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Coppélia

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Coppélia

7:30–10:30 PM

Citizens Opera House · Boston

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Haunted places in Boston

Haunted places in Boston

Boston has been accumulating dead people since 1630, so the ghost stories had time to pile up. The places are real, ghosts, possibly. Harvey D. Parker opened the hotel in 1855. The hotel has published the ghost stories. In a 1992 Boston Globe interview quoted by the hotel, bellman John Brehm said he first heard about Parker’s ghost when he started work in 1941. The story then was that Parker roamed the 10th-floor annex. Around 1950, a guest said she saw a heavyset man with a black mustache in that hall. Security went up and found nobody. Other reports from that floor are a rocking chair in a room that does not have one, and lights moving down the corridor. In a separate story, a mother and daughter in room 1012 said a man in old clothes stood at the foot of the bed and then vanished. At breakfast, his portrait was hanging in the dining room. The granite building beside Massachusetts General Hospital was the Charles Street Jail, finished in 1851. In 1973, after prisoners revolted over the conditions, a court found the jail in violation of the inmates’ constitutional rights. The last prisoners left on Memorial Day weekend in 1990. It reopened as The Liberty Hotel in 2007. The rotunda, the catwalks, and some of the cells are still there. CLINK. serves dinner in the old cells. Alibi is in the former drunk tank. Ghost tours describe footsteps and former prisoners. The hotel’s own history does not. The theater opened in 1903. The stories that get repeated are a well-dressed couple in the balcony, a little girl who supposedly takes gifts left for her, and a former mayor who died in his seat during a performance. There is no record of a Boston mayor dying at the Majestic. People who have worked in the building still describe a man in a suit in the balcony lobby, and a child’s voice in the house. The restaurant opened in 1826, in a building that was already old. During the Revolution the second floor was headquarters for Ebenezer Hancock, paymaster of the Continental Army, and soldiers were paid where people now eat. Staff have talked about flickering lights, electronics that quit, footsteps, and a man in colonial clothes bent over a desk. Tour guides say that man is Hancock. A separate story involves a chef named Henry, seen by a coworker around the time Henry died. John F. Kennedy’s booth is upstairs, with a plaque. Ghost tours add a Kennedy haunting. The restaurant’s history page mentions the booth and stops there. Photo by Robert Linsdell King’s Chapel Burying Ground opened in 1630. It is the oldest burying ground in Boston proper. It filled up, and in 1660 the town opened the Granary Burying Ground nearby. Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and the Boston Massacre victims are there, along with thousands of people who no longer have a stone. Both grounds are regular stops on ghost tours. Visitors report footsteps, cold spots, and someone in colonial clothes who is not leading a tour. The sightings are not verified. Fort Warren is on Georges Island in Boston Harbor. Construction ran from 1833 to 1861, and during the Civil War the fort held Confederate prisoners. The ghost story is the Lady in Black. In the version Boston Harbor Islands tells, she is Melanie Lanier, who rowed to the island to free her husband Andrew, a Confederate prisoner, and was hanged in black. Historians have not found a record of her. Edward Rowe Snow is the one who spread the tale. Georges Island is a ferry ride. Check whether the boats are running before you go.
5 best Korean BBQ restaurants in Boston

