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Sofar Sounds: Embrace the Haze with Sierra Nevada (Glass Rooftop)
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Bakey – Boston Common
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Aeronaut Brewing Company
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Guides
5 Boston holiday lightings in 2026, including one where Santa arrives by boat
Boston’s holiday lightings start Nov 23 and end with two on Dec 3. Two get Santa and Rudolph, one gets Santa by boat, and the big tree on the Common is a gift from Nova Scotia. Boston’s biggest Christmas tree is a thank-you note. Every year Nova Scotia sends the city a tree for the help Boston rushed north after the 1917 Halifax explosion, and this year’s tree lighting is Thursday, December 3. Before that night, the city’s Parks Department lights up a waterfront trellis, a playground ship and the newly renovated Copley Square. Here are all five, in order, with the times and what to expect at each. The season starts on the North End waterfront, where the Parks Department and the Friends of Christopher Columbus Park light the park’s 260 feet of trellis for the 24th annual trellis lighting. It runs from 5 to 6 p.m. at 110 Atlantic Avenue, next to the Marriott Long Wharf. Santa and Rudolph make an appearance, there’s live music, H.P. Hood pours eggnog, the Marriott brings hot chocolate and cookies, and Joe’s Waterfront serves clam chowder. Since it ends at 6, you have the whole evening left for dinner in the North End, a few blocks away. This one is built for kids. At 5 p.m. the Friends of Martin’s Park and the Parks Department host the fifth annual lighting of the ship at Martin’s Park, 64 Sleeper Street on the Fort Point waterfront. The park’s ship, the beach fencing around it and the pedestrian bridge get wrapped in more than 1,500 feet of blue and white tube lights, and Santa pulls up on the Harborwalk by boat with the Boston Police Harbor Unit. Berklee musicians play holiday songs, and kids can meet the Boston Park Rangers Mounted Unit, climb around a Boston Fire Department truck and make holiday crafts with a local artist. Hood and Caffè Nero bring the holiday drinks. It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving, so if family is in town, bring them. Copley Square Park has been under renovation, and this year’s Copley Square Tree Lighting doubles as its grand reopening. It runs from 5 to 6 p.m. at 560 Boylston Street, with guided tours of the renovated square, arts and crafts, Santa and Rudolph, and performances by vocalist Joelle James, the Boston Children’s Chorus and the Symphonic of Emerson College. Once the tree is lit, walk across the street to the Fairmont Copley Plaza for cookies and photos with Santa at 6 p.m. This is the big one. The Boston Common Tree Lighting runs from 6 to 8 p.m. next to the Visitor Information Center at 139 Tremont Street, hosted by Mayor Michelle Wu and the Province of Nova Scotia, with Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston joining her. The tree is the province’s yearly thanks for December 6, 1917, when a munitions ship exploded in Halifax Harbor and, within 24 hours, a train full of supplies and emergency crews left Boston to help. This is the 55th year Nova Scotia has sent Boston a tree. If you want to see it before it glows, it’s due to arrive on the Common by police escort at about 11 a.m. on Tuesday, November 24. Park Street and Boylston are the closest T stops on lighting night. Don’t leave when the Common’s tree comes on. Right after, around 8 p.m., Mayor Wu walks over to the Back Bay with the Friends of the Public Garden to light the trees on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, from Arlington Street all the way to Charlesgate. Neighborhood volunteers ran this display for decades before joining forces with the Friends of the Public Garden in 2022. The walk from the Common through the Public Garden to the start of the Mall takes a few minutes, so you can catch both lightings in one night, then keep walking under the lit trees toward Mass Ave. All five are hosted by the Boston Parks and Recreation Department and held outdoors in public parks, so dress for a cold night on the water or the Common. The two Monday events and the ship lighting each run about an hour, starting at 5 p.m., which makes them easy to fit in after work. December 3 is the crowded one, so get to the Common early if you want to see the stage. The Parks Department answers questions at 617-635-4505, and every event links to its city page above if a date changes for weather.
