Victorian Boston Today

Reviewer's Bookwatch, Dec, 2004 by Sharon Stuart

Victorian Boston Today

Mary Melvin Petronella, editor

Northeastern University Press

360 Huntington Avenue, 416 CP, Boston, Massachusetts 02115

1555536050 $22.50 1-800-666-2211 www.nupress.neu.edu

Compiled, edited, and organized by Mary Melvin Petronella for the New England Chapter of the Victorian Society in America, Victorian Boston Today offers the contemporary reader twelve truly outstanding "walking tours" that reveal Boston's Victorian cultural and architectural legacy. The tours comprising this traveler's compendium include: Boston's Nineteenth-Century Waterfront (Pauline Chase-Harrell); Boston's South End: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Planning and Architecture (Margaret Supplee Smith and Richard O. Card); Ethnic Diversity in the Victorian North End (Will Holton); The Commercial District with a Prior Look at Boston's Nineteenth-Century Charles Street Jail (Robert B. MacKay); Touring Through Time to the Heart of Back Bay: Boylston and Dartmouth Streets with Copley Square (Margaret Henderson Floyd); Boston's Victorian Authors: Thinkers in the Center of the Planet (Eguenia Kaledin and Mary Melvin Petronella); Black Heritage Trail (Sue Bailey Thurman et al.); Walking with Women in Victorian Boston (Patricia C. Morris); Charlestown in the Victorian Era: From the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument to the Coming of the Main Line Elevated (Edward W. Gordon); Victorian Boston's Chocolate Village (Anthony Mitchell Sammarco); Victorian Jamaica Plain: Monument Square and Summer Hill (Edward W. Gordon); A Victorian Boulevard Preserved: Cambridge's Brattle Street (Charles Bahne). Enhanced with a wealth of illustrations, maps, lively historical anecdotes, landmarks, luminaries and landscapes, Victorian Boston Today is strongly recommended for life-long Boston residents seeking to learn more about the history of their city and community, as well as an invaluable resource for tourists, historians, and students of American architecture.