5 best Korean BBQ restaurants in Boston

Korean BBQ in Boston can mean settling in around a grill with several cuts of beef and pork, or ordering a plate of bulgogi with a bowl of stew. Those are different meals, and choosing the right restaurant starts with knowing which one you want. These five places cover Boston, Cambridge and Medford. Naksan has staff cook the meat for you. Sura offers all-you-can-eat barbecue. Seoul gives downtown diners barbecue combinations alongside a much broader menu. Gather people who are willing to share, then work out the order together. Naksan Korean BBQ is on Commonwealth Avenue, where staff handle the cooking at your table. Its beef and pork combinations come with egg soufflé and a choice of kimchi or soybean stew. For a bigger meal, the Grand Tour adds beef tartare with caviar, several beef cuts and ice cream. Japanese A5 Wagyu is another option. This is a place to look at the combinations before adding separate dishes. Let the size of your group and the cuts you want guide the order. Naksan’s reservation policy says Friday and Saturday dinner is walk-in only, and parties larger than seven should call. Sura Korean BBQ in Medford is the all-you-can-eat choice on this list. The Boston menu currently lists a $30 regular package and a $40 premium package per person, before additional charges such as tax and drinks. Everyone in the party must choose the same package. Premium adds short-rib options and beef tongue. You select meat from the self-service area and cook it at your table. The meal also includes the appetizer and salad bar and made-to-order Korean dishes, including pancakes and steamed egg. Reservations are offered. Start with a manageable selection; you can decide what to repeat after the first round. Korean Garden in Allston offers both tabletop barbecue and dishes cooked in the kitchen. The barbecue menu lists short ribs, beef brisket, pork belly, chicken and shrimp, with a minimum of two orders for table cooking. The broader menu includes kimchi pancakes, rice cakes, soups and bibimbap, which helps when a group wants more than grilled meat. Its posted hours run later Thursday through Saturday than on the other nights. Confirm the last kitchen order if you are heading over late; the closing time alone does not tell you when a full barbecue meal can still begin. Koreana gives Cambridge diners a tabletop barbecue option on Prospect Street near Central Square. The built-in grills have ventilation above the cooking area, and the menu includes galbi, bulgogi and pork belly. Seafood scallion pancakes, cold noodles and tofu stews give you several ways to round out the meat order. Choose it for a meal where the table is sharing, rather than trying to fit barbecue into a rushed lunch. Ask the restaurant about the grill setup and ordering requirements when arranging your visit. A pancake for the table and a couple of different meat dishes make a more varied starting point than everyone choosing the same thing. Seoul Restaurant on Cambridge Street offers Korean barbecue plates alongside sushi, noodles and stews. The barbecue combinations pair choices such as beef bulgogi, pork belly or LA kalbi with soft tofu stew, cold noodles or stone-pot bibimbap. That gives you a way to order barbecue as part of a complete individual meal. It is a useful downtown option when everyone wants a different dinner. One person can choose a barbecue combination while another orders soup or sushi. Reserve through the restaurant’s website if you are planning an evening visit, and specify what kind of meal you have in mind. Before booking Korean BBQ in Boston Ask for a barbecue table if you want the grill, and confirm any minimum order before sitting down. Compare the price of a meat combination with its recommended party size, rather than assuming every listed price is per person. At an all-you-can-eat restaurant, agree on the package with everyone at the table and order quantities you expect to finish. For drinks afterward, our Boston speakeasy guide includes choices in Boston and Somerville. If part of the group would rather skip barbecue, the restaurant guide offers shared plates and other dinner options.

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Get to know Boston

How the Irish saved Halloween in Boston

How the Irish saved Halloween in Boston

Samhain (pronounced SAH-win or SOW-in) is an ancient Gaelic festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter Halloween customs turned up in other American colonies. Massachusetts sat them out. Anglican and Lutheran churches kept All Saints' Day. Maryland's Catholics did too. In the South, Scotch-Irish settlers, Scots who had lived in northern Ireland, sometimes went out in costume and called it guising. The Puritans who settled here took a dim view of all of it. The Commonwealth Museum's history of the holiday traces the night to Samhain, the Celtic new year on November 1, when the dead of the past year were thought to come back for a verdict. Disguises, and a candle in a hollowed turnip, were supposed to keep the spirits away. In the eighth century, the museum says, Pope Gregory III set All Saints' Day on November 1. The eve became All Hallows Eve. Halloween is that name, worn down. The church would rather you dressed as a saint. What people actually did on October 31 still changed from one place to the next. Artist's depiction of Pope Night in Boston, 1768 Pope Night was a different riot Boston already knew how to wreck an evening in early November. The occasion was Pope Night, November 5. Old North Church traces it to Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament. The North End and the South End each built an effigy, the pope and often the devil, and hauled it through the streets. The crowds met and fought for the figures. North End winners burned them on Copp's Hill. South End winners burned them on the Common. Isaiah Thomas, who was in the fights, wrote that broken heads were not infrequent. In 1764 a boy was run over by a cart and killed. Houses along the way were expected to hand over money. Skip the payment and the windows could go. That is still not Halloween. The Commonwealth Museum says the connection to later Halloween pranks is not clear, and that Guy Fawkes Day is a stretch as an origin. Pope Night was an anti-Catholic riot with its own date. In 1775 George Washington ordered the army to stop burning the pope in effigy. The colonies wanted Catholic allies in Canada. Old North treats that order as the end of the holiday in Boston. Traditional Irish halloween Jack-o'-lantern made out of a turnip. Photo by rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid County Cork, then a pumpkin The customs Bostonians now recognize arrived with Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, after the Great Famine began in 1845. In County Cork, the museum says, people wore costumes on Halloween and announced themselves at a house with cow's horns. Food or a drink from the household was supposed to bring prosperity. The lantern was a turnip with a candle in it. Once those immigrants were here, a pumpkin did the job better. There is more face on a pumpkin than on a turnip, and less of a fight. They did not invent trick-or-treating. One older thread, also in the museum's account, is the medieval soul cake: bread for the poor, prayers for the dead in exchange. The pillowcase version came later. Costumes, a stop at the door, and a lantern were the Irish Halloween traditions that Boston actually got. The Globe caught on in 1884 On October 31, 1884, the Boston Daily Globe ran "Why Thousands Will Think of Erin Tonight." The Commonwealth Museum cites the headline. Halloween historian Lesley Bannatyne quotes the article. It describes Ireland, not a candy route through Boston: a church fast that fell apart when the party started, colcannon sent from the country, and "parties of young men and their sweethearts" going house to house among relatives and friends. The candy holiday was still ahead of that. Newspapers, magazines, and clubs from the Scouts to the Rotary spread Halloween in the twentieth century, the museum says. Trick-or-treaters were being spotted in Wellesley by the 1920s. After the Second World War, the baby boom made it a product. Manufactured costumes and decorations arrived then.
Ten BERy employees pose in front of a streetcar in the Jamaica Plain carhouse around 1920