How to get into 5 Boston private clubs, from $40 a day to don’t even ask
In January 1945, a fire broke out at the Somerset Club on Beacon Street. Firefighters ran for the front door, and the club’s majordomo sent them around back to the service entrance. That story still tells you most of what you need to know about private clubs in Boston. Some of them are easier to get into than you’d think, though, and one will let you in today for the price of a nice lunch. Here they are, from easiest to hardest. The Athenaeum on Beacon Street is a private membership library, open since 1807, and it’s the one club on this list you can join on the spot. A $40 day membership gets you into the reading rooms, the upper floors and the fifth-floor terrace. If you like it, the Athenaeum will put that $40 toward a full membership as long as you join within a week. Individual membership is $506 a year, and it’s $338 if you’re 40 or under. Members can borrow books and work in the reading rooms as often as they like. If you just want to look around, the first-floor gallery and exhibitions have their own admission, and the art and architecture tours are worth booking ahead. The Harvard Club at 374 Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay takes alumni of Harvard, MIT, Yale and Tufts’ Fletcher School. Harvard and MIT faculty and students can join too, plus physicians at Harvard-affiliated hospitals and the parents, children and grandparents of members. Nobody on that list needs a sponsor. If you don’t qualify, you can try for the Commonwealth Membership, with 50 spots a year for friends and family of current members, and that one needs a member to sponsor you. Dues depend on your age, your status and the ZIP codes where you live and work. Once you apply, the club says membership is active in 10 to 15 business days. The ‘Quin House opened in 2021 in the old Algonquin Club building at 217 Commonwealth Avenue, designed by McKim, Mead & White. The club says invitations come through member referrals, and you pay a one-time initiation fee plus dues renewed every year. When it opened, Boston.com reported annual dues of $2,000 to $4,000, with lower rates for people in the arts, civic and nonprofit worlds. The club doesn’t publish current prices. Members get Japanese food at Bondo, Latin American cooking at Lunasol, Café Q, a gym, guest rooms and talks. The Union Club started in 1863, when members of the Somerset Club split over whether to back the Union, and the pro-Union side walked out. It moved into two connected townhouses at 7 and 8 Park Street, next to the State House, and remodeled them for the club in 1896. Calvin Coolidge, Louis Brandeis, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sumner were all members. It was the first men’s club in Boston to admit women, and in 1983 it took its first Black member. You can’t walk in from Boston Common. Membership questions go straight to the club, and guests need a member to bring them. The Somerset Club took its name in 1852 and has been in the granite David Sears house at 42 Beacon Street since 1872. The building has no sign outside, just the number 42. Membership mostly passes through families. A 2000 Harvard Crimson story about Boston’s old-line clubs quoted one person saying the surest way to never become a member is to ask about becoming one. If a member brings you as a guest, wear a jacket and tie or a dress, skirt or pantsuit, with no denim. Your phone stays out of the public rooms. If you need to make a call, go to Room 6.
Get to know Boston
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.
Boston’s streets make absolutely no sense
Take a wrong turn in downtown Boston and the city seems to rearrange itself behind you. A street bends without warning, changes its name, feeds into something called a square, and sends you back toward the place you just left. The usual explanation is that Boston paved over cow paths. It is repeated so often that it sounds like established history. The better explanation involves a small peninsula, private property, enormous amounts of fill and several towns that became Boston after laying out streets of their own. Boston’s streets started on a much smaller piece of land When English colonists established Boston in 1630, the Shawmut Peninsula was connected to the mainland by a narrow strip called Boston Neck. The route across it roughly followed present-day Washington Street toward Roxbury. There wasn't much room to leave town. The National Park Service describes the original peninsula as a place of three prominent hills, wetlands and estuaries. This was Massachusett land long before English settlement. Much of the ground that now seems inseparable from downtown Boston was still water. Early streets connected the places colonists needed to reach: houses, meetinghouses, markets, docks and fresh water. Routes fitted around slopes, shorelines and property. What served a small port town did not anticipate delivery trucks or someone trying to make a left turn on the way to a parking garage. The cows had other things to do Cows and sheep really did graze on Boston Common. The city eventually banned grazing there in 1830. That history explains why livestock belongs in the story, but it doesn't establish that wandering cattle determined the street plan. Ralph Waldo Emerson helped the idea stick. As Boston.com recounts in its examination of the cow-path story, he wrote, “we say the cows laid out Boston.” The article's historians point instead to fresh water, property boundaries and the original terrain as practical reasons for the early routes. A path used by animals might also have been used by people. That possibility is a long way from explaining an entire city. The cow story survives because it is easier to remember than the history of somebody else's property line. Boston made more land and gave it different streets Boston spent centuries creating room to grow. Hills were cut down, tidal areas were filled and the shoreline moved outward. The Leventhal Map & Education Center's account of landmaking describes both the physical work and the financial incentive: new ground could become valuable property. The result is particularly easy to see in Back Bay. Its rectangular blocks look different from the older streets downtown because they came from a different process. Planners could set out a street system for land being created, rather than fit roads around an existing waterfront town. Arthur Gilman produced his Back Bay plan in 1856. Filling began the following year and continued for almost four decades, according to the Friends of the Public Garden's history of Commonwealth Avenue Mall. The broad central mall gave the new neighborhood a long, planted space between its roadways. Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester and Hereford streets even proceed alphabetically. Commonwealth Avenue, Newbury Street and Boylston Street run alongside one another. For a few blocks, Boston gives you a system you can remember. Boston also bought into other towns' street maps Today's city includes communities that developed separately. The city's annexation timeline records Roxbury joining in 1868 and Dorchester in 1870. Charlestown, Brighton and West Roxbury followed in 1874. Hyde Park joined in 1912. Those places already had roads, town centers and property boundaries. Becoming part of Boston did not erase them or require their streets to meet a Back Bay grid. A trip across the city can take you through several different systems without a sign announcing the change. Later traffic rules added another complication. One-way streets and turn restrictions can make a short route on foot a much longer trip behind the wheel. Knowing where a place is and knowing how to drive there are separate accomplishments. To see the difference without dealing with either problem, start on foot in Back Bay. Follow its rectangular blocks, then cross toward Beacon Hill's older, narrower streets. The change in the map is right under your shoes.