, so we learned a lot. Our guide was very knowledgeable and impassioned about the house. George Washington used the house for his headquarters during the siege of Boston, which is one of the reasons Longfellow bought it, since he admired Washington so much. Longfellow lived in the home with his wife Fanny and his two children, Charley and Alice. Longfellow loved Japan, and the house contained a number of Japanese artifacts, including temple vases by the fireplaces. Art is everywhere, including a marble bust of Washington and several paintings by Charley. Alice went to great lengths to preserve the house for posterity.

Longfellow House

Longfellow loved Japan and collected these temple vases and many Japanese screens.

Afterward we walked to Harvard Yard, where we found a profusion of chairs in various colors scattered about. We sat down and ate our lunch while watching the passing students and others walking through. Then we tried to visit Widener Library, only to find that it is restricted to holders of current Harvard IDs.

Harvard Yard

Lee approaching Widener (only to be turned away at the door)

Next we walked to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I especially wanted to see the glass flowers. I had first heard about them when I studied a poem by Marianne Moore in high school, entitled Silence:

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave,
or the glass flowers at Harvard."

The flowers were amazing--every detail is made of glass, and there are thousands. And the exhibits just went on and on. One large exhibit focused on evolution and included fossils from dinosaurs and early amphibians and mammals, showing the relationships among species. Rooms were filled with lifelike stuffed animals from every corner of the globe. A vast room exhibited minerals and gems and meteorites, including a meteorite from Mars. We could have spent days and not seen everything. The name Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist and Harvard professor, showed up everywhere, as he had a profound impact on the development of the museum's collections.

Rare glass rhododendron

Rare working phone booth!

Admission to the Museum of Natural History includes the adjacent Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. We barely had time to run through it, but we did see an extensive collection of Pacific Islands artifacts.

Gail Dorey, my best friend, Carol's, sister, lives in Watertown and agreed to act as our tour guide for Boston by Night. She picked us up outside the museum and drove us to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, where we climbed the tower for a panoramic view of Boston and Cambridge and Watertown. We admired the many trees and shrubs which give the cemetery a reputation as an arboretum and drove past the impressive Mary Baker Eddy memorial.

Gail and Lee atop the tower at Mount Auburn

Then Gail drove us to Lexington, where we had dinner at the Lemon Grass Thai restaurant--good food and good company--before embarking on her "Boston by Night" tour. We had great views of the lights of the city laid out along the Charles River and drove across the grand new bridge, the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge, named for a civil rights activist and for the colonists who fought at Bunker Hill. Thanks, Gail!

By the time we got home we were exhausted and decided to sleep in tomorrow.