The boozy theory behind Jamaica Plain’s name

Jamaica Plain’s name may owe something to Jamaican rum, but nobody has established who chose it or why. Other theories credit a Massachusett leader or England’s capture of Jamaica from Spain. The rum explanation has enjoyed a long career without producing a receipt. The rum story has company The Caribbean explanation comes in more than one version. One credits Jamaica’s rum and its popularity among local drinkers. Another connects the name to England’s capture of the island from Spain in 1655. In a 2019 GBH interview about the name, historical society president Gretchen Grozier described the rum story against the setting of rural Roxbury, with inns and taverns along the road to Dedham, now Centre Street. The suggestion is that the drink’s association with the area became a nickname. The conquest explanation proposes a different motive: commemorating an English victory. Grozier identified it as a possibility, while emphasizing the weak connection between the military event and the neighborhood’s name. Neither explanation establishes that local sugar refineries named Jamaica Plain. A connection to Caribbean trade and a documented naming decision are different things. The trade itself also deserves more than a cheerful tavern anecdote. Boston College’s Global Boston history of Jamaica Plain connects the wealth of early estate-owning families to international commerce involving enslaved people, rum and other commodities. That economic history is substantial even where the etymology remains uncertain. The “plain” in Jamaica Plain’s name Before Jamaica Plain, there was Pond Plain. The Jamaica Plain Historical Society’s neighborhood guide identifies that earlier name with Jamaica Pond and the surrounding land. At the time, the area belonged to Roxbury. “Plain” described the relatively level ground around the pond and village, rather than promising that every future resident would have a flat walk home. The larger neighborhood includes hills. Boston University’s architectural and community history project describes an agricultural district of hills, farms and orchards in 1800, with wealthy Bostonians establishing estates beside the pond and Stony Brook. The older geographical label helps explain half the name. The difficulty is establishing how “Jamaica” became attached to it. A Massachusett leader is one possible namesake One longstanding explanation connects the name to Kuchamakin, a Massachusett sachem, or leader, whose name appears in several English spellings, including Cutshamekin. In Walter H. Marx’s account of the naming question, published in the Jamaica Plain Gazette in 1992 and preserved by the historical society, Kuchamakin’s association with the pond provides a possible route from a person’s name to a place-name. Under this explanation, English speakers altered his name into “Jamaica.” The different spellings reflect attempts to represent an Indigenous name in English. The explanation concerns a person associated with the area, rather than a literal translation of the modern neighborhood name. Marx also records a story about an Indigenous basket maker named Jamaco who lived beside the pond. Her story belongs among the accounts people have passed down, but the article does not establish it as the naming event. Why Jamaica Plain’s name still has competing explanations The sources do not give us a single person announcing a name and explaining the choice. Instead, they preserve different attempts to make sense of one that was already in use. A historian describing a tradition is useful evidence that the story circulated. It is not the same thing as a record of the original naming. The place itself has also changed. The neighborhood's pond, farmland and country estates belong to an earlier version of an area now connected to the rest of Boston by city streets and transit. Reading an old geographical label against the modern neighborhood can make it sound stranger than it did to the people using it. You can still start with the most visible piece of the explanation: Jamaica Pond. The earlier name Pond Plain located the community beside an actual body of water. Take the gardens and neighborhood walks at their own pace rather than treating the name as a puzzle that has to be solved before you get there. The rum story remains a possibility, and an unusually durable one. Nobody has produced the naming decision that would turn it into the answer. Jamaica Plain has managed to keep the name without agreeing on who deserves the credit.
The famous Boston accent and its obsession with the letter R

