Boston Common

Boston Common is the oldest public park in America — set aside for communal use in 1634, four years after the city was founded and 142 years before anyone thought to declare independence. In the intervening centuries, it's been a cow pasture, a military camp, a public execution site, a rallying ground for abolitionists, and the starting point of the Freedom Trail. It has never stopped being a park.

The Common sits at the intersection of every major neighbourhood in central Boston — Beacon Hill rises to the north, the Theatre District to the south, Back Bay to the west, and the Financial District to the east — making it the geographic and social heart of the city. The Frog Pond, which serves as a wading pool in summer and an ice skating rink in winter, occupies the centre. The Soldiers and Sailors Monument on the hill provides the best elevated view of the park and the surrounding cityscape.

What makes the Common remarkable isn't any single feature — it's the accumulation of nearly 400 years of public use. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke here. The British quartered troops here during the Revolution. Convicted pirates were hanged from the Great Elm (now gone). Pope John Paul II held mass for 400,000 people in 1979. The park absorbs history and keeps functioning as the place where Boston comes to sit on a bench, walk a dog, or eat lunch on the grass. It's the most democratic piece of real estate in a city that invented American democracy.