The famous Boston accent and its obsession with the letter R

Say “car,” then say “car engine.” For someone with a traditional Boston accent, the R can disappear in the first version and return in the second. The next sound makes a difference. That detail gets lost in plenty of Boston impressions. Removing every R gets you only so far, and eventually gets you somewhere nobody here is from. The accent has patterns involving consonants, vowels, and the way words meet in a sentence. It also varies considerably among the people who use it. Which R’s does the Boston accent drop? Linguists call the traditional accent non-rhotic. In ordinary terms, speakers often leave out an R after a vowel when another consonant or a pause follows. Think of “park,” “card,” or “car” said on its own. The R at the beginning of “red” stays. So does the one in “bring.” A Boston speaker is not applying a blanket ban to the letter. An R can also return at the end of a word when the next word starts with a vowel sound. In “car engine,” the words connect through the R. This is called linking R, a pattern also found in other non-rhotic English accents. Try saying the phrases naturally rather than giving each word its own pause. The difference is easier to hear in a sentence than in a list of words written with “ah” at the end. And where do the extra R’s come from? Then there is intrusive R: an R sound between words where no R appears in the spelling. “The idea of it” can sound like “the idear of it.” The vowel at the beginning of “of” creates the setting for that extra sound. It does not mean every Boston speaker says “idear” whenever the word appears. The University of York’s explanation of linking and intrusive R describes how one pattern developed from the other. Speakers extended an existing way of joining vowel sounds to words that did not have a written R. The extra consonant helps two vowel sounds meet. It follows a pattern, rather than arriving wherever an actor decides to put it. The vowels matter, too Listen to “cot” and “caught.” For many traditional Boston speakers, those words sound alike. That shared vowel is another important part of the accent, although it receives considerably less attention than “pahk.” Some speakers also use a broad A in words such as “bath” or “half,” bringing the vowel closer to the one in “father.” These features are not a checklist every Bostonian completes. A person can have a recognizable local accent without using all of them. You can hear examples in WBUR’s recordings and explanation of Boston speech, which includes Dartmouth linguist James Stanford discussing the sounds. Listening is more useful than trying to reconstruct an accent from exaggerated spelling. How Boston came to sound this way Boston speech belongs to the broader Eastern New England dialect region. Its history includes the English spoken by early settlers and the region’s continuing connections with England. Boston University linguist Neil Myler points to settlers from East Anglia as an important influence on the region’s R-dropping speech. Stanford also emphasizes the close contact Boston maintained with southeastern England, where non-rhotic pronunciation gained social prestige. That history helps explain the connection, but the accent has continued changing here. The way someone speaks also reflects their family, community, education, and social surroundings. Four centuries of Boston life did not leave the original dialect untouched. “Wicked” and “frappe” are a different part of the story An accent concerns pronunciation. A dialect includes vocabulary and grammar as well. “Wicked,” used to mean very or extremely, is vocabulary. In “wicked cold,” it increases the force of “cold.” It does the same job in “wicked expensive,” with less pleasant financial implications. “Frappe” is another regional word, pronounced “frap” in the familiar local usage. Merriam-Webster records both that pronunciation and the thick-milkshake meaning. Someone can order a frappe, complain that it is wicked expensive, and pronounce every R. Knowing the words and having the accent are separate things. Not everyone raised here sounds the same Research has documented differences across age groups and communities. In a 2010 study of Boston and two New Hampshire towns, linguists Naomi Nagy and Patricia Irwin found that younger speakers pronounced more post-vocalic R’s than older speakers. Education and other social factors also mattered. Those results concern the people in the study, rather than every younger person in Boston. They also measure one feature: someone who pronounces more R’s can retain other local sounds. The accent does not disappear the moment one pronunciation changes. For some people, sounding local is a source of pride. Others have felt pressure to soften their pronunciation to avoid being judged. Both experiences help explain why a city can have such a recognizable accent without all its residents sharing it. Pronouncing the R in “Dorchester” does not cancel out having grown up there.

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